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
April 17, 2007
It's long been noted that the impressionists steadily grew more abstract as the 19th century came to a close. One only has to compare an early Monet from the 1870's to a late Monet landscape to understand the importance of this transition. The pretty pastels and dappling light gave way to thick…
April 16, 2007
I'm fascinated by these sorts of mass delusions. They seem almost laughably strange - hundreds of people convince themselves they are sick - until you realize that collective hysteria is only the flip-side of the placebo effect. We are all capable of talking ourselves into feeling better so it only…
April 13, 2007
Stalin famously said that "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." Sadly, it turns out that Stalin's observation is psychologically accurate. That, at least, is the conclusion of Paul Slovic, a scientist at the University of Oregon. Slovic set out to answer a tragically…
April 12, 2007
So I'm sitting in the movie theater the other day (I went to see The Lives of Others - go see it), and as soon as the first scene begins, the elderly lady sitting next to me says to herself: "Gosh darnit! I've already seen this movie! But it sounded so different when I read about it!"
When the…
April 10, 2007
I always assumed that all aquaculture was created equal. Fish farms produced massive algae blooms and fecal waste, polluted the coast and corrupted wild fish stock. (Of course, I'm still not sure that aquaculture isn't preferable to massive overfishing of the Cod-in-Newfoundland variety. What do…
April 8, 2007
A friend of mine (who happens to be Ph.D student in economics) sent me a skeptical email regarding a recent article that sought to measure marginal utility:
I'm really not convinced that marginal utility can be so easily correlated with activity in the midbrain. I think one of the virtues of the…
April 6, 2007
Matsuzaka looked impressive in his MLB debut. He had 10 strikeouts in 7 innings and only threw 108 pitches. I'm still not convinced he's worth $103.1 million, but the weak Kansas City lineup looked pretty dazed and confused.
Matsuzaka's genius, I think, is to create as much batter uncertainty as…
April 5, 2007
Marginal utility can be measured. According to new research out of Wolfram Schultz's lab, poor people are much quicker learners than rich people when playing a Pavlovian paradigm for small amounts of money. (Poor people took about 12 trials to figure out the game, while rich people took about 35…
April 5, 2007
Dave and Greta Munger have posted an excellent reply to the following question:
What's the difference between psychology and neuroscience? Is psychology still relevant as we learn more about the brain and how it works?
You have to be a pretty staunch reductionist to believe that neuroscience makes…
April 4, 2007
There's been a bit of controversy over John McCain's recent remarks suggesting that Baghdad was much safer than conventional media descriptions suggest. "There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods," McCain said, before castigating Baghdad reporters for…
April 4, 2007
Does power corrupt? And is absolute power absolutely corrupting? Here's some suggestive evidence:
Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey.…
April 3, 2007
A recent study in The Archives of General Psychiatry suggests that 25 percent of all Americans diagnosed with depression are actually just dealing with the normal disappointments of life, like divorce or the loss of a job. Their sadness is being treated like a medical condition. They were given…
April 3, 2007
So I'm watching a DVD and the usual legal disclaimer - "The views expressed in the commentary do not reflect the views of the studio, etc." - comes on the screen. Whatever. Such a warning label seems unnecessary, but what do I know? Maybe there's been a rash of lawsuits over DVD extras. Then the…
April 2, 2007
Why do we remember shards of poetry when we can't remember anything else? After Tom Chaffin's brain tumor was removed, he temporarily lost the ability to speak in coherent sentences. (He also lost the ability to move the right side of his body.) And yet, even when he couldn't name more than two…
April 2, 2007
I had a very bizarre dream last night. I was driving to the gas station to buy milk. It was the middle of the night. (In case you were wondering, I don't normally make nocturnal milk runs, or buy my dairy products at the local Exxon-Mobil station.) As I pull into the gas station, I notice several…
March 30, 2007
It's the worst of all possible worlds: gas prices have gone up, but Americans haven't adjusted their gasoline consumption habits. Instead of using higher energy costs as a prod to use less energy (or at least use less foreign oil), we have fully acclimated to the price at the pump:
In the late…
March 29, 2007
I love whale sharks. There's something very uplifting about such an enormous animal being so gentle. But I think it's pretty clear that whale sharks don't belong in aquariums:
A young whale shark that sank to the bottom of its tank at the Georgia Aquarium this year and died had been forcibly fed…
March 29, 2007
President Bush has recently taken up reading. Ordinarily, that would be a good thing, if only because I found his anti-intellectualism and lack of curiousity deeply troubling. The bad news is that we know what books Bush has actually been reading. I think the man has a serious case of confirmation…
March 28, 2007
In a recent issue of The New Republic, Alex Heard takes David Sedaris to task for blurring the line between memoir and novel, fiction and non-fiction, truth and lies:
I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using the nonfiction label. And after spending several weeks fact-checking four…
March 27, 2007
It was a day of unexpected findings for the field of cardiology. First, there was the news that patients with stents did not have a longer life span or a reduced number of heart attacks compared to patients treated with statins and other heart drugs. (Only a few years ago, drug-coated stents were…
March 26, 2007
This is the funniest thing I've read today. Over at McSweeney's, Simon Dedeo compares our physical theories to types of women:
0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in…
March 26, 2007
Here's your medical factoid of the day:
As of 2003, the average income of a French physician was estimated at $55,000; in the U.S. the comparable number was $194,000.
Personally, I'm a little frightened by the idea of my doctor not being highly paid. I don't want my surgeon to be a member of the…
March 23, 2007
Over at Mind Matters, there's a typically fascinating discussion of a paper concerning the underlying mechanisms of executive control and attention:
To find out what happens during attentional lapses, a team of researchers led by Daniel H. Weissman used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)…
March 22, 2007
On Monday, I posted about some recent imaging work documenting the way the brain distinguishes between "personal" and "impersonal" moral dilemmas. Now comes a new Nature paper from a medley of researchers documenting how damage to a single brain region - the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPO) -…
March 21, 2007
I used to work in a restaurant where we served wild salmon with a Barolo sauce. (This was back when drinking red wine with fish was still very au courant.) Needless to say, the chef wasn't wasting real Barolo on a wine reduction. Instead, we used some of the generic plonk you buy in two gallon jugs…
March 21, 2007
Here are your disturbing prison facts for the day:
Percentage of American adults held in either prison or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68
Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75
Percentage today who are in prisons: 97
That's from the…
March 20, 2007
It's hard to believe that just over fifty years ago psychology was in the firm grip of behaviorism, which denied any semblance of intelligence or emotion in animals. (They were just biological machines.) Talk of anything but stimulus and reward was just sentimental pseudoscience. Then came Chomsky…
March 20, 2007
If you fancy a very small car that gets 60 miles per gallon, or just fell in love with the cute Smart roadster while vacationing in Europe, then you'll be happy to know that you can now reserve, for $99, a Smart car of your very own. How small are Smart cars? Small enough that they can be parked on…
March 19, 2007
Descartes is turning over in his grave: the mind and body grow more intertwined by the day. It's becoming clear that maintaining a healthy mind into old age isn't simply a matter of keeping the brain active with card games and crossword puzzles. Perhaps equally important is an active body. Physical…