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
January 22, 2007
Last night's Colts-Patriots game was a painful experience. (As you probably guessed, I'm a Patriots fan.) But it wasn't just painful because the Pats lost the game: it was how they lost the game. The Pats dominated the 1st half, only to have their 18 point lead slowly chipped away by Manning's…
January 19, 2007
From Steven Shapin's recent New Yorker article on the history of vegetarianism:
A recent report by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization reckons that at least eighteen per cent of the global-warming effect comes from livestock, more than is caused by all the world's transportation systems.…
January 19, 2007
In the past two years, we've been blessed with two remarkable novels about neuroscience and the brain: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers, and Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Personally, I thought Saturday was the more perfect work, although both books address a similar set of themes. Can science solve…
January 18, 2007
I've got good news and bad news. I'll give you the good news first:
A cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.…
January 18, 2007
People who have near-death experiences often report a similar set of symptoms: they levitate above their body while being slowly pulled towards a bright white light. Nevertheless, the details of this experience - the particular afterlife that lies beyond the light - reveal a tremendous amount about…
January 18, 2007
Good news: cancer deaths have declined for the second year in a row. This trend has a number of causes, including fewer smokers and improved treatment options. But one cancer accounts for more than 65 percent of the overall decline in deaths:
By far the greatest decreases in mortality have been in…
January 17, 2007
I'm always startled by the sheer variety of toothpastes being sold at my local drug store. It's a classic example of excessive choice: all those different products, most of which seem interchangeable, actually make me less likely to buy anything. I dread the oral health aisle.
So how do…
January 17, 2007
Here is the most depressing lede of the day:
$1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign -- a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of…
January 16, 2007
What is the neural correlate of the self? The easy answer is that nobody knows. We have yet to discover a neurological patient who has lost their sense of identity, but still retained their conscious sensations. Nevertheless, certain brain areas have been implicated in distinguishing the self from…
January 16, 2007
John Tierney inaugurates his new Science Times column with a charming mediation on a recent neuroeconomics paper published in Neuron:
The economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental subject $40 in cash and offered the…
January 15, 2007
Having children is bad for your health:
A pair of researchers, drawing on the experience of nearly 22,000 couples in the 19th century -- has measured the "fitness cost" of human reproduction. This is the price that parents pay in their own health and longevity for the privilege of having their…
January 15, 2007
Agricultural subsidies are bad policy on so many different levels. They artificially lower food prices, thus making it harder for farmers from developing nations to compete. (Cutting subsidies would do a tremendous amount of good for the third world.) They encourage the growth of monoculture…
January 13, 2007
Is the mathematical avant-garde getting so abstruse that it stretches the limits of the human mind? Is it dangerous when a science becomes entirely dependent upon the calculations of computers? Here's Sharon Begley in the WSJ:
Mathematicians have become increasingly vexed that some statements about…
January 11, 2007
So I was talking to a friend of mine, currently working towards his Ph.D in neuroscience, and we got into an interesting discussion about the most influential neuroscience book published in the last 25 years. We defined "influence" as broadly as possible, so that it refers to both working…
January 10, 2007
PZ has a great post on a recent Nature Genetics paper that explores the startling connection between longevity and luck. (Or, as scientists like to stay, stochasticity). It turns out that genetically identical worms survive for very different amounts of time. The length of their life depends upon…
January 10, 2007
I'm curious how animal rights activists feel about this:
They are the new "Prozac Nation": cats, dogs, birds, horses and an assortment of zoo animals whose behavior has been changed, whose anxieties and fears have been quelled and whose owners' furniture has been spared by the use of…
January 9, 2007
Last week, gay-rights activists led a protest against research being done on sheep at Oregon State University. Andrew Sullivan reports:
The researchers have been adjusting various hormones in the brains of gay rams to try to see if they can get them to be interested in the opposite sex. The…
January 9, 2007
According to a new study published in the BMJ, the Danish are happier than people in other developed nations because they have low expectations. That's the dismal secret of happiness: not expecting very much from life in the first place.
"It's a David and Goliath thing," said the lead author, Kaare…
January 8, 2007
In his latest New Yorker article (an otherwise problematic discussion of Enron), Malcolm Gladwell makes an interesting distinction between "puzzles" and "mysteries":
Osama bin Laden's whereabouts are a puzzle. We can't find him because we don't have enough information. The key to the puzzle will…
January 8, 2007
I've always thought that most reality television was nothing more than unethical psychological experiments in disguise. (What else could Temptation Island or Wife Swap possibly be?) But now ABC has taken this idea to its logical extreme. Last week, the news show Primetime Live, along with social…
January 5, 2007
According to The Washington Post, public libraries are tossing little-read classics so that they can make more room on their shelves for popular best-sellers. I think this is a good thing. Public libraries exist so that people can read books for free. Their purpose is not to force-feed the public a…
January 5, 2007
Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up:
Foreshadowing potential climate chaos to come, early global warming caused unexpectedly severe and erratic temperature swings as rising levels of greenhouse gases helped transform Earth, a team led by researchers at UC Davis said Thursday.
The…
January 3, 2007
Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon have a great article in the new Foreign Policy magazine on "Why Hawks Win." They describe some of the mental biases discovered by Prospect Theory, and explain how these biases affect our foreign policy decisions. (Last week, I speculated on the influences of…
January 3, 2007
From Dan Neil, the wittiest writer in the newspaper business:
Desire, the Buddha informs us, is the root of all suffering -- also, a leading cause of alimony, but let's move on.
The craving for comfort, luxury, prestige and me-first acceleration drives us to buy more car than we absolutely need to…
January 2, 2007
Since I spend most of my disposable income on Amazon, I found this article on their pricing strategy somewhat disturbing:
Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don't want to carry the books around. So you ask the clerk to hold the tomes until Saturday,…
January 2, 2007
There was a nice article in The Times on Sunday about the research of Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill (and former record producer) who studies the neural substrate of music:
Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade…
December 29, 2006
The annual list from the BBC. Here's a semi-random sampling:
More than 90% of plane crashes have survivors.
The Mona Lisa used to hang on the wall of Napoleon's bedroom.
Eating a packet of crisps a day is equivalent to drinking five litres of cooking oil a year.
A common American poplar has twice…
December 29, 2006
It sounds as if Bush has decided to "escalate" the war in Iraq by sending a "surge" of 20,000 more troops. I'm no military expert, but this certainly seems like a terrible idea, especially considering that the previous attempts to pacify Baghdad earlier this summer were so ineffective.
So what is…
December 28, 2006
Wait, I thought the war on drugs was supposed to make heroin more expensive:
Grams of highly pure Afghan heroin are now trading at $90 in LA. That's about a dime per pure milligram, compared with $2.50 a pure milligram in New York during the "French Connection" days. For a naive user, 5mg of heroin…
December 28, 2006
Ever since 1994, when universities were no longer allowed to require professors to retire at a certain age, the average age of academics has been steadily rising. Here's the Boston Globe:
This year, 9.2 percent of tenured professors in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences are 70 or older,…