Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 23

Naps, Learning and REM

It's a shame that we stop encouraging naps in preschool. After all, there's a growing body of scientific evidence that the afternoon siesta is an important mental tool, which enhances productivity, learning and memory. (It's really much more effective than a cup of coffee.) Here's the Times:

Have to solve a problem? Try taking a nap. But it has to be the right kind of nap -- one that includes rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, the kind that includes dreams.

Researchers led by Sara C. Mednick,

The Endowment Effect

I went jean shopping this weekend. Actually, I went to the mall to return a t-shirt but ended buying a pair of expensive denim pants. What happened? I made the mistake of entering the fitting room. And then the endowment effect hijacked my brain. Let me explain.

The endowment effect is a well studied by-product of loss aversion, which is the fact that losing something hurts a disproportionate amount. (In other words, a loss hurts more than a gain feels good.) First diagnosed by Richard Thaler a

Caring for Animals

I've gotten numerous emails about my recent post on animal rights - I called animal experimentation a "necessary evil" - but I think this note from a reader eloquently captures the ambivalence that many scientists feel:

I have a child with insulin-dependent diabetes. I am constantly aware that every single advance keeping her not only alive, but so healthy that others never notice her condition, rests on the shoulders of thousands upon thousands of creatures. These animals have suffered, and

Smell and Obesity

Here is the NY Times, describing the latest weight-loss fad:

Like almost every dieter in America, Wendy Bassett has used all sorts of weight-loss products. Nothing worked, she said, until she tried Sensa: granules she scatters on almost everything she eats, and which are supposed to make dieters less hungry by enhancing the smell and taste of food.

The maker of Sensa claims that its effectiveness is largely related to smell: the heightened scent and flavor of food that has been sprinkled with

Energy Efficiency

I think one of the most important tests of behavioral economics will arrive in the next few years, as we attempt to persuade consumers to improve energy efficiency in the home. Just imagine if, instead of installing granite on every kitchen countertop, we'd instead spent that money on better window seals and insulation. Of course, if people were rational agents, we wouldn't need cleverly constructed "choice environments," since the vast majority of efficiency improvements pay for themselves with

Joyce

Yesterday was Bloomsday - the day Leopold Bloom wandered around Dublin - and so I drank a pint of Guiness and read some Joyce. Now that Ulysses is part of the modernist canon it's easy to forget what a radical shift in form and content the novel represented. (Even Virginia Woolf thought Joyce went too far: "I don't believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes," she wrote.) Once upon a time, the mi

Market Analysis

There was a telling moment yesterday on the NYTimes.com website. It was just after 10:30 in the morning and the top of the site featured a breaking news article about the S&P 500 heading into higher territory. The article offered the usual litany of explanations, from better than expected news on housing starts to a surprising uptick in retail sales. But here's the catch: by the time I glanced at the article it was already obsolete, with the Dow and S&P down by a significant amount. A few hours

Radiolab

There's a new full-length podcast out from the world's finest science radio show. It's on "Stochasticity," which is a great word because 1) it sounds really fancy but is actually a rather simple idea 2) it's an essential concept when it comes to understanding lots of different stuff, from neural oscillations to quantum physics.

I make an appearance on the episode to help explain what was happening inside the mind of Ann Klinestiver, a high-school English teacher who developed a severe gambling

Processing Power

Tom Vanderbilt has a fascinating article on the infrastructure of data centers, those server farms that make Google, Facebook and World of Warcraft possible. Every keystroke on the internet (including this one) relies on shuttling electrons back and forth in a remote air-conditioned industrial hangar. These are the highway ribbons of the future, the grid that's so essential we don't even notice it.

The article also mentions the energy costs required to run such server farms, which has real scie

Home Field Advantage

The Lakers-Magic game last night was quite the thrill-ride: it's now the morning after, and my pulse has only begun to return to its resting rate. (Full disclosure: I'm a Lakers fan.) The game was played in Orlando and the big moment came when the Lakers' Derek Fisher nailed a three-pointer at the end of regulation. The loud Orlando crowd went totally silent; you could actually hear the collective intake of breath.

Why did this matter? Why was I suddenly (over)confident that the Lakers would w