Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 9

Mayan Morality

Here's a moral scenario:

A man is sitting near the side of the road when he sees a truck speeding along. It is headed towards a group of five men, who do not hear or see it, and if nothing appears in the road, it will certainly hit and kill them. Across the road is another man sitting in front of his house. If the man who is sitting by the road calls out to the man by his house and says 'come here,' the man will walk into the road in the path of the truck, be killed, and stop it from...

Personal Narratives

It sounds like President Obama and his communications staff are getting to know the research of Paul Slovic:

After weeks of making his case for the legislation in broad strokes -- including two similar rallies last week in Philadelphia and St. Charles, Mo. -- Mr. Obama used Monday's appearance to pivot to the personal, as he recounted the story of the cleaning woman, Natoma Canfield -- a health care drama that could not have been better scripted for his purposes if he had written it...

Online Status Anxiety

Now that the social web is maturing - the platforms have been winnowed down to a select few (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) - some interesting commonalities are emerging. The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach...

Marijuana and Divergent Thinking

In response to my post on the effects of mood on cognition, which also referenced the possibilities of self-medicating ourselves into the ideal mood, Andrew Sullivan offered up the following anecdote:

I was talking with a fine artist the other day and he was telling me how blocked he was on a piece, and how he then smoked some pot and everything came together.

It unleashed what he wanted to express, by suppressing the analytic portion of his mind that was inhibiting him. I know this is the...

The Spread of Goodness

In recent years, it's become clear that much of our individual behavior depends on the dynamics of our social network. It doesn't matter if we're talking about obesity or happiness: they all flow through other people, like a virus or a meme. Last year, I profiled James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis in Wired, who have conducted several fascinating studies that demonstrate the power of social networks:

There's something strange about watching life unfold as a social network. It's easy to...

Marriage

One of the hazards of writing a book on decision-making is getting questions about decisions that are far beyond the purview of science (or, at the very least, way beyond my pay grade). Here, for instance, is a question that often arrives in my inbox, or gets shouted out during talks:

"How should we make decisions about whom to marry? If the brain is so smart, why do half of all marriages end in divorce?"

Needless to say, there is no simple answer to this question. (And if I had a half-way ...

More on Depression

I thought it's worth addressing this article one last time. Dr. Ronald Pies (professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse) has written three eloquent and extremely critical blog posts about the article and the analytic-rumination hypothesis. Here's his latest riposte:

Writer Jonah Lehrer caused quite a stir with his recent article in the New York Times Magazine, with the unfortunate title, "Depression's Upside." I have a detailed rejoinder to this misleading...

Inequality Aversion

The ultimatum game is a simple experiment with profound implications. The game goes like this: one person (the proposer) is given ten dollars and told to share it with another person (the responder). The proposer can divide the money however they like, but if the responder rejects the offer then both players end up with nothing.

When economists first started playing this game in the early 1980s, they assumed that this elementary exchange would always generate the same outcome. The proposer w...

Mood and Cognition

One of the interesting subplots of this new research on the intellectual benefits of sadness - it seems to bolster our attention and make us more analytical - is that it helps illuminate the intertwined relationship of mood and cognition. For decades, we saw the mind as an information processing machine; the brain was just a bloody computer with lipid bi-layer microchips. The problem with this metaphor is that machines don't have feelings, which led us to overlook the role of feelings in...

More Questions

I've received a few emails along this line:

"How does this new theory about depression enhancing problem-solving relate to all the studies that have shown cognitive deficits in people with depression?"

That's a really good question. I tried to address this issue quickly in the article - I referenced the fact that the "cognitive deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise" - but I think it's worth spending a l...