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
June 14, 2007
Imagine you are a doctor, and a patient comes into your office with a serious case of back pain. You begin by performing all the standard diagnostic tests, including an MRI and X-ray. Then, you perform an extensive interview. You ask about his psychological history, and rate his level of depression…
June 14, 2007
If people were rational creatures, you might expect them to respond to rising gas prices by doing less solitary commuting. The cost of filling up the tank would provide an incentive to either carpool or use a heavily subsidized mass transit system. But that hasn't happened:
Despite high gasoline…
June 13, 2007
Felice Frankel is a model of consilience:
When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces.
In the first place, the photographs she makes don't sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. "Nobody wanted to…
June 13, 2007
So I guess this belongs under the shameless self-promotion tag - I helped plan the show - but the latest Radio Lab is on a topic near and dear to my frontal cortex. It's about the dishonesty of memory, the way we are constantly recreating, reconsolidating and refining our sense of the past.…
June 12, 2007
So everybody is talking about the Sopranos. I might as well weigh in. Personally, I thought the ambiguous ending was pretty brilliant. The Sopranos is always being compared to literature, but the engineered vagueness of that final scene is perhaps its most literary act. As the literary critic Frank…
June 12, 2007
Freud thought that the male psyche was forged by our relationship with our mother. Our repressed Oedipal wishes form the "nuclear complex" of our neuroses. As a result, Freudian psychoanalysis tends to emphasize the role of the maternal figure when excavating our childhood. (Look, for example, at…
June 11, 2007
Richard Rorty has died. I was one of those innumerable undergraduates who, after failing to understand Heidegger or Wittgenstein or Quine or Davidson, picked up Rorty and felt enlightened. The man had a tremendous facility for interpreting the philosophy of others. After reading Rorty on Dewey, I…
June 8, 2007
I discuss the neuroscientific sensitivities of Saturday, Ian McEwan's 2004 novel, in my forthcoming book, so I was happy to read this paragraph in Jonathan Lethem's review of McEwan's latest novel. Lethem is wondering why McEwan, despite his dabbles in modernist structure (Saturday is modeled on…
June 8, 2007
David Leonhardt makes a good point. Controlling health care costs - one of our most important domestic policy problems - will require our politicians to make hard (and unpopular) decisions.
In Idaho Falls, Idaho, anyone suffering from the sort of lower back pain that may conceivably be helped by…
June 7, 2007
Reductionism is seductive, especially when it comes attached with a nifty sounding brain region:
Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation
of a psychological…
June 7, 2007
The headline says it all: "Forgetting May Be Part of the Process of Remembering":
The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering…
June 6, 2007
I've always been embarrassed by my relentless fidgeting. I play with my beer bottlecaps at bars and endlessly twirl the remote while watching television (this drives my girlfriend crazy). I tap my leg at the dinner table and rap my fingers all day long on my desk. I fold napkins, twirl forks and…
June 6, 2007
Simon Baron-Cohen (of Mindblindness fame) has written a short little essay about a rather gigantic subject:
Let's make this concrete. Your eye looks at a fish. This causes your brain to form a visual image of a fish. So far, your primary representation 'fish' still has accurate truth relations with…
June 5, 2007
There's something unbearably poignant about scientific discoveries that delineate the limitations of science. Dennis Overbye explains:
Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing…
June 4, 2007
Matt Yglesias makes an important psychological point about political debates:
My read of what I see in these debates is so heavily colored by ex ante beliefs and information that it's hard for the debate to change anything. During the first 100 days question, for example, John Edwards gave his…
June 4, 2007
The new season of Radio Lab has begun. For those of who aren't NPR junkies, Radio Lab is a sonically dense, narrative driven science shown broadcast out of WNYC. Each episode has a theme (ala This American Life), and then explores the theme from a variety of different angles. I'd love the show even…
June 1, 2007
I'm not a big Damien Hirst fan, but this is really beautiful:
The diamond encrusted skull, which is estimated to be worth more than $50 million, comes from the skeleton of a man who lived between 1720 and 1810.
June 1, 2007
Razib has a frighteningly smart post on religion, secularism, Korea, etc., but I thought this excerpt was worth noting:
Religion adapts to the world as it is, engaging in dynamic processes of retrofitting. If supernaturalism is the cognitive default in many then the details of the religious…
May 31, 2007
The physicist David Ruelle gives a convincing demonstration that suspending the gravitational effect on our atmosphere of one electron at the limit of the observable universe would take no more than two weeks to make a difference in Earth's weather equivalent to having rain rather than sun during a…
May 30, 2007
So there's an interesting debate over at TPM Cafe about this article in the Nation, which argues that neoclassical economics (the mainstream) suppresses its heterodox alternatives. If true, this would be a classic case of a Kuhnian paradigm, in which the entrenched dogma resists any alternative…
May 30, 2007
Lou Dobbs has repeatedly asserted on his CNN show that there have been 7,000 cases of leprosy in the US over the previous three years. If true, that statistic would represent a stunning increase. Dobbs' insinuation, of course, was that illegal immigrants are responsible for bringing an influx of…
May 29, 2007
David Brooks uses neuroscience to criticize Al Gore's latest book:
[Gore's argument] grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and should master, the primitive and more emotional mind below. He thinks this can…
May 29, 2007
Here's a great L.A. Times editorial on the various policy options that we can use to combat climate change. The editorial comes out firmly against regulation (simply ordering polluters to clean up), and mounts a reasoned criticism of cap-and-trade schemes (the EU trading scheme has been a bust). So…
May 27, 2007
It works. Dick Cheney shows how to do it:
These are events [9/11] we can never forget. And they are scenes the enemy would like to see played out in this country over and over again, on a larger and larger scale. Al Qaeda's leadership has said they have the right to "kill four million Americans,…
May 25, 2007
A new study by economists James Heckman and Dimitriy Masterov argues that investing in the education of young children (pre-K) provides the greatest return on investment. In contrast, trying to educate the brains of adolescents, the economists say, is largely a waste of resources. Here's Joel…
May 24, 2007
We are surprisingly bad at it:
Although last year was quieter than anticipated and the storms of 2005 caused the Weather Service to raise its prediction, the number of tropical storms predicted in May was within the expected range in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2004.
The forecast was low in 2001 and 2003…
May 24, 2007
So the Yankees aren't quite as bad as we've been led to believe. (At least, until Petite also pulls his hamstring.) They've taken two of the last three from the Red Sox. That said, it's still obvious that the Yankees are one of the most least productive baseball teams when looked at through the…
May 22, 2007
From the March 31 issue of The Lancet:
The ease of getting to sleep and staying asleep depends not only on previous wake time, but also on associations with the circadian rhythm of core temperature. Sleep is easiest to initiate when core temperature is falling rapidly or is at its lowest, and most…
May 20, 2007
Daniel Zwerdling has an excellent article on the chicken slaughter industry in the latest Gourmet. I had no idea that Americans consumed more than 9 billion broiler chickens every year. Or that, thanks to newfangled forms of feed, it only takes a broiler chicken six weeks to reach market weight. (…
May 18, 2007
I've got an article in New Scientist on changing scientific perceptions of synesthesia, and how synesthetic experiences are helping scientists understand how language is processed inside the brain. The article is behind a subscription wall, but here's the link:
For the woman known as AP, everyday…