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
August 21, 2006
I'll be on vacation for the next ten days, and probably won't have much time to blog.
In the meantime, I thought I'd leave everyone with a few random quotes. Even though these jingles have embedded themselves in my brain, I don't really pretend to understand any of them. Your thoughts, as always,…
August 21, 2006
It's easy to forget that science and religion weren't always at war in America. Once upon a time (the late 19th century), they managed to co-exist in a romantic synergy. Enlightened theologians tried to integrate Darwin into the Bible, and scientists freely admitted that not every question had a…
August 18, 2006
Over at Cracked.com, they have posted the five most obviously drug fueled TV appearances ever. Richard Pryor is pretty absurd - he can't stop rubbing his sweaty face - but my favorite is James Brown, who answers every question by chanting "Living in America!"
August 18, 2006
Cigarettes are in the news again. A Federal judge just imposed strict new limits on tobacco advertising - no more "low tar" cigarettes - and Michael Bloomberg announced that he has set up a new foundation dedicated to starting a global anti-smoking campaign.
Personally, I think the solution is…
August 18, 2006
That's the conclusion of a new study by economists Andrew Leigh and Christoper Jencks. (I suppose this is good news - poor people aren't more likely to die in developed countries - although I fear how these statistics will be interpreted by policy makers and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.…
August 18, 2006
Cass Sunstein in the Washington Post offers an excellent explanation of why an international deal on global warming is so unlikely:
The obstacle stems from the unusual incentives of the United States and China. As the world's leading contributors to climate change, these are the two countries that…
August 17, 2006
Can we get any more self-indulgent? These desert dwellers have decided that the best way to survive the summer heat is to install gigantic misters and air-conditioners in their backyard.
Not content to spend summers housebound, Berger and his wife, Eileen, decided to reclaim their backyard with a…
August 17, 2006
One of my persistent problems with evolutionary psychology is its consistent lack of interest in the way culture affects human nature. Instead of trying to understand the way pop jingles, political systems and pulp fiction novels influence our behavior, evo psychers prefer to explain away our…
August 16, 2006
What happened when LSU adopted a business model budget? This is what happened.
Hint: It wasn't very good for inter-disciplinary programs. But it was great for the majors favored by football players...
August 16, 2006
What's scarier? Communists or Islamic Fundamentalists? Stalin or Osama? Although I'm too young to remember the U.S.S.R. - the crumbling Berlin Wall is a vague childhood memory, and my sense of the Soviets came from Rocky 4 - I tend to agree with this sentiment:
Although I did duck-and-cover drills…
August 15, 2006
In response to my last post on Musical Geniuses, I was accused of being a simple minded nurturist, a proponent of environmental determinism. So I thought I would take a moment and elaborate on why people with extraordinary talent - like Mozart, or Michael Jordan, or this Jay Greenberg kid - aren't…
August 14, 2006
In a sidebar for my last Seed article, I argued that Mozart's musical genius was the result of dedication and practice, and not some innate talent for symphonic composition. Well, here's another musical savant trying to prove me wrong.
On Tuesday, Sony Classical will release his 34-minute Symphony…
August 14, 2006
The WSJ reports today that the Dept. of Homeland Security has begun testing biometric devices designed to weed out airplane passengers with "hostile intent". The particular metrics are secret, of course, but they seem to be surprisingly crude. (They don't go much beyond measuring your blood…
August 14, 2006
They should put more polling places in schools. According to scientists at Stanford, voters were significantly more likely to support an increased sales tax for education if they voted in a school. (Their data set was voting patterns in the 2000 Arizona election.) Voters were also significantly…
August 14, 2006
Everytime I walk into a wine store, and see that collage of numerical stickers (This Chianti is a 91! This Pinot Grigio is an 88!), the neuroscientist in me wants to tear them all down an go on a long rant about unconscious biases. The idea that the human olfactory system can reliably decipher the…
August 12, 2006
In this otherwise excellent summary of the physiology of testosterone, the NY Times leaves out one crucial element: it's psychological effect. And no, I'm not just talking about the placebo effect. As I mentioned earlier, testosterone is well known for producing a euphoric high. We already know…
August 11, 2006
Why is terrorism so frightening? After all, if you just look at the numbers, being blown-up on an airplane is far less likely than dying in a car crash on the way to the grocery store. A Cato report makes this abundantly clear:
In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at…
August 10, 2006
The recent decisions of G.M. and Ford will soon be taught in business school as an example of how not to run a business. Despite gas hovering at $3 a gallon, both companies seem determined to sell the public precisely what it doesn't want: big trucks, bigger SUV's and lumbering V8 engines.
Just…
August 9, 2006
When my girlfriend told me that the Baptist church down the street was holding a dinosaur fair at its summer camp, I didn't expect anything unusual. I assumed the kids might watch Jurassic Park, or learn about the teeth of T-Rex, or excavate some fake fossils. Alas, I was wrong. The poor campers…
August 9, 2006
Over at Times $elect, Verlyn Klinkenborg (the E.B. White of our time) has written an eloquent meditation on our changing scientific knowledge of the night sky. After reviewing some of the universe's stranger facts - the age of light, the absence of time, the way galaxies "violently intersift" - he…
August 8, 2006
As PZ Myers has already pointed out, Francis Collins has been busy spreading the gospel. Myers has already dismantled Collins squishy theism better than I ever could, so I thought I would focus on one particular Collins' claim in particular. It's a theme that consistently gets rehashed in his…
August 7, 2006
Although it wasn't supposed to be possible, Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Salopek managed to trace the gallons of gas he purchased from a local gas station back to its varied origins. He ended up traveling to the Gulf of Mexico, Nigeria, Irag and Venezuela. Along the way we meet gas station…
August 7, 2006
In the new Atlantic, the always optimistic Gregg Easterbrook has an interesting take on global warming: it's not inevitable. His logic is historical. Given the ease with which we solved past air-pollution problems (CFC's, acid rain, etc.), we can also figure out how to postpone our warming…
August 5, 2006
Joe Francis founded the "Girls Gone Wild" franchise. As this riveting article makes clear, he's a total sleazebag. But I didn't know he was also an evolutionary psychologist:
"Sex sells everything," Francis says. "It drives every buying decision . . . I hate to get too deep and philosophical here…
August 4, 2006
In this TED talk, Jeff Han (a scientist at NYU) demonstrates a computer system that is driven purely by touch. No keyboard, no mouse clicks, just ten fingers and varying amounts of pressure. I want one.
P.S. You should also check out the rest of the TED website. They've got videotaped talks by…
August 4, 2006
According to news reports, a PR firm with close ties to oil companies has distributed a parody of "An Inconvenient Truth" on YouTube. In the corporate video, "Gore appears as a sinister figure who brainwashes penguins and bores movie audiences by blaming the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan…
August 4, 2006
From today's WSJ:
Studies of psychiatric drugs by researchers with a financial conflict of interest -- receiving speaking fees, owning stock, or being employed by the manufacturer -- are nearly five times as likely to find benefits in taking the drugs as studies by researchers who don't receive…
August 3, 2006
Apparently, the final straw was the recent heat wave. Robertson said on his television show this morning that the high temperatures stifling most of the country are "the most convincing evidence I've seen on global warming in a long time." While I'm glad Robertson has belatedly seen the light, I…
August 3, 2006
In the search for renewable energy, environmentalists are sometimes the bad guys. And no, I'm not talking about nuclear energy (although I'm in favor of building new nuclear plants). I'm talking about the new attempt to squeeze electricity from the perpetual swells of the ocean. In a rational world…