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.
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Posts by this author
December 11, 2006
My favorite foods all seem to involve lactose. Whether it's an aged goat cheese from the Loire Valley, or a stinky washed rind cheese, or a scoop of dark chocolate ice cream, I would probably starve if I was lactose intolerant. Now we know how lactose-tolerance evolved. Being able to digest milk is…
December 11, 2006
The Christmas season is conspicuous consumption time. I recently made my annual trip to the mall, and couldn't help but think that, somehow, the consumption gets more conspicuous every year. The antiqued jeans get more expensive, the televisions get higher definition, and the Starbucks in the food…
December 9, 2006
The scientific process is famously conservative. On the one hand, this is a necessary flaw: empiricism requires reproduction, and it's never fun when our view of reality is jolted by some revolutionary new fact. The reputation of science in large part depends upon not endorsing charlatans.
On the…
December 8, 2006
So I'm reading the newspaper this morning, with NPR on in the background. Next thing I know, a tear is trickling down my cheek.
December 8, 2006
The helter-skelter of urban life even affects birds. I swear my cockatiel is better behaved since I left London; now I know why:
Rapid urbanisation around the world and the subsequent increase in ambient noise has proven problematic for animals which use sound to communicate. For birds in…
December 8, 2006
When will they learn?
The Environmental Protection Agency has changed the way it sets standards to control dangerous air pollutants like lead, ozone and tiny particles of soot, enhancing the role of the agency's political appointees in scientific assessments and postponing the required review by…
December 7, 2006
If there was a circle of hell designed especially for me, I'm pretty sure it would closely resemble this:
The strobe lights pulse and the air vibrates to a killer rock beat. Giant screens show mayhem and gross-out pranks: a car wreck, a sucker punch, a flabby (and naked) rear end, sealed with duct…
December 7, 2006
Over at Pure Pedantry, Kara has a nice post on Goethe and game theory. While we're on the topic of Goethe's prescience, I'd thought I'd mention one of Goethe's most important scientific contributions: his analysis of color. Simply put, Goethe argued that our perception of color is a phenomenon of…
December 7, 2006
This won't be news to Rupert Murdoch. Here's Austan Goolsbee in the Times:
New research by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, entitled "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers" (www.nber.org/papers/w12707.pdf) compiles some compelling…
December 6, 2006
Obama makes bridging our cultural divides look easy. He takes a potential faux-pas - talking about condoms in an evangelical megachurch - and manages to make birth control seem like a faith-based solution. We've been led by a buffoon for so long now, that it's easy to forget what it's like to…
December 6, 2006
After the rapture, when the aliens start to colonize our desolate planet, they will be endlessly fascinated by documents like this. Yes, I'm talking about the world's longest diary, composed by Robert Shields of Dayton, Washington, which clocks in at a Talmudic 35 million words. The entries are so…
December 6, 2006
This is why you suck at it.
New research suggests that the better you know someone, the harder it can be to predict their taste. According to researchers at Tilburg University and Kathiolieke University, we rely too heavily on preconceived notions because we often think we're much more similar to…
December 6, 2006
It's fascinating, and a little scary, how quickly medicine can transform our notions of what "normal" is. The WSJ reports that drug makers are starting to market birth control pills as a way to help women eliminate their periods. Of course, not everyone likes this idea, since it threatens to…
December 5, 2006
Good question. There appears to be no single cause, although there are several factors that put Boston-area Puerto Ricans at higher risk for depression, including high rates of obesity and diabetes. But some causes of the depressive epidemic might prove harder to treat:
Their depression, the…
December 5, 2006
This is just tragic. We send our young men and women off to fight a war, and then refuse to treat their very real mental health symptoms. When are we going to learn that war ravages the brain, and that you have to treat PTSD just as seriously as you would an injury to the body:
Soldier Tyler…
December 5, 2006
Remember that controversy last year about the Jackson Pollack paintings that were found in a closet, only to have their authenticity dismissed by a physics professor who used "fractal analysis" to prove that they were "substantially different" from real Pollack paintings? Well, it turns out that…
December 5, 2006
This is the ultimate placebo effect:
Pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy, is rare, occurring at a rate of 1 to 6 for every 22,000 births. Though scientists are still largely baffled about what causes it in humans, recent case studies and studies of similar conditions in animals are beginning to…
December 4, 2006
Studio 360, a radio show on NPR (no affilation with Aaron Sorkin), did a show this week on the "Science of Creativity". The show featured a few nice segments - I especially enjoyed the riff on mental illness and artistic genius (Virginia Woolf wasn't the only one) - but I kept on waiting for the…
December 4, 2006
In The New Yorker, there's a funny cartoon that features a couple driving in their car. Both are reaching for the climate controls, and the man is huffily speaking to his wife: "Let me do it. You don't understand the science of defrosting."
Which made me realize that I don't have a clue how the…
December 1, 2006
It's one of those tired cliches: Bush makes decisions with his irrational "gut instincts," instead of relying on "careful analysis". Paul Krugman, in today's Times, end his columns by repeating this cliche:
Luckily, we've got good leadership for the coming storm: the White House is occupied by a…
November 30, 2006
You'll live longer. From the latest Nature:
Regular, moderate consumption of red wine is linked to a reduced risk of coronary heart disease and to lower overall mortality1, but the relative contribution of wine's alcohol and polyphenol components to these effects is unclear2. Here we identify…
November 30, 2006
So David Brooks is now a swing voter. He's grown so disenchanted with the Republican leadership that he has started giving them advice on how to woo him back. For the most part, I agree with his advice and support his policy proposals. He advises the Republican leadership to "support stem cell…
November 30, 2006
Until he became a global warming skeptic and an environmental advisor to the Bush White House, I'd always been a fan of Michael Crichton. His scientific dystopias always made for excellent pool-side reading and, when he was good, he could be very good. Say what you will about his didactic dialogues…
November 29, 2006
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but this sort of body-language interpretation, as featured in the NY Times today, struck me as about as scientific as palm reading and hand-writing analysis:
Tonya Reiman and Maxine Lucille Fiel do not know much about football, but they are fluent in body language, one of…
November 29, 2006
It's ironic that scientific research on animals has ended up becoming an important source of evidence against animal research. After all, it's only because we sacrifice chimps that we understand the deep connections between the chimp brain and the human brain. If we didn't experiment on rats, or…
November 29, 2006
At last, an auto show that doesn't revolve around thirsty V-12 engines and gigantic SUV's. The L.A. Auto Show, which starts today, is notable for the debut of several environmentally friendly vehicles. And these aren't just futuristic fantasies. For the most part, these are practical technologies…
November 29, 2006
Obama is coming to town! Since I live in New Hampshire, that also means that Obama is going to run for President. (I suppose Obama might also just have a soft spot for Manchester. . .)
So what am I going to ask Obama about? I've already confessed to a serious man-crush, but I'm dismayed by Obama's…
November 28, 2006
Fun for the whole family. If Judith Rich Harris is correct, then kids should have the same accent as their peers, not their parents. According to this quiz, my childhood friends in Southern California were actually from the Midwest. (Or maybe I just watched too much TV, since most television voices…
November 28, 2006
There's a thorough article in the Times Magazine on the persistence of the "achievment gap" in public education. The conclusion of the article is rather simple: the "achievment gap" persists due to a series of entrenched inequalities, but very good schools (and I mean very good) can actually…
November 28, 2006
This is a briliant idea: Youtube for test tubes. Instead of trying to translate the methodology of experiments into technical prose, why not just videotape the experiments? Most of the time, science is just a fancy form of manual labor, and as most researchers can tell you, trying to replicate a…