Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, will be published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2007.
cortex
Posts by this author
July 16, 2007
It's a brilliant new approach to treating the traumatized minds of war veterans: having them care for rescued and abused parrots. By developing a bond of trust with a bird, the PTSD patients slowly recover their faith in humanity. Listen to the NPR story.
And here's a shot of my own parrot, eating…
July 16, 2007
Is this a living missing link? Scientists in the Congo have found a band of primates that seem to engage in some very sophisticated hunts. The Guardian reports:
Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local…
July 13, 2007
I like good coffee as much as the next pretentious writer, but this is a little gross:
To connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping.
Human hands don't harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They're plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts…
July 13, 2007
Yesterday, PZ linked to a short list of leading evolutionary explanations for homosexuality. On this subject, PZ is an ardent non-adaptationist:
There are really just two classes of explanation [for homosexuality], the adaptationist strategy of trying to find a necessary enhancement to fitness, and…
July 12, 2007
David Dobbs has a wonderful article in the most recent Times Magazine on Williams syndrome, a development disorder that results in a bizarre mixture of cognitive strengths and deficits:
Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA's double helix is divided into two…
July 12, 2007
From the latest National Geographic cover story on malaria:
"Some scientists estimate that one out of every two people who have ever lived have died of malaria."
From the Times:
"Last year, UPS cut 28 million miles from truck routes - saving roughly three million gallons of fuel - in good part by…
July 11, 2007
It's easy to forget just how nasty kids can be. They might look cute, but they are such assholes. They prey on differences and disabilities, using taunts to generate solidarity. Middle school really is a terrible time. But I was pretty surprised to learn that American kids have a strong bias…
July 10, 2007
By now, just about everybody knows about the two competing hypotheses that attempt to explain the drop in crime in the late 1990's. There's the "broken windows" theory, which assumes that crime is contextual, and that cracking down on the small misdemeanors (like public drunkenness, loitering and…
July 9, 2007
Here's your depressing determinist paper for the day:
Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital…
July 9, 2007
So I finally sat down and watched Planet Earth on my new television. It's even better than everybody says: endless hours of the most extravagant nature porn ever put on film. But the show also got me thinking about evolution, and why it's so difficult for most Americans to believe in Darwinian…
July 6, 2007
When I first heard that Al Gore III was caught going 105 mph in a Prius, I was most impressed by the fact that a Prius can actually go that fast. You must really have to floor the Prius engine - all 110 horsepower of it - in order to get the car into triple digits. But it turns out there are…
July 3, 2007
Barry Schwartz has a very interesting op-ed in the Times. It's about the psychology of incentives, and the mistaken assumptions of economic theory. Simply put, economists assume that people are selfishly rational agents, which means that we should be extremely responsive to external incentives (…
July 3, 2007
I just got back from spending a few days with a neuroscientist friend who recently became a PI, in charge of his own lab. On one of the walls in his lab, there was a map of the world with little pins marking the birthplace of each lab member. (My friend is originally from Calcutta.) Needless to say…
June 29, 2007
A comic discussion on the origins of life, the moral status of sperm, abortion and a few other not-safe-for-work topics. (It's a deleted scene from Knocked Up, which everybody should see, right after they see Ratatouille.) Judd Apatow, by the way, is a genius.
Update: the embedded video link was…
June 29, 2007
I've got an article in the latest Seed on some research that applies metabolic theory to the metropolis:
Cities have always been compared to organisms - Plato talked about the city as a corporeal body - but being underneath the street makes the metaphor literal. These are the guts of the city, the…
June 28, 2007
This is glass:
If you've never been to the glass flowers exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History then you are missing out on a truly spectacular fusion of art and science. Here's NPR:
Back in the late 19th century, botanical teaching models were mostly made of wax or papier maché. Or…
June 28, 2007
This interview with the novelist from The Believer is a few months old, but it's well worth a read:
Something truly interesting is happening in many basic sciences, a real revolution in human knowing. For a long time--centuries--empiricism has tried to understand the whole in terms of its isolated…
June 27, 2007
An intriguing hypothesis:
Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious than adults. Her argument for this view begins with the idea that people in general -- adults, that is -- have more conscious experience of what they attend to than of what they disregard. We have…
June 27, 2007
Yesterday, Chris had an interesting post describing an experimental situation in which selective brain damage leads to improved performance. It's an cool paradigm, since it helps to illuminate the innate constraints of the (intact) brain.
Look, for example, at this experiment, led by Baba Shiv,…
June 26, 2007
According to a new study, conservative Muslim dress codes might be causing serious health problems for Muslim women:
In certain Middle Eastern and other countries where conservative dress curtails exposure to sunlight, high levels of vitamin D supplementation may be needed to raise serum levels…
June 26, 2007
I've discovered my new favorite example of artists and scientists working together. It features Cecil Balmond, an engineer for Arup, and Anish Kapoor, the Turner-Prize winning sculptor. They collaborated on Marsyas, the spectacular 2003 installation inside the Tate Modern. David Owen describes…
June 22, 2007
David Brooks makes a good point:
A little while ago, a national study authorized by Congress found that abstinence education programs don't work. That gave liberals a chance to feel superior because it turns out that preaching traditional morality to students doesn't change behavior.
But in this…
June 21, 2007
This is what happens when a wine critic decides to scientifically test his sense of taste:
She first handed me a cotton swab and instructed me to rub it vigorously against the inside of one of my cheeks. This was the genotype test; as soon as I was done, Reed's assistant, Fujiko Duke, whisked the…
June 20, 2007
So the Times is reporting that online sales are starting to stall/ (Jack Shafer disagrees.) This trend certainly jives with my own shopping experiences. While I still buy most of my things online - the only thing I will never buy online are pants - I've grown disenchanted with the vast majority of…
June 19, 2007
n+1 nails an important psychological aspect of blogs:
Imagine a grandfather clock that strikes at random intervals. You can't tell time by it and yet you begin to live in constant anticipation of the next random chime.
Pavlov was there first. He realized that there was something especially alluring…
June 19, 2007
It was one of those unquestioned rituals of childhood: after getting a little scrape or cut (generally in the knee or elbow area), your mother dutifully applies some hydrogen peroxide to the injury. The peroxide burns, but the pain is just evidence that the peroxide is working. The cut is being…
June 18, 2007
Another heartbreaking tale of improper medical care for veterans from The Washington Post. This time, the article is about the lack of mental health care for mentally troubled veterans, especially when it comes to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). While the Army excels at providing emergency…
June 15, 2007
I'm a fan of both Dennett and Rorty*, and I thought this touching anecdote from Dennett really captures a crucial difference between the two philosophers:
At one three-hour lunch in a fine restaurant in Buenos Aires, we [Dennett and Rorty] traded notes on what we thought philosophy ought to be,…
June 15, 2007
Given recent inane comments about the immateriality of altruism by a certain neurosurgeon, I thought this recent article on the neural underpinnings of "pure altruism" might be of interest:
You don't need to donate to charity to feel all warm inside. Researchers have found that even when money is…
June 15, 2007
Over at the Economist, Jason Furman worries about the long-term implications of growing societal inequality:
Regardless of the cause of rising inequality, lefties, utilitarians, Rawlsians and anyone with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system should all be concerned. As Alan…