Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 12

Cable News

Cable news is not good for the soul. People make fun of Jersey Shore, but at least those randy kids don't reinforce our deep-seated political biases. A new paper by Shawn Powers of USC and Mohammed el-Nawawy of Queens University of Charlotte looked at the effect of international cable news on the ideology of its viewers. Not surprisingly, they found that people were only interested in "news" that didn't contradict what they already believed:

Powers and el-Nawawy show that global media...

Power

The Economist reviews an interesting new study that investigates the immorality of power:

In their first study, Dr Lammers and Dr Galinsky asked 61 university students to write about a moment in their past when they were in a position of high or low power. Previous research has established that this is an effective way to "prime" people into feeling as if they are currently in such a position. Each group (high power and low power) was then split into two further groups. Half were asked to...

Musical Predictions

There's an interesting new paper on how the brain makes sense of music by constructing detailed models in real time. The act of listening, it turns out, is really an act of neural prediction. Here are the scientists, from the University of London:

The ability to anticipate forthcoming events has clear evolutionary advantages, and predictive successes or failures often entail significant psychological and physiological consequences. In music perception, the confirmation and violation of...

Chess Intuition

Time Magazine has an interesting profile of Magnus Carlsen, the youngest chess player to achieve a number one world ranking:

Genius can appear anywhere, but the origins of Carlsen's talent are particularly mysterious. He hails from Norway -- a "small, poxy chess nation with almost no history of success," as the English grand master Nigel Short sniffily describes it -- and unlike many chess prodigies who are full-time players by age 12, Carlsen stayed in school until last year. His father...

Charity is Social

There's a new and very timely paper out this week that looks at the cortical mechanics of charitable giving. While it's been known for a few years that giving away money activates the dopamine reward pathway - that's why doing good feels good - this latest paper attempted to investigate the philanthropic system in detail. In a world full of need, how do we choose where to give?

The larger goal of the scientists was to better understand a core feature of the human brain, which is the ability ...

Haiti

The news out of Haiti this morning is hellish; the Earth slips and thousands die. The early reports have the same feel as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, in that every bulletin brings more awful news. I already find myself dreading tomorrow's newspaper, which will outline the full scope of the tragedy. Here is more information on where to donate.

I'd like to take a moment and discuss a cruel paradox of such events, which is that the sheer scale of the suffering seems to inhibit our empathy...

Falsification

In a recent New Yorker, John Cassidy spends time with a number of influential economists at the University of Chicago, home to the Chicago School and its emphasis on the productive efficiency of free markets. Obviously, the financial maelstrom of the last few years has led many to question this premise, at least in its strongest form. How have these economists reacted? If you read my recent article in Wired on the psychology of failure, you probably aren't too surprised to learn that Cassidy ...

How We Decide (Paperback Remix)

The paperback of How We Decide is now shipping from your favorite online retailers and should be in local bookstores. To celebrate the occasion, I thought I'd repost an interview I conducted with myself when the hardcover was published last year. If you'd like more, there's also this interview on Fresh Air, and this interview on the Colbert Report.

Q: Why did you want to write a book about decision-making?

A: It all began with Cheerios. I'm an incredibly indecisive person. There I was...

Intelligence and the Idle Mind

I've written before about the importance of daydreaming and the so-called default, or resting state network, which seems to underlie some important features of human cognition. Instead of being shackled to our immediate surroundings and sensations, the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings and interesting counterfactuals. As a result, we're able to envision things that don't actually exist.

Of course, this new research conflicts with the bad...

Funding Innovation

Via Tyler Cowen, comes this graph of demographic shifts in NIH grants, which show a clear trend: older scientists are getting more money.

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Cowen also cites the eminent economist Paul Romer, who worries about the effect of this shift on innovation:

Instead of young scientists getting grant funding to go off and do whatever they want in their twenties, they're working in a lab where somebody in his forties or fifties is the principal investigator in charge of the grant.  They're working as a...