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
September 20, 2006
One of the more unfortunate side-effects of the endless creationist controversy is that it dehumanizes Darwin: he either becomes a biological prophet - the Newton of life - or a Faustian devil, a thinker who sold his soul to discredit god. What gets lost is Darwin's astonishing scientific process,…
September 19, 2006
I was raised on Costco farmed salmon, those mealy slabs of pinkish fish protein. My first bite of wild salmon was a revelation. It was a different species of taste, so rich and oily and strong. You could practically taste the swim upstream. So I was interested in this WSJ article on the billions of…
September 19, 2006
One of the few accurate criticisms of An Inconvenient Truth was the way it deliberately avoided difficult policy prescriptions. For one thing, there was no mention of a high carbon tax, one thing our country (and atmosphere) desperately need. (And liberals aren't the only ones endorsing a carbon…
September 18, 2006
Peers matter. According to two recent economics papers, the behavior of our peers determines our own. Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti looked at worker productivity:
A 10% increase in average co-worker permanent productivity is associated with 1.7% increase in a worker's effort. Most of this peer…
September 18, 2006
Is nothing sacred? I'm starting to wonder if nutrionists are the scientific version of fashion designers, and make sure to contradict their claims every few years or so, just to stay cutting edge. Anyways, I like breakfast. Noting gets me going like a nice bowl of sugary Cinnamon Life.
Whatever you…
September 16, 2006
From David Remnick's outstanding profile of Bill Clinton in The New Yorker (not online):
"'I keep reading that Bush is incurious, but when he talks to me he asks a lot of questions,' Clinton went on. 'So I can't give him a bad grade on curiousity. I think both he and his father, because they have…
September 15, 2006
David Buller's book, Adapting Minds, is in the news again. I agree with Mixing Memory that many of Buller's specific debunkings - such as his full-throated attack on the cheater module - seem flimsy. (And trust me, I was prepared to believe...In my humble opinion, too much evolutionary psychology…
September 15, 2006
The always interesting Sharon Begley has a WSJ column today on the new scientific journals that only publish negative results.
A handful of journals that publish only negative results are gaining traction, and new ones are on the drawing boards.
"You hear stories about negative studies getting…
September 14, 2006
Over at the Loom, Carl Zimmer reflects on 18th century science, lightning, and the nervous system. The question of when scientists first realized that our nerves used the same stuff as lightning bolts - a completely outlandish idea - has long fascinated me. It's an empirical story in which two…
September 14, 2006
From the WSJ:
Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific research journals, has embarked on an experiment of its own.
In addition to having articles submitted for publication subjected to peer reviews by a handful of experts in the field, the 136-year-old journal is trying out a new…
September 13, 2006
From The Atlantic:
Studies indicate that Asian students achieve some of the highest scores in the world in math and science comparisons. However, owing to excessive focus on memorization, done solely for the purpose of passing tests, these gloomy idiot savants demonstrate surprisingly little…
September 13, 2006
According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Starbucks Frappuccino is equivalent in calories to a McDonald's coffee plus 11 of their creamers and 29 packets of sugar. A venti Caffè Mocha with whipped cream is calorically equivalent to a Quarter Pounder with cheese. This is the…
September 12, 2006
From Dean Baker:
If physicians in the United States received the same pay as physicians in Europe, this step alone would save $80 billion a year from the country's health care bill - approximately $800 per family.
September 12, 2006
It's not that rich people sleep more hours per night - although they often do - it's that they are more efficient at using their time in bed. In other words, they are less likely to toss and turn. I wonder if this is because they can afford Ambien...
