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
May 18, 2007
At first glance, it sounds like a cheesy third-culture gimmick:
UCLA molecular biologists have turned protein sequences into original compositions of classical music.
"We converted the sequence of proteins into music and can get an auditory signal for every protein," said Jeffrey H. Miller,…
May 17, 2007
Help Hillary pick her campaign song. The music fan in me would vote for U2's "City of Blinding Lights" or The Staple Singers "I'll Take You There". The political strategist in me would vote for The Dixie Chicks "Ready to Run," since they give you credibility with the anti-Bush, anti-war bloc and…
May 17, 2007
It's not the usual version of love at first sight: it's much better. Elizabeth Fitzsimons was adopting a Chinese baby. The girl was a year old, but she already suffered from a long list of medical ailments. She'd had a tumor removed from her back, and suffered nerve damage during the surgery. She…
May 16, 2007
David Leonhardt has an interesting column on the importance of using subtle environmental cues - Leonhardt calls them "nudges" - to encourage good decision-making. He begins with a fascinating anecdote about patients in hospital beds:
For more than a decade, it turns out, medical researchers have…
May 16, 2007
Dan Neil, the finest car critic around, drives the Fortwo, aka the Smart car. He likes the car just fine - "it's a minor hoot to drive" - but worries about his safety on American streets:
So, the first question potential buyers must consider is a cosmic version of: Do I feel lucky? The Fortwo --…
May 15, 2007
Anthony Gottlieb has an excellent review of several recent books on atheism in the New Yorker. I especially enjoyed his comparison of David Hume and some of the more polemical atheists currently atop the bestseller lists:
In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a…
May 15, 2007
Here's the Pope, speaking on his recent trip to Brazil:
Where God is absent -- God with the human face of Jesus Christ -- these [moral] values fail to show themselves with their full force: nor does a consensus arise concerning them.
I do not mean that nonbelievers cannot live a lofty and exemplary…
May 11, 2007
One day, I want to compile a collection of all the metaphors that have shaped modern science. The sciences of the mind, perhaps because we know so little about the mind, have been particularly vulnerable to the lure of facile analogy. There's the classic "mind-as-computer" metaphor which, although…
May 10, 2007
Let's say your plate is filled with three different foods: a turkey sandwich, some spears of broccoli and a chocolate chip cookie. Which food do you eat first?
According to Brian Wansick's new book, Mindless Eating, your birth order helps to shape your eating habits:
When we looked at the food…
May 9, 2007
Yesterday, Massachusetts announced a massive new stem cell research program, which amounts to more than $1 billion dollars in new funding. The grants are good, but I'm most excited by Governor Patrick's proposal for a stem cell bank, the first of its kind in America. According to the Boston Globe,…
May 8, 2007
Obama gave a good speech yesterday, outlining his plan to save Detroit from itself. He would basically force the Big Three (really the Shrinking Two) to invest in fuel efficient vehicles that run on alternative fuels*:
Obama proposed that the government pay for 10 percent of domestic automakers'…
May 7, 2007
In the world of oenophiles, terroir is a sacred term. It's a French word with a murky English definition, but it's generally used to describe the relationship between a wine and the geographical place that it comes from. Chablis, for example, is renown for its hint of flint, which is supposedly a…
May 4, 2007
Jonathan Weiner, author of the magisterial Beak of the Finch, has a lovely essay explaining what Darwin can teach writers. This struck close to the bone:
Sitzfleisch. Robert Oppenheimer once observed that a physicist needs not only inspiration but also sitzfleisch--the ability to keep one's flesh…
May 3, 2007
Factoid of the day:
Bad eyewitness identifications contributed to 75 percent of wrongful convictions in cases that were overturned by DNA evidence.
Given these dismal statistics, some states have tried to fix their procedures for eyewitnesses. New Jersey, for example, used to do police lineups the…
May 2, 2007
Mind Matters, David Dobbs' research blog over at Scientific American, is indispensable weekly reading. This week is no different. The topic is a paper documenting the importance of maternal presence in rat-pups. Apparently, the absence of a rat mother during a critical period of pup development…
May 1, 2007
Score another one for unconscious processing, which is especially prevalent during sleep. A new study in PNAS suggests that, as people sleep, their brains are forming relational memories, which require "the flexible ability to generalize across existing stores of information".
Earlier studies…
April 30, 2007
So here's a link to my future book (due out in November), which gives you a nice little synopsis of the subject. What do you think of the cover?*
*I'm personally interested in whether or not most people recognize the cookie as a madeleine, and thus get the Proust reference. My hunch is that, if it…
April 30, 2007
Another great Atul Gawande article on the aging process and the need for more geriatric specialists:
The single most serious threat she [an 86 year old woman] faced was not the lung nodule or the back pain. It was falling. Each year, about three hundred and fifty thousand Americans fall and break a…
April 29, 2007
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section today on the cognitive revolution, and recent research demonstrating the relationship between cognition and emotion.
Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to…
April 26, 2007
Alison Gopnik has written a thoroughly entertaining takedown of the mirror-neuron hype:
The myth of mirror neurons may not do much harm. Perhaps it's even good for science that in the 21st century we turn to the brain, rather than gods and monsters, for our mythical images. Still, science and…
April 26, 2007
Mike Penner, a sports writer for the LA Times, has decided to become a woman. He will return to the paper as Christine Daniels. He wrote a gripping personal reflection for the paper explaining his decision:
Transsexualism is a complicated and widely misunderstood medical condition. It is a natural…
April 26, 2007
Christof Koch makes a compelling argument:
My empirical studies into the neurobiology of consciousness have convinced me that many species share the sights and sounds of life with us humans. Why? First, except for size, there are no large-scale, dramatic differences between the brains of most…
April 25, 2007
Does football cause brain damage? The evidence remains sketchy and completely inconclusive, but is nevertheless suggestive:
Bennet Omalu, a man who knew nothing about football and was a soccer goalie in his homeland, believes he has proven that repeated concussions in football lead to early-onset…
April 25, 2007
David Leonhardt has an excellent column on the squeezed middle class. He notes that while inequality is increasing, the other common complaint - that the income of middle class workers is now more volatile - is not supported by government statistics. There has been no great risk shift, at least…
April 24, 2007
Take note historians of the future. When you set out to write your tome, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you might find the following three stories, all of them appearing in today's New York Times, to be of interest. They are all symptoms of decadence run amok, the sure sign of a country…
April 24, 2007
Not all wags mean the same thing. Careful analysis reveals an emotional difference between wags to the right and wags to the left. This asymmetry reflects an underlying asymmetry built into the mammalian brain:
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more…
April 20, 2007
So Harry Reid announced that the Iraq war is lost, that there is no military solution to the crisis. He's being denounced, of course, by lots of right wing pundits, who are clamoring for his resignation. Regardless of whether or not you think the war is lost, I have trouble understanding how saying…
April 19, 2007
When I discover a new band* I follow a set routine. I go to the Itunes store and start sampling the songs that are most often downloaded. I tacitly trust in the wisdom of crowds and assume that more popular songs are better, or at least catchier. It turns out that I'm wrong. Here's Duncan Watts, a…
April 19, 2007
I'm excited by Nissan's announcement that the next generation Maxima will come up with a cleaner burning diesel engine:
Nissan Motor will offer its flagship Maxima sedan with a cleaner-burning diesel engine in the United States by 2010, the company's chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, said on Wednesday…
April 18, 2007
From Psychology Today:
Conventional wisdom dictates that people become parents because children bring joy. But do they really? For scientists studying the subject, simply correlating parenthood and happiness can't answer this question, since happy people might be more likely to have kids to begin…