Jonah Lehrer
Los Angeles
As seen in:
The New York Times,
Post Outlook,
The Guardian,
The Washington Post,
ABC News,
Goodreads,
PBS,
The Wall Street Journal,
WIRED (UK),
WIRED Magazine
and
jonahlehrer.com
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Jonah Lehrer
Don't Forget to Write
When Marilyn Kleinman is caught making out with the rabbi’s son in front of the whole congregation, her parents ship her off to her great-aunt Ada for the summer. If anyone can save their daughter’s reputation, it’s Philadelphia’s strict premier matchmaker. Either that or Marilyn can kiss college goodbye. To Marilyn’s surprise, Ada’s not the humorless septuagenarian her mother described. Not with that platinum-blonde hair, Hermès scarf, and Cadillac convertible.
Ashton Hall
Who hasn’t dreamed of retiring to an idyllic estate in the English countryside? In Lauren Belfer’s Ashton Hall, that vision turns out to be a bit more complex when Hannah Larson visits her ailing relative at the titular historic manor house alongside Nicky, her young son with special needs. What starts out as a family visit becomes much more unexpected the moment Nicky comes across a hidden room cloistering a sixteenth-century skeleton.
Cardiff backs Taith international learning exchange programme
Cardiff University is hosting the Programme Executive delivering Welsh Government’s new international learning exchange programme, Taith , which has the power to help students carve out new career pathways. Taith (’journey’) aims to help 15,000 students and staff from Wales travel overseas, and for 10,000 in turn to work or study in Wales. It replaces the Erasmus+ programme the UK Government left after Brexit.
Innovation by design: Lessons from 3M
“Invention often occurs not because a person tries to be original, but because the person attempts to do something difficult. Necessity, the saying goes, is the mother of invention. I would add: not only necessity, but the sort of commitment that leads some people to put ‘unreasonable’ demands on themselves and their products.” –D.N. Perkins, The Mind’s Best Work More Progress Faster with James Pethokoukis and Don Watkins Why is progress important—and what’s holding it back?
Book review of Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution by Jonah Lehrer
On a winter night in 1926, a young Agatha Christie put her daughter to bed, told the maid she was going for a drive and vanished. The next day her car was found with its wheels overhanging the edge of a cliff. The story became a sensation: Was it an accident? Suicide? Possibly even murder?
The Ugliness of Comic Sans Has a Practical Use
To understand why, it helps to know about the work of psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer. A decade ago, he led a study at a public high school in Chesterland, Ohio. The scientists asked teachers to submit their written classroom materials, such as PowerPoint decks and worksheets. Then, the researchers changed the fonts on the material, transforming the text with a variety of so-called disfluent fonts, such as Monotype Corsiva and Comic Sans italicized.
A Love of Mystery Is Woven Into Our Biology, and Edgar Allan Poe Was the First to Find the Formula for a Very Specific Dopamine Hit
The Rue Morgue In the spring of 1841, at the age of thirty-two, Edgar Allan Poe decided to write a new kind of short story. At the time, Poe was best known for a magazine column on cryptography in which he dared readers to send him a code he couldn’t crack. He received nearly a hundred secret messages from all over the country. Poe solved them all, except for one.
Learn to Think Better: Tips from a Savant
You may never have the memory of Rain Man, but you can still get tips for improving your cognitive performance from this extraordinary thinker Daniel Tammet is author of two books, Born on a Blue Day and Embracing the Wide Sky, the latter of which came out in January. He is also a linguist and holds the European record for reciting the first 22,514 digits of the mathematical constant pi.
Jonah Lehrer | WIRED
There comes a time when this body we have always taken for granted suddenly insists on being noticed. I used to think that stretching before running was for suckers, that my muscles didn’t need a warm-up. Now I know better. I used to assume my joints were frictionless hinges. Now I feel the friction – […]
How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect
Humans are storytelling machines. We don't passively perceive the world - we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense of meaning from the randomness of life. But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with the plot.
The Cost Of Creativity
The best part of book tours are the questions. After spending years with the same ideas and sentences - they become old friends - it's invigorating to see how people react, to keep track of which concepts spark their curiosity. It's also fun to consider questions that never occured to me while writing the book. For instance, I was recently stumped by a seemingly obvious query that I hadn't really considered. It was asked by a 4th grader: "What," he wanted to know, "is the downside of creativity?
How Do We Identify Good Ideas?
I've always been fascinated by the failures of genius. Consider Bob Dylan. How did the same songwriter who produced Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde also conclude that Down in the Groove was worthy of release? Or what about Steve Jobs: What did he possibly see in the hockey puck mouse? How could Bono not realize that Spiderman was a disaster? And why have so many of my favorite novelists produced so many middling works?
The Neuroscience of Effort
While writing this post, I will get bored. I will get tired of looking at these words and crave a distraction. And so I will click away from this page and head somewhere else, amusing myself with a totally irrelevant website. After a few lovely minutes of wasted time, my feelings of guilt will grow and I will find my way back here, to this sentence. Such are the moment-by-moment melodramas of work.
