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
March 19, 2007
It's hard to believe it's been four years since the war began. If you missed Bob Woodruff's important documentary on the epidemic of brain injuries caused by war, I highly suggest watching it. According to Woodruff, up to 10 percent of all veterans suffer some sort of brain injury - often caused by…
March 18, 2007
This is an unbelievably poignant story about what it's like to learn that your nervous system is fated to self-destruct. Katherine Moser, a 25 year old occupational therapist, decided to take a genetic test that would tell her whether she carried the gene for Huntington's disease:
The test, the…
March 16, 2007
The 20th century was the American century, but we got progressively less happy as the years rolled along:
The authors also find that over the last century, Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily--and hugely--less happy. The difference in happiness of men between men of my generation,…
March 16, 2007
Apparently, Wilfrid Sellars came up with this "philosophical time-waster":
Identify three foods A, B, and C such that any two of these are complementary (taste good in combination) but the trio does not. So A and B must be complementary, B and C must be complementary, and A and C must be…
March 15, 2007
Do any neuroscientists actually take Roger Penrose's theory of quantum microtubules seriously? When I hear phrases like "quantum Platonic non-computational influences" being applied to the brain, I tend to get very sleepy. But Andrew Sullivan, in a post titled "The Big Wow," recently featured a…
March 15, 2007
In response to a recent post on spindle cells in which I referred to that neuronal cell type as a transmitter of social emotions, I received a very astute comment:
This doesn't as a statement make any sense "their antenna-like cell body is able to convey our social emotions across the entire brain…
March 14, 2007
Chris Shays (R-CT) has introduced an important piece of legislation. It's called The Farm Animal Stewardship Purchasing Act, and it would set basic humanitarian standards for any farm trying to sell meat to the federal government.
Humane treatment would be defined as:
Adequate shelter that allows…
March 14, 2007
Here are some choice quotes from Will Wright's recent speech at SXSW. Is it odd that one of the most insightful thinkers in our culture designs computer games?
[When designing a game], we're trying to generate the largest rulespace in a game. This is the opposite of science, where we try to find…
March 14, 2007
What's the biggest philosophical difference between neuroscientists and physicists?* I think neuroscientists are more averse to discussions of mystery and the limits of knowledge. They've spent so much time convincing the public that there is no soul - the ghost is just a side-effect of our…
March 13, 2007
Since the science of humor is in the news today, I thought I'd point out an interesting tidbit from a recent Cerebral Cortex paper:
The speculation that humor may be a uniquely human cognitive trait (Bergson 1924; Caron 2002) prompted our third hypothesis: humor will activate both anterior…
March 13, 2007
I'm pleased with my generation:
Young Americans, it turns out, are unexpectedly conservative on abortion but notably liberal on gay marriage. Given that 18- to 25-year-olds are the le ast Republican generation (35 percent) and less religious than their elders (with 20 percent of them professing no…
March 13, 2007
Experiments like this demonstrate why Puritanism is so psychologically unrealistic:
A paper in The Journal of Consumer Research looks at the effects of self-restraint on subsequent impulse purchases.
In one experiment, college students spent a few minutes free-associating and writing down their…
March 12, 2007
Now that the NCAA basketball tournament brackets have been announced, it's worth reminding ourselves not to bet too much money on our (overconfident) predictions. Why not? Because the tournament is impossible to predict. That, at least, was the conclusion of a 2001 paper by the economists Edward…
March 9, 2007
After Freud lost his scientific credibility, psychology became very dismissive of dreams. The leading scientific theory held that dreams consisted of mental detritus, the scraps and fragments of memories that your brain didn't want to remember. While Freud mined our nighttime thoughts for hidden…
March 8, 2007
Somehow, magnification makes the grossness disappear. The insect almost looks like a religious icon, an angel nailed to a cross. See more entomological splatterings here.
March 8, 2007
Everybody wants to cure cancer and pioneer gene therapy. This sort of scientific discovery, especially when the discovery could have profound consequences, is a worthy ambition. But does this ambition distract us from less appealing but even more important endeavors? Does searching for the miracle…
March 8, 2007
A friend of mine recently asked me a simple question that I couldn't answer:
i want to know if there is a physiological explanation for why we have an easier time remembering things that we perceive to be true.
bad example: suppose that you believed that the earth was flat. then i took you out…
March 7, 2007
I'm a junkie for medical stories. You give me a good narrative description of a mysterious set of symptoms, and I'm hooked. If you share my obsession with patient histories and diagnostic case-studies, then I highly recommend Complications, by Atul Gawande (2003). It's easily the best medical book…
March 7, 2007
This is getting ridiculous:
Matthew Reich is a baker dedicated to natural ingredients. He prefers butter in the cookies and brioche he turns out at Tom Cat Bakery in Long Island City, Queens, and like many professional cooks he applauds the public health effort to get artificial trans fat out of…
March 5, 2007
I'll be away from my desk tomorrow, so I thought I'd keep you entertained with a video of me. (Forgive the shameless self-promotion.) In this short video, I'm discussing how Walt Whitman anticipated some truths of modern neuroscience. (I've written a whole book on this subject, which will come out…
March 5, 2007
Here's your crazy factoid of the day. It's from the recent article on spider hunters in the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger (not online):
Spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes…
March 5, 2007
First of all, I apologize for the most grandiose blog title of all time. I was going to add Love and War to the title too, but I ran out of space.
My subject is yesterday's Times Magazine synopsis of the current scientific explanations for the universal human craving for some sort of God. The…
March 2, 2007
If you like spicy food - and I love spicy food - then you'll find this report from Harold McGee's blog rather interesting. It concerns the evolution of capsaicin, the pungent chemical that makes chilis so spicy:
Levey, Tewksbury and colleagues tested the theory that capsaicin selectively repels…
March 2, 2007
It's easy to deride our irrational bias against losses. From the perspective of economics, there is no good reason to weight gains and losses so differently. (Losses feel twice as bad as gains feel good. We demand a $40 payoff for a $20 bet.) Opportunity costs should be treated just like "out-of-…
March 1, 2007
This is a totally frightening poll:
Yes, you read that right: 42 percent of Christian Americans are Christians before they are Americans. In general, Christians in America are about as conflicted in their identities as Muslims in France. And they call atheists un-American...
I'd be curious if…
March 1, 2007
Some people are really, really rich:
Take Oracle's founder, Lawrence J. Ellison. Mr. Ellison's net worth last year was around $16 billion. And it will probably be much bigger when the list comes out in a few weeks. With $16 billion and a 10 percent rate of return, Mr. Ellison would need to spend…
March 1, 2007
Since it's easy to get angry at drug companies - they profit from sickness and market inefficiencies - it's also worth noting when they go out of their way to do good:
A new, cheap, easy-to-take pill to treat malaria is being introduced today, the first product of an innovative partnership between…
March 1, 2007
Last week, I criticized David Brooks for his conservative interpretations of modern neuroscience. This week, I'm happy to report that Brooks' policy recommendations are much more interesting (and scientifically accurate, at least in my opinion):
If we want to have successful human capital policies…
February 28, 2007
Here at Scienceblogs, we spent a lot of time debunking various types of unscientific falsehoods (aka "woo," religious believers, and the conservapedia.) As far as I'm concerned, that's just great. The world always is always suffering from a shortage of skepticism. We need more empiricism and less…
February 28, 2007
It's the latest bourgeois battle: a bunch of angry supermarket shoppers, led by Michael Pollan, are criticizing Whole Foods for not living up to their organic values. While the stores are filled with billboards extolling the virtues of small farms and local produce, Whole Foods gets most of its…