Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 27

The Psychology of the Sale

I was doing my grocery shopping yesterday when I stumbled upon a discount that I assumed was a clerical mistake: some fancy olive oil had been reduced from $23 to $9. Needless to say, I immediately put a bottle in my cart, even though I didn't need another bottle of olive oil.

But then, just a few minutes later, I began to wonder: why was the olive oil so drastically reduced in price? Is something wrong with it? What isn't Whole Foods telling me? That nagging suspicion - and I'm sure it was c

Magic and Neuroscience

I've got a new article in the latest issue of Wired, guest-edited by J.J. Abrams. It's quite an excellent issue, I think, although I'm still utterly befuddled the hidden puzzles on the glossy pages. My article is an investigation of what stage magicians can teach us about the human mind and the frailties of perception:

For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tensi

Connectivity and Status Anxiety

Virginia Heffernan, writing in the Times magazine, takes Bruce Sterling's SXSW talk about connectivity and poverty mainstream:

Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on "connections" like the Internet, Skype and texting. "Poor folk love their cellphones!" he said.

In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To

Gendered Language

Robert Krulwich has a typically brilliant piece on Shakespeare, roses, gendered language and the latest version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German -- die brucke -- is a feminine noun, and the word for "bridge" in Spanish -- el puente -- is a masculine noun, native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender.

"Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian spe

NYU

Just a quick note to say that I'll be at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute this coming Monday, at 7 PM, in conversation with Robert Lee Hotz. We'll be talking about science journalism, blogging, aha moments, the prefrontal cortex, etc. It's free and open to the public.

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The Neuroscience of Admiration

I know the medium is the message, but does every message have to be about the medium? People on twitter love tweeting about twitter, just as people on facebook love writing about the facebook redesign. Sometimes, this naval gazing can get out of hand, which is what I think happened with a recent (and extremely interesting) PNAS paper on the neural substrate of admiration and compassion. The paper, by scientists at USC, has nothing to do with twitter or online social networks or even the internet

The Hollow Mask Illusion

Wired Science reports on a fascinating finding: schizophrenics have trouble seeing the hollow mask illusion, in which people perceive the concave inside of a mask as an actual face. The reason we're vulnerable to this illusion is that our expectations of what we'll see - we're used to seeing real faces - profoundly influence our actual sensations. Schizophrenics, however, seem to have trouble with modulating their perceptions, which might explain why they persistently believe in delusions and fa

Business Books

In the Boston Globe Ideas section, Drake Bennett has a typically excellent article on the logical fallacies underlying best-selling business books, such as In Search of Excellence or Good to Great :

While the particulars vary, the basic idea underlying the literature is the same: that the secrets of success can be divined by careful study of the institutional habits of the world's business all-stars - companies that set the standard for their industries, that thrive in tough times, companies th

The Stress Vaccine

Stress has been a hot topic lately. In the past week, we've looked at how chronic stress can trigger working memory deficits among the poor and lead, eventually, to severe depression. But there's hope, at least if you're a stressed out lab rat. (In theory, these findings should apply to humans, but there's always that nagging gap between theory and reality.) The work is led by Robert Sapolsky, the incredibly engaging and eloquent primatologist and writer.

The experimental strategy strategy is

Do Parents Matter?

Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Judith Rich Harris, author of the influential and infamous The Nurture Assumption, which provocatively argued that parents aren't particularly important when it comes to determining the behavior of their children, at least outside of the home. Instead, Harris argued that the most important variable was the child's peer group. The Nurture Assumption has recently been reissued in an expanded version to celebrate its tenth anniversary.

LEHRER: Why d