Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 16
November 2, 2009
Arts Education
Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine make a neuroscientific case for arts education. They argue that teaching kids to make art has lasting cognitive benefits:
If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer "cognitive enhancement," many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes. Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any...
October 30, 2009
The Gay Animal Kingdom
I still don't have any additional details, but the initial newspaper report from the Jacksonville Journal-Courier is disturbing:
A Southwestern High School English teacher has been suspended after reports he had students in his classes to read an article about homsexuality in the animal kingdom.Dan Delong of Carlinville acknowledged his suspension but declined to comment further until he spoke with his union representative.
Delong is said to have allowed students to read the article "The...
October 29, 2009
The Neuronovel
In the latest N+1, Marco Roth takes a critical look at the rise of the "neuronovel":
The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel--the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind--has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. ince 1997, readers have encountered, in rough...
October 27, 2009
Dopaminergic Aesthetics
Natalie Angiers profiles dopamine, which isn't just about rewards:
In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don't watch out, you'll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure lines cruising through your brain. Hey, why do you think they call it dopamine?Yet as new research on dopamine-deficient mice and other studies reveal, the image of dopamine as our little Bacchus in the brain is misleading, just as was the previous...
October 26, 2009
Grocery Shopping
In a recent NY Times Magazine, Mark Bittman (aka the Minimalist) waxes enthusiastic on the potential of online grocery shopping:
That's why, to focus on things that could happen in our lifetimes, we should take a look at improving online grocery shopping. The one time I tried shopping online I was sent a free watermelon -- how does that happen? -- but that didn't make up for the even-less-than-supermarket quality of the food. This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ...
October 22, 2009
Learning from Mistakes
In the latest Mind Matters, the psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn review some interesting new work by Nate Kornell and colleagues, which looked at the advantages of learning through error. Conventional pedagogy assumes that the best way to teach children is to have them repeatedly practice once they know the right answer, so that the correct response gets embedded into the brain. (According to this approach, it's important to avoid mistakes while learning so that our mistakes g...
The Personality Paradox
David Brooks has written yet another wonderful column on the mind. This time he explores the nagging gap between our intuitions about personality - we each express a particular set of character traits, which can be traced back to our early childhood - and the scientific facts, which suggest that the vague personality traits measured by the Myers-Briggs are too vague to mean much of anything. Here's Brooks:
In Homer's poetry, every hero has a trait. Achilles is angry. Odysseus is cunning...
October 20, 2009
Robert Parker
Via Felix Salmon comes this amusing anecdote about Robert Parker's blind tasting of 2005 Bordeaux, which he has declared the best vintage since 1982. Parker has previously rated all of these wines, and even given them exact point scores, so his public blind taste test was an interesting natural experiment: would Parker's new scores correlate with his 2007 scores? How many of these wines would he be able to identify?
The answers were humbling. (In Parker's defense, these wines are still...
October 16, 2009
Reading, E-Books and the Brain
The New York Times wonders if E-Books are inherently less pleasing for the brain that ink on a page. They canvass a diverse group of experts, most of whom focus on the nature of attention during the reading process. They see old-fashioned printed books as a distraction-free medium, stark and pure and elemental. Here, for instance, is Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist at Tufts and author of the excellent Proust and the Squid:
I have no doubt that the new mediums [like E-Books:] will accomplish m...
October 15, 2009
Smart Mice
I've got a new article in Nature this week on the growing number of learning and memory enhanced strains of mice, and what these smart rodents can teach us about the human mind. I also discuss Luria's The Mind of A Mnemonist and the stunning research demonstrating that the cognitive deficits of many neurodevelopmental disorders, including Neurofibromatosis, Down's Syndrome and Fragile X, have actually proven to be reversible, at least in mouse models. The article is behind a paywall, but...