September 12, 2006
In honor of the start of football season, I thought I'd blog about one of my favorite economics papers. It's by David Romer of UC Berkeley, and it should be mandatory reading for every sleep-deprived NFL coach out there. The question Romer was trying to answer is familiar to every NFL fan: what to…
September 11, 2006
I have had the tragic privilege of living in New York during 9/11 and London during 7/7. The two events are, of course, incomparable, if only because the falling skyscrapers puncutated our lives without warning. I still vividly remember the first night of 9/11, when the stench of melted plastic…
September 8, 2006
Spy shots of a new BMW that runs on hydrogen have just been released. Back in 2004, BMW promised that they would have a hydrogen car ready in 4 years. Seems like they might keep their word (unlike GM and Ford.)
As far as I can tell, there is only one problem with his fine piece of German…
September 8, 2006
For me, one of the most heartbreaking images of Katrina was a picture of a dying dog, resting underneath a junked car. At a certain point, the press photographs of bloated human bodies floating on the greasy Louisiana water became numbing - they were just too awful - and it was this image of a sick…
September 7, 2006
Any bets on what Bush will drive (or get driven in) once he gets out of office? My hunch is a Hummer. But Clinton is about to become the proud owner of a Mercury Mariner Hybrid. If Hillary weren't running for President (and didn't need to carry Michigan), Bill could have upgraded to a nicer car.
September 7, 2006
Cognitive Daily brought my attention to an interesting study about consumers and health care. Simply put, Americans are terrible at knowing when we are getting good medical treatment. Our satisfaction with our doctors bears no relationship to how good our doctors actually are.
This shouldn't be too…
September 7, 2006
Seed just posted a video of a "salon" between Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers. These are two deliriously smart men, and it's worth checking out...
September 6, 2006
Over at Slate, Gregg Easterbrook proposes an audacious hypothesis: the rise of television viewing among infants is responsible for the current autism epidemic.
The idea is wholly speculative. No scientist has shown a link between autism and television, but so far as I could determine no scientist…
September 6, 2006
An excellent review has just been published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on the relationship between enriched environments and the onset and severity of nervous system diseases. A consensus seems to be emerging: putting rodents in enriched environments - cages with space for foraging, toys and…
September 5, 2006
Jerry Vlasak is a dangerous lunatic, a spokesman for domestic terrorists. He is also a trauma surgeon living in Woodland Hills:
Vlasak's views are so incendiary that he is banned from ever visiting Britain. He has been arrested on a Canadian ice floe, at a traveling circus, at a Rodeo Drive furrier…
September 5, 2006
How long before this is on YouTube?
Videotape of the moment Steve Irwin was hit by a stingray's tail shows the Australian naturalist pulling the barb from his chest, his manager has said.
"The tail came up, and spiked him here [in the chest], and he pulled it out and the next minute, he's gone," Mr…
September 4, 2006
Bill Simmons is right:
I'd put Season 1 of "The Wire" against anything. The first three seasons of "The Sopranos." Seasons 1 or 2 of "24." The first seasons of "NYPD Blue," "ER" or "Miami Vice." You name it. I have never seen a show like it. Season 2 wasn't as good (if Season 1 was an A-plus-plus-…
September 4, 2006
It was the final exam of my freshman year. I was taking Intro to Psych, and I had just pulled an all-nighter. After a few minutes, I began to notice some odd paper shuffling off to my left. The kid next to me was carelessly using a small cheat sheet, dense with definitions written in 8 point font.…
September 1, 2006
The talented Elizabeth Gould of Princeton has done it again: she has produced another study documenting the power of structural plasticity. This time she studied marmoset fathers. She compared the brains of first time and experienced fathers with males who never had children. Her results showed…
September 1, 2006
The economists Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski have recently published a working paper analyzing the "artificiality" of Iraq's borders. Their conlusion is sobering: Iraq is a fake state, a lingering blot of colonialism that merges different ethnicities together with little…
September 1, 2006
My vacation is over. Your humble blogger is now back to work, complete with some awkward tan lines and a slightly jet-lagged brain.
I'd thought I'd begin by making sure everybody read Richard Rorty's scathing review of Marc Hauser's new book, Moral Minds, in the NY Times. Hauser's claims are…