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
February 27, 2007
Last year, a Cornell University economist named Michael Waldman noticed a strange correlation: the more precipitation a region received, the more likely children were to be diagnosed with autism.
[This] soon led Prof. Waldman to conclude that something children do more during rain or snow --…
February 27, 2007
Over at Mixing Memory, Chris has an excellent post complicating the recent psychological study which demonstrated that reading selected passages from the Bible about retributive violence makes people more aggressive. He reminds us that other studies have found the opposite effect. Chris' sobering…
February 26, 2007
I'm glad Al Gore won the Oscar. Personally, I found his film a little dry and pedantic, but it has clearly played an essential role in shifting the public debate on global warming. (Or are we now supposed to call global warming "the climate crisis," pace Gore?)
But it's worth remembering that our…
February 23, 2007
My last post on David Brooks, conservatism and neuroscience inspired a spirited debate. I argued that the discoveries of modern neuroscience seem to support liberal public policies focused on reducing levels of inequality:
While conservatives tend to regard poverty as primarily a cultural issue,…
February 23, 2007
I like Paul Krugman's column today for two reasons.
1) He works in a nice allusion to Chomsky. His headline is "Colorless Green Ideas".
2) He makes an important point about California and energy conservation:
Let me tell you about a real-world example of an advanced economy that has managed to…
February 22, 2007
Jane Galt mocks liberal interpretations of behavioral economics:
[This] also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from…
February 22, 2007
From Der Spiegel:
The football World Cup from June 9 to July 9 last year appears to have sparked a baby boom in the host country Germany, where hospitals are reporting a marked rise in imminent births nine months after the tournament, remembered here as a month-long fairy-tale of sunshine, parties…
February 22, 2007
It's a gripping video, a youtube window into the autistic mind:
And now Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the telegenic brain surgeon on CNN, has spent time with Amanda, the "low-functioning" autistic woman produced and starred in the video:
She taught me a lot over the day that I spent with her. She told me that…
February 21, 2007
I spent a year studying theology at Oxford. I focused on the relationship between religion and science (lots of Galileo and Darwin and William James), but couldn't help learning a lot about the Bible along the way. I went in pretty unimpressed by Jesus (I'm a Jew who doesn't believe in God), but…
February 21, 2007
Needless to say, this is ridiculous:
Settled in the well-groomed Los Angeles suburb of San Marino, Derek O'Gorman worked as an insurance broker. His wife, Mary Ann, took care of their two girls, both stellar students at top-ranked local schools. But in 2005, when the family visited a nearby private…
February 21, 2007
I'm all for clean air regulations, but sometimes they don't make very much sense. Case in point: California, along with four Northeastern states, has imposed strict limits on the type of pollutants coming out of the tailpipe of a car. There's only one problem: these regulations make diesel engines…
February 20, 2007
I had a happy and healthy American childhood, but perhaps I was an exception. According to a new report by UNICEF on children in developed countries, the US and UK rank last and second to last in the "well-being" of their children. (The Netherlands and Sweden were first and second.) The report…
February 20, 2007
Who knew B flat was so strange? Robert Krulwich explains, as only he can:
During World War II, the New York Philharmonic was visiting the American Museum of Natural History. During rehearsal, somebody played a note that upset a resident live alligator named Oscar. Oscar, who'd been in the museum on…
February 20, 2007
Over at the academic blog Overcoming Bias, Arnold Kling makes a good point:
Before the Iraq invasion, President Bush did not say, "I think that there is a 60 percent chance that Saddam has an active WMD program."
Al Gore does not say, "I think there is a 2 percent chance that if we do nothing there…
February 19, 2007
In his most recent column, David Brooks argues that the new discoveries of neuroscience and biology have confirmed the conservative view of human nature.
Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don't even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of…
February 16, 2007
According to some recently published research by Carol Dweck, knowing about brain plasticity makes kids smarter:
100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the…
February 16, 2007
It's been one of the enduring mysteries of neurogenesis: where do all our new cells go? Do they plug themselves into the cortical network? Do they travel to the olfactory cortex? Or do they wither away and die, a vestigal legacy of a more primitive brain?
Now a big part of the puzzle has been…
February 15, 2007
There's an interesting evolutionary psychology paper in the new Nature. It's by Tooby and Cosmides, and it investigates the roots of the incest taboo. The researchers found that, on average, our repulsion at the idea of having sex with a sibling correlates with two variables: how long we lived with…
February 15, 2007
When sexual education classes in the Montgomery County public schools were outsourced to the Rockville Pregnancy Center, an "evangelical, antiabortion clinic," the education part of the class took a dramatic turn for the worse. Instead of actually learning about birth control or STD's, Rockville…
February 15, 2007
I have trouble remembering my own telephone number, so feats like this are totally incomprehensible:
When he [Daniel Tammet] gets nervous, he said, he sometimes reverts to a coping strategy he employed as a child: he multiplies two over and over again, each result emitting in his head bright…
February 14, 2007
It seems wrong to connect this memoir - which is so sincere, honest and lovely - to Valentine's Day, which is little more than a marketing conspiracy put together by Hallmark, the neighborhood florist and Tiffany's. But if you're looking for a little romantic reading, and don't mind a tragic ending…
February 14, 2007
Irony and wit can be very patriotic, although my patriotism has never felt this sad:
February 14, 2007
Greg Clark, an economist at UC Davis, has come out with a new paper arguing that natural selection accounts for the rise of "capitalist" attitudes. Simply put, the rich capitalists had more offspring than the poor serfs, so humans evolved a "set of preferences that were consistent with capitalism…
February 13, 2007
Since the 2008 election appears to be in full swing, and the political prognosticators have started peddling their predictions, I thought it was worthwhile to remind everybody that political experts are not to be trusted. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has spent decades following the predictions…
February 12, 2007
Here's Pat Churchland, from a recent New Yorker profile (not online):
Paul and Pat believe that the mind-body problem will be solved not by philosophers but by neuroscientists, and that our present knowledge is so paltry that we would not understand the solution even if it were suddently to present…
February 12, 2007
What biological organ does this machine resemble?
In leaping beyond the two- and four-core microprocessors that are being manufactured by Intel and its chief PC industry competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel is following a design trend that is sweeping the computing world.
Already, computer…
February 11, 2007
It's a fine line separating intelligence and insanity. According to a new study, the same gene that makes you smarter also makes you more likely to go crazy:
Most people inherit a version of a gene that optimizes their brain's thinking circuitry, yet also appears to increase risk for schizophrenia…
February 10, 2007
So Hillary Clinton came to my town today. She packed the local high school gym and brought with her a phalanx of television cameras, hordes of reporters and a hefty dose of political celebrity. (The doors opened at 1:15, and the gym was filled to capacity by 1:30.)
What did she say? Nothing…
February 9, 2007
This is the Milgram experiment come to life. Eric Fair was a civilian interrogater in Iraq, working for the 82nd Airborne. The Washington Post published his op-ed today:
The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour…
February 9, 2007
It's just an n of 1, a small anecdote within a larger story, but it illuminates some of the perpetual controversies of the cognitive sciences, from the accuracy of the IQ test to the plasticity of the human mind. It occurs on page 189 of Michael Lewis' The Blind Side, a gripping history of the left…