Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 20

Harold and the Purple Crayon

One of my favorite aspects of the modern cognitive sciences (and a big part of the reason I can't stop writing about them) is the way they shed new light on old rituals. Why, for instance, are so many games for young children centered around impulse control? (Consider "Simon Says" or "Duck-Duck-Goose" - these activities are all about being primed for action but still finding a way to exercise restraint. You have to be ready to be the goose and run quickly around the circle, but chances are you'r

Information Addiction

I finally got the internet setup in my new apartment - I won't bore you with my customer service complaints - and I've never been so delighted to waste time on the web. At first, my information vacation was lovely, charming, an experiment in vintage living. It was like traveling back in time to 1994 - I'd wake up, buy an actual newspaper, and leisurely sip my coffee. No blogs, no twitter, no ESPN.com. I'm not going to lie and pretend that, once freed from the yoke of constant email updates, I su

Identity Delusions

Benedict Carey at the Times has an interesting article documenting the harrowing story of Adam Lepak, who has struggled with identity delusions since 2007, when he was involved in a serious motorcycle accident:

The diagnosis [given to Adam:] was diffuse axonal injury. "The textbook definition is essentially a blow that shuts down the bundle of wires responsible for keeping us conscious," said Dr. Jonathan Fellus, a neurologist at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, N.J., who has

The Perry Preschool

Sometimes, while working on a story one comes across a data set that's so interesting it just has to be shared. Unfortunately, it can't quite be shoehorned into the tight narrative of the article. That's why God invented the sidebar. My recent story on grit included a sidebar on some incredibly important work from the Perry Preschool, including an important new analysis of the data by James Heckman, et. al. which finds that preschool provides a crucial boost in "non-cognitive" skills.

In the 19

Los Angeles

Apologies for the radio silence - I've been moving across the country, my life in a big metal box. I'm leaving Boston (sadly) and just arrived in Los Angeles, my old hometown and new home.

Whenever I first arrive in LA, I'm always struck by the same two thoughts: 1) it really is a beautiful city, especially around dusk when you make a left turn and all of a sudden you're heading into the chaparral of the Hollywood hills, glazed with pink light and softened by the haze of smog. I'm not one of t

Grit

I had an article in Boston Globe Ideas section on the psychology of grit:

It's the single most famous story of scientific discovery: in 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England - he was avoiding the city because of the plague - when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force. (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.) This mundane observation led Newton to devise the

Ketchup

I'm a ketchup fiend. When I was a little kid, I was famous for squirting my plastic bottle of Heinz on everything, from spaghetti to vanilla ice cream. I've seen become slightly less disgusting - I no longer eat frozen dairy products with the condiment - but I still go through a disturbing number of ketchup packets when eating fast food. (French fries are a near perfect food, but they really are so much more delicious when coated in that sticky-sweet red sauce.)

So I was intrigued when Meg Favr

Marathons and Memory

The Neurocritic has a fascinating summary of a recent paper investigating different types of memory in marathon runners. Why marathoners? Because completing a 26.2 mile race is an insanely arduous exercise, and leads to the massive release of stress hormones such as cortisol. Here are the scientists:

Indeed, cortisol levels recorded 30 min after completion of a marathon rival those reported in military training and interrogation (Taylor et al., 2007), rape victims being treated acutely (Resnick

Television and Loneliness

Over at Mind Matters, there's a cool post by Fionnuala Butler and Cynthia Picketton on the benefits of watching television when lonely, which seems to provide the same sort of emotional relief as spending time with real people:

For decades, psychologists have been interested in understanding how individuals achieve and maintain social relationships in order to ward off social isolation and loneliness. The vast majority of this research has focused on relationships between real individuals inte

Threat Detection

Over at the Times, Benedict Carey has a fascinating article on the crucial importance of intuition on the battlefield, where soldiers are often forced to make decisions without knowing why, exactly, they are making them:

The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, wher