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
December 27, 2006
I've been reading Dave Eggers new book, What is the What. It's a beautifully told story of a boy's flight from Southern Sudan to a refugee camp in Ethiopia to the slums of Atlanta. Based on a true story - the novel's subtitle is "The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng" - Eggers recounts, in…
December 27, 2006
The Times has a story today on the recent boom in "brain health" programs:
From "brain gyms" on the Internet to "brain-healthy" foods and activities at assisted living centers, the programs are aimed at baby boomers anxious about entering their golden years and at their parents trying to stave off…
December 26, 2006
Talking about death is hard, and many doctors aren't very good at it:
Researchers who in the mid-1990s observed more than 9,000 seriously ill patients in five American teaching hospitals found substantial shortcomings in the care of the dying. More than a third spent at least 10 of their last days…
December 26, 2006
Here is Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) weighing in on neuroscience and free will (a topic that has been heatedly discussed on this blog recently):
It seems to me that free will can be easily tested. The next time someone is getting brain surgery, just take a few minutes to perform the test.…
December 24, 2006
The latest poll from my state of New Hampshire:
If the Democratic primary were held today, Obama would be in a statistical dead heat with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, according to a new Monitor poll. Last month, a Monitor poll showed Clinton trouncing her opponents, with Obama lagging 23 points…
December 22, 2006
Tis the season of Santa Claus, and my neighborhood is full of these awful blow up Santa dioramas. The grinch in me hopes that some other grinch comes along with a sharp scissors and pokes a hole in all this inflatable lawn plastic.
Don't these people realize that there's nothing vaguely Christian…
December 22, 2006
Here's how Michel Gondry - director of the Science of Sleep,* and cinematic master of low-tech effects - created the illusion of solving a Rubiks Cube with his feet. Hint: it involves time.
And here's the Seed video of Gondry talking to sleep scientist Robert Stickgold.
*Beautiful movie, but really…
December 21, 2006
These are just a few questions that Slate's Explainer couldn't, or wouldn't, answer:
What comes after 999 trillion?
Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't our troops carry laser guns?
Is it possible to collect all the cookie dough in Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough…
December 21, 2006
My last post on neuroscience and free will generated lots of interesting comments. Please check them out. But I think a few readers misunderstood my ambition. It's easiest to begin by saying what I wasn't trying to do: I wasn't trying to construct a philosophically sound defense of free will (I'm…
December 21, 2006
We all know about Proust and his madeleine. One whiff of that buttery cookie, shaped like a seashell, and Proust suddenly remembered his long forgotten childhood in Combray. Proust makes it clear that his sense of smell was the trigger for his memory. He knew that our nose bears a unique burden of…
December 20, 2006
The Economist believes that "modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will":
In the late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He…
December 19, 2006
So I don't think we should send more troops to secure Baghdad. This song explains why:
Note to Bruce: While I enjoyed your Seeger Sessions - even if I really don't listen to it that much - may I suggest that your next record of covers feature Bob Dylan?
December 19, 2006
Nabokov always said that the only thing he enjoyed more than writing novels and solving chess puzzles was studying butterflies. As he notes in Strong Opinions:
Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a…
December 19, 2006
The purpose of dreaming is learning. While you are sleeping, your brain is digesting the day, deciding which new experiences to consolidate into long-term memory. That's the implication of Matthew Wilson's latest paper, which documented the neural activity in the brains of dreaming rats. Here's the…
December 18, 2006
There was an excellent review this past Sunday of the new William James biography, by Robert Richardson. The review was written by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. I heartily agree with this passage:
James's own philosophical positions were fused with his reactions to the experiences of his life. A…
December 18, 2006
DARPA, the often secretive research unit of the Pentagon devoted to sponsoring "revolutionary, high-payoff research," has recently turned its attention to neuroscience. DARPA is best known for creating the precursor of the internet, and for decades lavished its considerable resources on high-end…
December 16, 2006
Is inflation really so bad? The great scourge of the American economy - and the economic phenomenon that gives Greenspan and Bernanke nightmares - turns out to have some pretty progressive side-effects. This paper is from the December 2006 issue of the Journal of Political Economy:
This study…
December 15, 2006
There are so many confounding variables here I don't know where to begin, so I'll just post the study, in the hope that it convinces somebody to eat some tofu or cheese instead of some ethically dubious meat:
Children with high IQs are more likely to be vegetarians when they grow up, according to…
December 15, 2006
Just when I thought we are all doomed to inhabit a planet of acidic oceans and infernal heat, I learn that the Pentagon's top weaponeer - nicknamed Dr. Evil - will save us all from global warming.
PS. Did you know that the the army can create rain? I sure didn't.
December 15, 2006
In December 1992, the FDA approved a new cancer drug called Taxol. The active ingredient was paclitaxel, a toxic chemical taken from the bark of the Oregon yew tree. Hailed as a treatment for metastasized tumors - the cancer had already spread - Bristol-Meyers Squib proudly announced that the pill…
December 14, 2006
A few days ago, I lamented the rise of conspicuous consumption, and wondered whether all our luxuries were actually making us depressed. My logic was simple: we adapt to what we have - it stops making us happy - but we are constantly being barraged with all sorts of new needs, like HDTV's, and blu-…
December 14, 2006
As everybody knows by now, having a circumcised penis cuts a man's risk of contacting AIDS from heterosexual sex by half. Those ancient Israelites were some astute scientists:
Uncircumcised men are thought to be more susceptible because the underside of the foreskin is rich in Langerhans cells,…
December 14, 2006
Apparently, the Japanese believe that blood type is destiny. It's their version of the zodiac:
In Japan, using blood type to predict a person's character is as common as going to McDonald's and ordering a teriyaki burger. The association is akin to the equally unscientific use of astrological signs…
December 14, 2006
Well, no meritocracy is perfect. The economists Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv analyzed the faculty in the top 35 U.S. economics departments. Their conclusions were startling, especially if your last name begins with the letter Z:
Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to…
December 13, 2006
If I was a smart man, I'd go out and invest in the stock of some robot companies. Bill Gates (yes, that one) is convinced that the 21st century will be the age of the robot:
Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies... But it is…
December 13, 2006
What are the psychological effects of "doing time"? Do harsher prison conditions create harder criminals? These are the questions that the economists M. Keith Chen and Jesse Schapiro were determined to answer. Their conclusions are sobering:
Some two million Americans are currently incarcerated,…
December 12, 2006
Evangelicals are getting worried: all their pastors are turning gay. Who's to blame? Well, some might argue that genes play a role, and that homosexuality is really a biological behavior. But that would be utterly foolish. It turns out that the real problem is soy. According to Jim Rutz, tofu turns…
December 12, 2006
The fight is getting pretty entertaining. While I've got my problems with Gladwell, I think his main argument in this skuffle is exactly right:
As I thought should have been obvious, I don't think that the observation, or analysis, or discussion of racial differences is racist. The black-white…
December 12, 2006
This article on turtles contains more bewildering facts than just about anything else I've read recently. Consider this:
The liver, lungs and kidneys of a centenarian turtle are virtually indistinguishable from those of its teenage counterpart, a Ponce de Leonic quality that has inspired…
December 12, 2006
John Strassburger, the president of Ursinus College, a small liberal arts institution here in the eastern Pennsylvania countryside, vividly remembers the day that the chairman of the board of trustees told him the college was losing applicants because of its tuition.
It was too low.
So early in…