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 8, 2007
That didn't take long. As soon as a gallon of gas stabilized around $2 and change, hybrid sales started to flatline. Now Toyota needs to use incentives to push the Prius:
In April, Toyota will begin its first national advertising campaign for Prius since it began selling the hybrid in the United…
February 8, 2007
Another week, another fascinating seminar over at Mind Matters. The paper in question concerns a topic near and dear to me: decision making. Here's the abstract:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis…
February 8, 2007
It's only fitting that Harvard, the birthplace of pragmatism, is trying to reform its pedagogy by making learning more practical and "active". Here's the Boston Globe:
In his 2006 book, "Our Underachieving Colleges," Bok cited a study that found that students remembered only 42 percent of what they…
February 7, 2007
Molecular gastronomy, a movement of chefs devoted to the experimental tools of the modern science lab, now has its own Italian convention:
For three days last week some of the biggest names in "molecular gastronomy" (Ferran Adrià , Wylie Dufresne) were mixing and matching secrets with more…
February 7, 2007
It doesn't get much more romantic than this:
This pair of embracing human skeletons was found at a Neolithic archaeological dig site near Mantova, Italy, in this photo released by Reuters on February 6, 2007. Archaeologists believe the couple was buried 5000-6000 years ago, their arms wrapped…
February 6, 2007
Nick Bostrom offers up a great suggestion for a new academic field:
Perhaps we need a new field of "cognitive forensics" for analyzing and investigating motivated scientific error, bias, and intellectual misconduct. The goal would be to develop a comprehensive toolkit of diagnostic indicators and…
February 6, 2007
Freud would be thrilled. Talk therapy seems to be effective, at least when it comes to panic attacks:
Last week, a team of New York analysts published the first scientifically rigorous study of a short-term variation of the therapy for panic disorder, a very common form of anxiety. The study was…
February 6, 2007
I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping mood.
For me, one of the most annoying parts of insomnia is the way I continually…
February 5, 2007
There's a pretty interesting interview with the philosopher John Searle in the Boston Globe:
IDEAS: You think that questions about the mind are at the core of philosophy today, don't you?
SEARLE: Right. And that's a big change. If you go back to the 17th century, and Descartes, skepticism -- the…
February 5, 2007
Conscious awareness is difficult to measure. On the one hand, it's a private, subjective phenomenon that resists easy quantification. (Only I know what I am aware of.) On the other hand, neuroscience won't be able to understand many mental phenomena - like consciousness - unless it can develop…
February 3, 2007
What you believe about your body affects your body:
Psychology researcher Ellen Langer of Harvard University has long been intrigued by mind-over-body effects. She and student Alia Crum therefore invited 84 women, ages 18 to 55 years old, who worked as housekeepers at seven Boston hotels, to…
February 2, 2007
From Harold McGee's charming new blog:
Tomato lovers know that a sprinkling of salt enhances the flavor of even the best field-ripened specimen. Some recent news that bodes well for improved flavor in greenhouse tomatoes: you can enhance tomato flavor by salting the plant as the fruit grows! At the…
February 2, 2007
It's a shocker: getting hit in the head by enormous men running at high speed is bad for your brain. The NY Times today has a riveting article chronicling the retirement travails of Ted Johnson, a former middle lineback for the Patriots:
Ted Johnson helped the New England Patriots win three of the…
February 2, 2007
Ezra Klein laments his dental inheritance:
I have weak teeth. Always have. My father has weak teeth, my mother has weak teeth, and I, their dutiful son, possess weak teeth. My sister doesn't suffer from this malady. I remember a joint dentist appointment we had, where the doctor returned with our X…
February 1, 2007
Your unconscious brain is better at processing information than you are. Here's Ap Dijksterhuis:
We gave our subjects information pertaining to a choice--for example, which of four apartments was the most attractive, or which of four cars was the best. They had three options: They could make a…
February 1, 2007
This will surely rank as one of the major scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century*:
This winter, a sparkling diamond landed in front of a technician at the Gemological Institute of America in New York City. He ran tests, noted the stone was man-made, and graded it as he would any diamond. It…
February 1, 2007
Over at Scientific American, David Dobbs has introduced a wonderful new "seminar blog" in which researchers discuss a specific topic or paper. This week's topic is the prevalence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Vietnam veterans. The catalyst is a Science paper by Bruce Dohrenwend…
January 31, 2007
Over at Slate, Gregg Easterbrook argues that the President's recent proposal to increase the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard by 4 percent a year is a brilliant and bold policy that will "reverse [oil] consumption trends". He blames the liberal media for not giving Bush the credit he…
January 31, 2007
The epic battle between video game consoles seems to have a clear winner: the Nintendo Wii.
The Wii, which uses an innovative wireless controller to translate the players' motions onto the screen, has upset the order of the video game world. In electronics stores and elsewhere, there are growing…
January 30, 2007
In the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock decided to eat nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. He ended up gaining lots of weight, suffering liver damage, and enduring intense mood swings. But now Spurlock's movie has been repeated under experimental conditions. The results are good news…
January 30, 2007
For some reason, I find the death of Barbaro rather upsetting. The first two horse races I've ever watched on television were his victory at the Kentucky Derby and his injury at the Preakness. I've since followed his medical travails with baited breath, rooting for his left foot, then his right…
January 29, 2007
There's a new collection of Einstein's personal letters that are about to be published. They give us a portrait of the young scientist before he revolutionized science. At the time these letters were written, Einstein was insecure, poor and struggling to publish. In other words, he was just like…
January 29, 2007
Paul Krugman's analysis of Milton Friedman's intellectual legacy is one of the best articles I've read recently. Krugman not only paints a balanced portrait of Friedman's accomplishments - great economist, bad popularizer - but ably summarizes the rival tensions in 20th century economics. It's all…
January 27, 2007
It almost seems as if the faddish claims of nutritional science have an inverse relationship with reality. If a nutrient is supposed to be good for us, chances are that later research will contradict the claim. Here's Michael Pollan in the Times Magazine:
Last winter came the news that a low-fat…
January 26, 2007
It's an astonishingly robust finding:
Smokers with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage in other parts of their brains.
What makes this paper so interesting is that it actually makes sense. The insula has been recognized for more than…
January 24, 2007
Is the Hard Problem of consciousness solvable by science? Will we ever come up with a meaningful explanation as to how squirts of neurotransmitter and minor jolts of electricity create subjective experience? As far as I'm concerned, this is the major philosophical question hovering over…
January 23, 2007
Is this true? Are neuroscientists really the cool kids? If so, then what is the "coolest" avenue of neuroscience research? (And please don't say consciousness studies.)
Q. Among biologists, is sperm research very respected?
A. Well, in biology, all the glamour is in neuroscience. The common thing…
January 23, 2007
For most of the 20th century, neuroscience treated our memories like inert packets of information. They were created through Pavlovian reinforcement, and then just shelved away in the brain, like dusty old books in a library. While this approach led to many important discoveries, like CREB, Cam…
January 22, 2007
This is an important medical story about the spread of a drug-resistant strain of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii. The spread of this superbug - it's known as an opportunistic pathogen, since it preys on the old, young and weak - seems to largely be a consequence of war. Here's Steve…