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
July 10, 2006
There's currently a glut of good books on happiness. If you don't have the time to wade through them all, Jennifer Senior of New York Magazine has a helpful summary of the latest developments in positive psychology.
July 10, 2006
I've always wondered why evangelicals obsess over evolution and not quantum physics. If their intent is to undermine materialist science, the surreal conclusions of modern physicists - multiple universes, 11 stringy dimensions, the invisible weight of dark matter - strike me as far more vulnerable…
July 8, 2006
These bonobos can even invent metaphors...The secret, at least according to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, head scientist at the Great Ape Trust near Des Moines, is to expose primates to language when they are still infants. Of course, this isn't the first time talking chimps have threatened to dethrown…
July 7, 2006
It's pretty damn funny. I especially like the part where Ali G connects being bilingual with bisexuality. Chomsky doesn't even flinch.
[Courtesy Andrew Sullivan]
July 7, 2006
Just read it. Common sense wrapped in lucid prose is a powerful tool.
July 7, 2006
Sharon Begley has another wonderful column today in the WSJ. She focuses on the so called "violence gene" as an example of the hopelessly complicated relationship between genetics and real life.
In the late 1980s, a number of men in several generations of a large Dutch family were found to carry a…
July 7, 2006
Money also can't buy you happiness. It's been reported before, but it's always worth repeating: the rich aren't happier than the rest of us. In the last issue of Science, a team of researchers (including Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman), reported that
"The belief that high income is associated with…
July 6, 2006
Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg alleges that if global warming were an entirely natural phenomenon - as opposed to a man-made problem caused by greenhouse gases - then "the reluctance on the part of some on the right to fix the problem would evaporate." This is a grand claim, and it's worth…
July 6, 2006
Much ink has been spilled about the recent paper in Science documenting empathy in mice. The experiment was rather simple. The scientists noticed that mice given a painful injection displayed increased writhing behavior (a reflexive response to pain) in the presence of cagemates who had also been…
July 5, 2006
This charming article, on Shamu, positive reinforcement, and the malleability of men, has been one of the NY Times' most emailed articles for the last 10 days. (Is that some kind of record?) The basic message is very straightforward:
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that…
July 3, 2006
This week's question is "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?"
That's a tough question. I'm going to go with mental health. Until relatively recently (i.e., the 1960's), our mental health institutions were illiberal asylums, mass…
July 3, 2006
The NY Times Magazine had an interesting article on deja vu and memory. It's about a group of cognitive psychologists who are using patients afflicted with a continual sense of deja vu (sounds a little hellish to me) in order to understand the neural mechanisms of remembering.
This is a relatively…
June 30, 2006
So we now have a short list of some great but forgotten psychologists:
Karen Horney: "Neurosis and Human Growth"
Frederic Bartlett: "Remembering"
Kurt Lewin
William James: "Pragmatism"
Alfred Adler
Edward Tolman
John Dewey
George Mead
Keep the suggestions coming!
June 30, 2006
Why can't we supress laughter?
I have no idea, but this video is hilarious. It's also a little cruel. I dare you not to laugh.
June 30, 2006
I've really enjoyed Olivia Judson's columns on Times $elect. They've been funny, eloquent and haven't shied away from the biological nitty-gritty. In her last column, she ends with a meditation on three questions she wants evolutionary biologists to solve:
The first is metamorphosis. Everyone knows…
June 30, 2006
From The Daily Telegraph:
Scientists who carry out embryonic stem cell research and politicians who pass laws permitting the practice will be excommunicated, the Vatican said yesterday.
"Destroying human embryos is equivalent to an abortion. It is the same thing," said Cardinal Alfonso Lopez…
June 29, 2006
It seems that supply and demand are compensating for the ineffectual policies of the Bush Adminstration. An Energy Information Adminstration press release announced the following:
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels increased by 0.1 percent in 2005, from 5,903 million metric…
June 29, 2006
I've lived in New Hampshire for almost a year now, and I'm still not used to the constant presence of presidential hopefuls. Yesterday, Bill was here. Pataki was supposed to come, but the floods kept him in NY. In the last month, we've had Warner, Feingold, Clark, McCain and just about everyone…
June 29, 2006
Did you know that we can thrive with only half a brain? Weird. The New Yorker has a wonderful article documenting the lives of patients who live through these hemispherectomies. The strangest thing is that no one knows how they do it:
When I asked the surgeons how it's possible for people with half…
June 29, 2006
Over at Small Gray Matters, there is an excellent critique of my last post on fMRI. Here is the nut graf:
While fMRI certainly has important technical limitations people should be aware of (low spatial and temporal resolution, high costs giving rise to underpowered studies, etc.), I think the issue…
June 28, 2006
Mixing Memory's post on the undeserved obscurity of Franz Brentano got me thinking. What other great scientists of mind are modern neuroscientists neglecting?
My own vote goes to William James. While his Principles of Psychology are often mandatory reading in Intro to Psych courses - not bad for a…
June 28, 2006
The blogosphere has begun debating the merits of fMRI. That's a good thing. The debate began with Paul Bloom's excellent editorial in Seed, in which he argued that "fMRI imagery has attained an undue influence, and we shouldn't be seduced." It continues here and here.
I used to work in a…
June 27, 2006
Mixing Memory posted an interesting reply to my "Gladwell is the New Freud" post. He argued that my "Freud bashing was just wrong":
For one, while Jonah attempts to criticize Gladwell for being too Freud-like in his discussion of the "adaptive unconscious" (another term for the "cognitive…
June 26, 2006
It's in every neuroscience textbook: the kitten that never saw with stereoscopic vision, because Hubel and Weisel sutured one of its eyes shut during the "critical period" of brain development. The moral, at least as I was taught it, was that plasticity has limits. After infancy, our brain begins…
June 26, 2006
According to the Wall Street Journal, DaimlerChrysler is going to announce this week that it is introducing the Smart car into the U.S. market. For those who don't know, the Smart car is an incredibly tiny line of cars that get excellent gas mileage and are targeted at urban dwellers. In Paris, for…
June 26, 2006
My post comparing Gladwell and Freud seemed to provoke a few defenses. Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily offered a guarded defense of Gladwell, while Mixing Memory offered a defense of Freud. I'll respond to Cognitive Daily first. Here is Dave on me on Gladwell:
Jonah's problem with Gladwell's…
June 26, 2006
Today's rumination on faith and fundamentalism by Edward Rothstein in the NY Times left me cold. In the process of reviewing Bill Moyer's new program on "religion and reason," Rothstein rejects the idea that fundamentalism, violence and religious faith are especially intertwined. He goes on to…
June 24, 2006
This comment was in response to my earlier post which argued that researchers should try to discover the genetic causes of mental illness instead of trying to decipher intelligence. The commenter makes some excellent points, although I still believe that untangling the (incredibly) complicated…
June 24, 2006
My next article for Seed will talk briefly about Toyota and some of the reasons for its astonishing success in one of the most competitive industries in the world. But I thought it was worth highlighting a quote from the former chairman of Toyota, Hiroshi Okuda, who stepped down yesterday. "I do…
June 23, 2006
Sharon Begley has an interesting column today in the WSJ on the growing chorus of voices aiming to discredit string theory.
String theory isn't any more wrong than preons, twistor theory, dynamical triangulations, or other physics fads. But in those cases, physicists saw the writing on the wall and…