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
Well, that didn't take long: thanks to falling gas prices, sales of light trucks and SUV's rose 1.2 percent last month. The good news, though, is that policy makers now know how much gas needs to cost before consumers start buying subcompacts. If I were a politician who didn't want to get re-…
From the latest edition of Science. It's worth noting in advance that, if one were to design an educational system that were the exact opposite of No Child Left Behind, it would look a lot like Montessori's approach:
Montessori education is a 100-year-old method of schooling that was first used…
At last, someone demolishes the bad cognitive science and even worse political science being peddled by George Lakoff. If the Democrats really think that calling income taxes "community dues" or "membership fees" will help them retake the White House, then God help us all, because Rove is going to…
Neuroscience now knows that chronic stress and impoverished environments - the two hallmarks of human poverty - are debilitating to the primate brain. Stress releases glucocorticoids which, if they hang around long enough, turn into poison, while impoverished environments diminish the growth and…
Bob Lutz, the vice-chairman for development at GM, is best known for creating gas-guzzling and eye-catching icons, like the Dodge Viper, Camaro concept and latest generation Corvette. He loves V-12's and ridiculous amounts of horsepower. So I was shocked to read this quote in today's WSJ:
"I'd say…
Just when you thought GM might be learning from its past mistakes, they go and do something really stupid like this...
Nobody knows much about this "ultracapacitor" technology - and one must always be skeptical of technological utopias - but it sure sounds promising:
Imagine the day when cellphones charge up in seconds, laptop batteries never degrade, and electric cars have the same power, driving range and…
Sometimes I'm amazed at the pockets of ignorance lurking in our midst. This is the sad story of a Texas art teacher who got suspended for taking her class to the museum. Her crime? Letting her innocent pupils glimpse some 16th century paintings that - gasp! - revealed a nipple or two. If the mirror…
It's Michael Kinsley day here at the Frontal Cortex. Over at the Guardian, Kinsley has another stupendous piece lamenting the sharp division that American newspapers (especially the NY Times) try to draw between fact and opinion.
According to a column by its "public editor" (aka ombudsman, or…
No, I'm not talking crystal meth, and that much hyped syndrome, methmouth. I'm talking about your cholesterol medication, or your blood pressure pills, or your Prozac. From Steven Dubner:
Dr. Reiss [Dubner's dentist] told me that tooth decay in general, even among wealthy patients, is getting worse…
It's not particularly difficult to expose the incoherence of current Republican policy. But few do it with the wit and brio of Michael Kinsley:
It was, I believe, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) who first made the excellent, bitter and terribly unfair joke about conservatives who believe in a right to…
It's one of the grandest experiments in American democracy since the invention of the paper ballot, and nobody seems to care. Many municipalities are now moving towards electronic voting, and the results are starting to trickle in. So far, things have not gone well. (In fact, things went so badly…
Special K - active ingredient ketamine - is an illegal club drug that was originally used as a medical anesthetic. But now scientists are reporting that it might be a useful ally in the fight against depression:
Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health announced a study recently in…
When it comes to stocks, ticker symbols seem to be extremely important. Instead of evaluating a company's financial fundamentals, investors get seduced by cute abbreviations. As the WSJ notes:
For at least two years, Harley-Davidson Inc.'s investor-relations folks had thought about it: Their ticker…
I'm fascinated by the fashions of mental illness. Every few decades, there is an epidemic of a new brain affliction, while an old disease quietly fades away. Mother's Little Helper (aka Valium) is replaced by the polite contentment of SSRI's. (I'm afraid we are still in the era of Prozac and…
Sorry for the absence. I was giving a talk in NYC, where I had the pleasure of meeting PZ, Chris Mooney and Lisa Randall. (I was talking about how Walt Whitman anticipated the neuroscience of today.) I also had the pleasure of spending time with my beautiful new niece (aka my sister's Mexican…
Go to Yale for free.
Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible.
While Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of…
It's a shame that exaggerating the extent of brain differences between men and women can be such a boon for book sales. (Call it the Mars and Venus phenomenon.) This publishing truism has been most recently demonstrated by Louann Brizendine, a researcher at UCSF who wrote The Female Brain. But now…
If anxiety is the new depression, then weed might be our next miracle drug. And no, this isn't the same seedy crap you get from your local delivery service. I'm talking about medically targeted spliffs, designed to only affect your amygdala (the neural source of fear and anxiety). Over at the new…
William James would have loved this paper. Then again, maybe he'd be dissapointed:
Neuroscientists investigating a young woman with epilepsy believe they have stumbled on an explanation why some people feel a ghostly presence nearby or develop paranoia or persecution.
The 22-year-old woman was…
According to Ann Veneman, the executive director of Unicef:
"Women do 66 percent of the work in the world, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 5 percent of income and 1 percent of the property."
With all the debate in Congress over illegal immigration, this paper is bound to cause a serious brouhaha. I haven't read the manuscript yet, but the numbers cited in the abstract are certainly thought-provoking. Economics is ultimately a study of trade-offs, and these economists clearly believe…
Ever since David Hume - our first great psychologist - it has been a well known fact that causation is a figment of our imagination. Although we perceive event A as causing event B, this perception is an illusion: necessary causation is not inherent in nature. As Hume wrote:
"We have no other…
...is being a crack dealer. You make much less than minimum wage, and have to live with your mother. Steven Levitt explains.
An excellent op-ed by Nina Plank on ways to reduce the amount of dangerous E. coli in our food supply. The answer is stupendously simple: feed cattle what they were meant to eat.
E. coli O157:H7 [the strain responsible for the latest outbreak] is not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised…
From the Times:
Mr. Chavez [President of Venezeula] brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to…
So the state of California has launched a frivolous lawsuit going after automakers for producing greenhouse gases.
The lawsuit contends that the greenhouses gases, mostly carbon dioxide, emitted from cars is a public nuisance and that automakers should pay for damages to the state's environment and…
Porn is a big business. Every year, Americans spend $4 billion on video pornography, which makes the industry larger than the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. When you include Internet Web sites, porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, phone sex, and magazines, the…
Looks like even the camera - that tool of verisimilitude - is leaving the reality based community. HP just introduced a digitical camera capable of "slimming photos". After all, who needs to diet when you can just admire pictures of your skinny self? The company says that the technology can take…
Thomas Friedman's take on energy policy grows more urgent by the day. In his latest column (Times $elect), he aims at American agricultural subsidies for sugar farmers. If I could eliminate one government subsidy or tariff - here the effect is equivalent - this would be it. Not only are we paying…