Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 10

Critiques

First of all, thank you to everyone who took the time to write and comment on my recent article on depression. I really appreciated all the insightful emails and I'm trying to respond to every one. In the meantime, I wanted to address some important criticisms of the analytic-rumination hypothesis and of my article, which were raised by an academic psychiatrist. I've reproduced his criticisms, and my replies, below:

First, you write "depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common...

Insomnia

I'm a terrible sleeper, which is perhaps why I got invited to contribute to a NY Times group blog on "insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life". Here is my first contribution, which focuses on the work of Dan Wegner:

My insomnia always begins with me falling asleep. I've been reading the same paragraph for the last five minutes -- the text is suddenly impossibly dense -- and I can feel the book getting heavier and heavier in my hands. Gravity is tugging on my eyelids.

And then, just as my...

The Upside of Depression

I've got an article on the upside of depression in the latest New York Times Magazine. If you'd like to learn more about this controversial theory, I'd suggest reading the original paper, "The Bright Side of Being Blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems," by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson. Here's my lede:

The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his "fits" brought on by "excitements," "flurries" leading to an...

Sarcasm

Sarcasm is a cognitive challenge. In order to get the sarcastic sentiment, we can't simply decode the utterance, or decipher the literal meaning of the sentence. Instead, we have to understand the meaning of the words in their larger social context. For example, if it's a beautiful day outside - the sun is shining, etc - and somebody states "What a nice day!," there is no sarcasm; the sentence makes perfect sense. However, if the same statement is uttered on a rainy day, then there is a...

David Galenson

In my recent WSJ article on age and creativity, I didn't have space to discuss the fascinating research of David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago who brings together a vast array of evidence to better understand the nature of creative production over time. Galenson divides creators into two distinct categories: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. In general, conceptual innovators make sudden and radical breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, often at an...

Laughter and Grief

A few weeks ago, I got an email wondering why people sometimes "break into uncontrollable laughter or smiling when faced with terrible situations, like death or illness." Where does this perverse emotional reaction come from? Why do we smile at the most inappropriate times?

I looked into the peer-reviewed literature and didn't find much. While there have been some interesting fMRI studies of our comedic circuits, I don't think that references to the left posterior temporal gyrus explain...

Creative Youth

I've got a new article in the Wall Street Journal on the complex relationship between age and scientific creativity:

When James Watson was 24 years old, he spent more time thinking about women than work, according to his memoir "Genes, Girls and Gamow." His hair was unkempt and his letters home were full of references to "wine-soaked lunches." But when Mr. Watson wasn't chasing after girls, he was hard at work in his Cambridge lab, trying to puzzle out the structure of DNA. In 1953, when...

Cartesian Metaphors

I've been reading a number of papers on the "science" of consciousness - I'll let the quotes express my skepticism - and I thought this clever metaphor from Francis Crick and Christof Koch, in their influential 2003 Nature review, was revealing. They compare the competition among our sensations to a democratic election, in which all those fleeting stimuli must fight for our limited attentional resources:

It may help to make a crude political analogy. The primaries and the early events in an ...

The Soda Tax

Mark Bittman wonders if soda is the new tobacco, and explores the possibility of a tax on sugary, carbonated beverages:

A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that a 3-cent tax on each 12-ounce sugared soda would raise $51.6 billion over a decade), and President Obama told Men's Health magazine last fall that such a tax is "an idea that we should be exploring. There's no doubt that our kids drink way too much...

Facebook Friends

In the latest New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen has an interesting and even-handed analysis of Facebook and social networking:

What many find most enticing about Facebook is the steady stream of updates from "friends," new and old, which sociologists refer to as "ambient awareness." This is not a new phenomenon: everyone from our Cro-Magnon ancestors to Jane Austen has known how it feels to be surrounded by the constant chatter of other people. Facebook's continuing attraction...