Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 25

Creativity and Living Abroad

The Economist summarizes a new study looking at the link between living abroad and increased creativity:

Anecdotal evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link.

As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of

The Speed of Short People

Robert Krulwich has a fascinating piece on NPR about the binding problem and the speed of nerve transmission. In essence, it takes a split-second longer for sensory signals to reach the brains of tall people, which means that their "now" is actually a little less timely. (This explains a lot about the NBA...)

Because for the taller person it takes a tenth of a second longer for the toe-touch to travel up the foot, the ankle, the calf, the thigh, the backbone to the brain, the brain waits that

Team Loyalty

Matthew Yglesias advocates for the free movement of sports franchises, so that they can hop from city to city with ease and thus follow the movement of population:

Right now, the New York City Designated media area contains 6.5 percent of households. LA has 5 percent. Chicago has 3 percent. Philadelphia has 2.6 percent. Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta all have about 2.1 percent. And things taper off from there. But considering that New York City has a media market three times the siz

Daydreams

An interesting new study on mind-wandering and the default network was recently published in PNAS. The scientists, led by Kalina Christoff of UBC and Jonathan Schooler of UCSB, used "experience sampling" in an fMRI machine to capture the moment of daydreaming: essentially, subjects were given an extremely tedious task and, when their mind started to wander (this was confirmed with subjective reports and measurements of task performance), had changes in their brain activity recorded in the scanne

Spending Money

One question that came up yesterday during the radio show was whether or not Americans can learn, once again, to delay gratification and save money. Can we get back the thriftiness of earlier generations? Or are we destined to be a nation with a negative savings rate?

I certainly wouldn't want to underestimate the malleability of consumer habits, or the motivating force of seeing foreclosure signs in your neighborhood, but I think it's worth pointing out that the steep decline in American savi

Things I Like

1) The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, by Freedarko.

This book is perpetually on my coffee table, if only so I can read through it (again and again) every time there's a commercial break during the NBA playoffs. It's a really hard book to describe, but if you think you might enjoy Langston Hughes references in an essay on Lamar Odom, or might like a digression into Shanghai architecture and globalization while reading about Yao Ming, then get this book.

2) The Talent Code, by Daniel

Marshmallows on the Radio

I was on On Point today with Walter Mischel, the subject of my recent New Yorker article. As usual, he was incredibly eloquent. One thing we both got a chance to emphasize was the plasticity of personality - as I mention in the article, Mischel has found a significant subset of subjects who, although they couldn't wait for a second marshmallow as four-year olds, ended up becoming "high-delaying" adults. How'd they get better? Nobody quite knows. Nevertheless, this group is an important reminder

Creativity

I've got a short column for the Seed website on the neuroscience of improvisation. I begin with one of my favorite stories of improv, which is Al Kooper's organ playing during the studio sessions for "Like A Rolling Stone":

Al Kooper didn't know what to play. He'd told some half-truths to get into Bob Dylan's recording session -- the musicians were working on some song tentatively titled "Like A Rolling Stone" -- and Kooper had been assigned the Hammond organ. There was only one problem: Kooper

The Secret of Self-Control

I've got a new article in the New Yorker this week on the pioneering work of Walter Mischel and the science of delayed gratification:

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a "game room" at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretze

Watching Movies

In his review of State of Play, David Denby laments the rise of incoherence as a filmmaking technique:

"State of Play," which was directed by Kevin Macdonald, is both overstuffed and inconclusive. As is the fashion now, the filmmakers develop the narrative in tiny fragments. Something is hinted at--a relationship, a motive, an event in the past--then the movie rushes ahead and produces another fragment filled with hints, and then another. The filmmakers send dozens of clues into the air at once