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
October 23, 2006
Apparently not. If you believe these economists, a bloody blockbuster might actually reduce crime, at least temporarily:
Laboratory experiments in psychology find that exposure to media violence increases aggression. In this paper, we provide field evidence on this question. We exploit variation in…
October 23, 2006
From Michael Specter's article in the New Yorker (not online):
Nearly half the people in the world don't have the kind of clean water and sanitation that were available two thousand years ago to the citizens of ancient Rome. More than a billion people lack access to drinking water, and at least…
October 21, 2006
From Alex Kuczynski's new book, Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery:
The synthetic collagen called Cosmoplast is manufactured from fetal foreskin stem cells harvested from a single baby boy, who would now be a teenager. (It's probably a good thing that he doesn't…
October 20, 2006
I've been hankering for Hamlet: The Game for a long time now. Imagine the possibilities: a first-person-shooter (FPS) that lets you inhabit some of the most famous characters of all time. I'd be Hamlet, but I wouldn't stab Polonius. Or mabye I'd be King Lear, and decide that Cordelia isn't so bad…
October 20, 2006
Via Joel Waldfogel:
James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, both of Dartmouth College, consider the effect of a particular aspect of history--the length of European colonization--on the current standard of living of a group of 80 tiny, isolated islands that have not previously been used in cross-country…
October 20, 2006
Here is the best argument yet for raising the gas tax, and it comes from George Bush's former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. (Sorry Thomas Friedman, you'll just have to try harder.)
With the midterm election around the corner, here's a wacky idea you won't often hear from our elected…
October 20, 2006
Try this fun game. In the following paragraph, clipped from Brian Greene's elegant defense of string theory in the NY Times, I've taken the liberty of substituting a "belief in God" for "string theory":
To be sure, no one successful experiment would establish that [a belief in God] is right, but…
October 20, 2006
Brian Greene mounted a lengthy defense of string theory today in the NY Times. He maintains that string theory is the grand finale of physics, the logical bridge between the contradictions of quantum physics and general relativity. Central to this argument is the concept that physics itself has…
October 19, 2006
First, they go after the beloved Steve Irwin. Now, they've begun attacking us outside of the water:
An 81-year-old boater was in critical condition Thursday after a stingray flopped onto his boat and stabbed him, leaving a foot-long barb in his chest, authorities said.
"It was a freak accident,"…
October 19, 2006
Is there a connection between omega-3 fatty acids and violence? Does a shortage of essential nutrients cause thuggish behavior? I'm skeptical of any direct causal connection - human behavior just isn't that simple - but I'm still going to eat more fatty fish. The evidence is tantalizing:
The UK…
October 19, 2006
Wyeth is currently waiting on FDA approval for a new birth control medication that stops women from menstruating. It's called Lybrel, and it delivers an uninterrupted flow of hormones (there is no week of placebo pills). As Sarah Richards notes,
Wyeth isn't the first pharmaceutical company to…
October 19, 2006
David Brooks annoys me just as much as the next Democrat - I especially dislike his oversimplifications of neuroscience - but he has a great column today on Barack Obama. Since it's behind the wall of Times $elect, I'll quote liberally:
Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for…
October 18, 2006
David Frum, the speechwriter and conservative pundit behind Bush's "axis of evil" line, has officially endorsed Al Gore's latest policy proposal: a tax on carbon. What's even stranger is that Frum endorses this policy without believing in global warming:
You don't have to believe that global…
October 18, 2006
Because our foreign policy of unilateral action has worked out so well here on earth, the Bush Administration has decided that we should also apply it to the rest of the universe. Just think how many distant solar systems will welcome us as liberators! From the Washington Post:
President Bush has…
October 18, 2006
Mosquitoes like blood, but they love sugar. A team of Israeli scientists are exploring how to use this sweet tooth against them:
We have all suffered the irritation of being the food source for hungry mosquitoes. While it is generally well known that female mosquitoes need a meal of blood before…
October 18, 2006
I'm probably breaking some obscure copyright law by simply mentioning this website. For those who don't know, allofmp3.com features ridiculously cheap mp3 files: a song usually costs a dime, not a dollar. The catch? They are a shady Russian company that uses a loophole in Russian law to not pay…
October 18, 2006
In response to my recent post on governmental regulation and energy conservation, an excellent debate has started in the comments. On the one hand, there is a long list of areas in which governmental regulation has forced corporations into making decisions that are beneficial for society at large:…
October 17, 2006
Here we are, enmeshed in a low-grade civil war, and our fearless leaders can't tell the two sides apart. Jeff Stein has been asking assorted congressmen, intelligence analysts and counterterrorism officials a fundamental question: "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?" Needless…
October 17, 2006
This is encouraging: Alaskans actually care about their own destruction. According to a new survey led by Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, the citizens of the state most directly affected by global warming have actually noticed what is happening, and they don't like it:
Over 81% of Alaskans are convinced…
October 17, 2006
The danger of being a recessive trait:
Once a hallmark of the boy and girl next door, blue eyes have become increasingly rare among American children. Immigration patterns, intermarriage, and genetics all play a part in their steady decline. While the drop-off has been a century in the making, the…
October 17, 2006
Are doctors like scientists? Are their practices primarily guided by experiments and empiricism? Or are doctors more like artisans, unwilling or unable to test the effectiveness of many of their treatments? The Washington Post provides an interesting example of the-doctors-as-artisan model, and the…
October 17, 2006
This ad is awesome. In sixty seconds, you watch a pretty-but-ordinary looking woman become a supermodel. All it takes is a little makeup, some hairspray and a few seconds of photoshopping. Instead of selling something impossible to achieve, this commercial reveals the unreality of what we all want…
October 17, 2006
When I lived in London, I used to have to take the bus to Oxford. Without traffic, the ride took 70 minutes, which was just long enough to catch up on my reading and iPOD playlists. But as anyone who knows the M40 will tell you, there is almost always traffic. As a result, I never adjusted to the…
October 16, 2006
Breathing Earth is a map that shows, in real time, births, deaths and tons of carbon dioxide emitted by countries all over the world. If it weren't so depressing to watch, I could stare at it for hours...
October 16, 2006
Here are some facts about energy conservation. They all suggest that when it comes to reducing energy consumption what we need is more governmental regulation, not less. And these facts come courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, which is not exactly a suporter of governmental regulation:
If each U.S…
October 16, 2006
A few months ago, I offered a completely speculative hypothesis on television and autism:
So how might TV be one of the causes of the "autism epidemic"? A possible answer focuses on the way the newborn brain organizes itself in response to the stimuli it receives. If an infant's world is suffused…
October 16, 2006
In his latest New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell profiles a group of shady entrepreneurs who claim to have devised an algorithm that can predict which movies will become blockbusters. They simply "interpret" the script, breaking it down into a discrete list of variables, and then plug those…
October 15, 2006
This is one manipulative television spot. Although I'm afraid it indulges in some serious scientific hype - stem cell cures for diabetes and Alzheimers remain a distant dream - it effectively humanizes a scientific issue. If we are ever going to get Americans to care about the politicization of…
October 13, 2006
I want Bill Clinton to be president again. First there was this savvy framing of the upcoming election:
"This is an election unlike any other I have ever participated in. For six years this country has been totally dominated - not by the Republican Party, this is not fair to the Republican Party -…
October 13, 2006
While we are on the theme of consilience, here's a pretty perfect paragraph of prose that captures the kind of Third Culture I fantasize about. It's from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table:
Carbon is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost…