Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 7

Poker Face

I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with professional poker players while writing How We Decide. For the most part, these players have exquisite control over their facial expressions, so that those micro-muscles around the eyes and mouth rarely betrayed their inner thoughts. (The players reacted with the same look of unflappable boredom to a pair of aces and a hand with mismatched number cards.) But I was always amused by their insistence on wearing opaque sunglasses inside the dimly...

Dreaming and Remembering

Ed Yong has a typically great post on a new Current Biology paper that investigates the link between dreaming and memory consolidation:

The last decade of research has clearly shown that sleep is one of the best aide memoires that we have. During this nightly time-out, our brain can rehearse information that it has picked up during the day and consolidate them into lasting memories. Wamsley's new study supports that idea but it also shows that dreaming while you nap can strengthen our...

Prozac and Plasticity

Prozac (aka fluoxetine) is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 80 million people around the world. Currently, approximately one in ten Americans are on an anti-depressant, with the vast majority taking SSRI's like Prozac.

How does Prozac work? At first, the answer seemed simple: the drug is supposed to increase the brain's supply of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, by blocking ...

Expertise and Anger

Experience changes everything. That, at least, is the lesson of a new study of Navy SEALS led by scientists at UCSD. Their experiment was an investigation into the anatomy of emotional perception, or what happens inside the brain when we glimpse angry, fearful or happy faces.

The results were straightforward: Navy SEALS are exceptionally good at detecting angry faces. While the soldiers were slower than control subjects at processing happy or scared expressions, the elite troops excelled...

Thinking About Tomorrow

The lure of instant gratification is hard to resist: when we want something, we want it right now. Of course, maturity and reality demand that we learn to wait, that we postpone our pleasures until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And so we stash money in our savings account, and forgo the SUV for the sake of climate change and don't eat the entire pint of ice cream. We resist the tug of immediate delight for the sake of even more delight in the future.

That, at least, is how we're

Optimism Bias

I'm pretty fascinated by this chart from the McKinsey Quarterly, which is a great demonstration of the optimism bias. The chart captures the earnings estimates of equity analysts for S&P 500 companies. The downward slope of these yellow lines is what happens when our hopeful projections meet dismal reality:

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Needless to say, these estimates come from highly paid professionals, with access to vast amounts of data. (They're also making projections about the relatively near future....

Touch and Basketball

A forthcoming paper by Michael Kraus and Dacher Keltner at UC-Berkeley investigates the correlation between "tactile communication" and success in the NBA. In essence, the paper demonstrates that "touchier" teams - and this includes everything from pats on the ass to high-fives - are also more likely to win. (The two touchiest teams during the 2008-2009 season were the Lakers and the Celtics, while the touchiest player was Kevin Garnett, followed by Chris Bosh.) Here's the abstract:

Tactile ...

Don't Choke

I've gotten a lot of emails from people about my recent WSJ article, which looked at the superstar effect, choking and performance anxiety. Most of the letters ask a similar question:

Can anything be done to prevent choking? Or are we destined to sabotage ourselves when it matters the most?

Let's begin with the bad news: choking, which I'll define as "performing below skill level due to performance related anxieties," is far more prevalent than most people assume. In recent years, choking h...

Classroom Creativity

Everybody wants a creative child - in theory. The reality of creativity, however, is a little more complicated, as creative thoughts tend to emerge when we're distracted, daydreaming, disinhibited and not following the rules. In other words, the most imaginative kids are often the trouble-makers.

Eric Barker recently referred me to this interesting study, which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative...

The NFL Draft

The 2010 NFL Draft is later this month, and there is already plenty of speculation about which QB will go first, and which DT is a better choice, and which teams will trade up for a higher draft pick. The stakes for the teams are huge, as a failed draft pick will not only waste millions of dollars in salary but will also come with a high opportunity cost. So there is a strong incentive to get the decision right, and to have a decision-making system that leads to the right personnel pick.

An...