Capital Region junior tennis on quarantine - May 16, 2020
Note: The Times Union is not responsible for posts and comments written by non-staff members. By Peter Green on May 16, 2020 at 12:01 AM First Day Back Many Capital Region outdoor tennis courts were unlocked and opened today. Tennis returned to Schenectady’s Central Park mid-afternoon with some new regulations in replace. Only one gate is open – all players must enter and exit through the same gate – stay 6 feet apart, please.
The Science of Charity
I recently recorded a short segment for Marketplace on the cognitive neuroscience of charity: The first thing to note about giving away money is that it feels really good. For instance, several brain scanning experiments demonstrate that donating to a worthy cause leads to activation in the dopamine reward pathway. It's the same part of the brain that's turned on when we have sex, or eat a slice of chocolate cake.
Feeling The Future: Is Precognition Possible?
Most science papers don't begin with a description of psi, those "anomalous processes of information or energy transfer" that have no material explanation. (Popular examples of psi include telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis.) It's even less common for a serious science paper, published in an elite journal, to show that psi is a real phenomenon.
Are Emotions Prophetic?
For thousands of years, human beings have looked down on their emotions. We've seen them as primitive passions, the unfortunate legacy of our animal past. When we do stupid things - say, eating too much cake, or sleeping with the wrong person, or taking out a subprime mortgage - we usually blame our short-sighted feelings. People commit crimes of passion. There are no crimes of rationality. This bias against feeling has led people to assume that reason is always best.
How Does the Brain Perceive Art?
In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a controversial exhibition entitled "Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt," in which works considered to be genuine Rembrandts were displayed alongside those done by his students and admirers. (These lesser paintings are often dismissed as "the school of Rembrandt.") The point of the exhibition was to reveal the fine line between genius and imitation, authenticity and fakery. A hundred years ago, about 700 works were attributed to Rembrandt.
The Willpower Trick
January is the month of broken resolutions. The gyms are packed for a week, Jenny Craig is full of new recruits and houses are cleaned for the first time in ages. We pledge to finally become the person we want to be: svelte, neat and punctual. Alas, it doesn't take long before the stairmasters are once again sitting empty and those same dirty T-shirts are piling up at the back of the closet.
The Cognitive Benefits Of Chewing Gum
Why do people chew gum? If an anthropologist from Mars ever visited a typical supermarket, they'd be confounded by those shelves near the checkout aisle that display dozens of flavored gum options. Chewing without eating seems like such a ridiculous habit, the oral equivalent of running on a treadmill. And yet, people have been chewing gum for thousands of years, ever since the ancient Greeks began popping wads of mastic tree resin in their mouth to sweeten the breath. Socrates probably chewed gum.
WE INVENTED THE REMIX.
May 29, 2012 I had it all wrong. To me, imitation was the furthest thing from flattery. As a designer and architect of a Streetwear brand, nothing could be worse – especially in our niche universe – than to hijack a concept, steal from a peer or predecessor, rip off an idea.
Feelings of Knowing
Clive Thompson has a wonderful article in the NY Times Magazine on Watson, the supercomputer programmed to excel at Jeopardy. Thompson delves into the clever heuristics used to generate singular answers to ambiguous questions. (Watson relies on massive amounts of parallel processing, so that "he" is running thousands of Google searches simultaneously.) While Watson's performance is certainly impressive, I thought the most interesting part of the story involved the failings of the machine.
Why Do Married Men Make More Money? — Jonah Lehrer
In 1979, Martha Hill, a researcher at the University of Michigan, observed a strange fact about married men: they make a lot more money, at least compared to their unmarried peers. (According to Hill’s numbers, marriage led to a roughly 25 percent boost in pay.) What’s more, the effect remained even after Hill controlled for most of the relevant variables, including work experience and training.
In honor of the Dewey Decimal System, take a tour of nonfiction titles by their call numbers
1 of 4 Dec. 10 is Melvil Dewey’s birthday! Take a tour of some nonfiction titles by their call numbers, learn about the man behind the classification and enjoy some unconventional guides to navigating the system. Here are four book recommendations brought to you by your friends at Pima County Public Library. by Daniel Leonard Everett Like these? Be sure to check out the full list at tucne.ws/1d93.
Calling Katrina
Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. New Orleans survived Katrina itself relatively intact but the city was unprepared for the flooding that followed the storm. courtesy of NOAA Three weeks ago, on this website, Robert Krulwich and I discussed new research documenting the 50 percent increase in the power of tropical hurricanes since the 1970s.
Why the U.S. Must Slow the Immigration Brain Drain
If there's one fact that Americans take for granted, it's that other people want to live here. As President Barack Obama noted in his speech on immigration earlier this week, the U.S. has always attracted strivers from every corner of the globe, often willing to risk great hardships to get here. U.S.-train entrepreneurs see bigger opportunities in their home countries. Getty Images During the 20th century especially, America became a magnet for the bright and ambitious.
You Become What You Pretend to Be
Our attitudes influence our behavior. Michelangelo believed he was the greatest artist in the world and could create masterpieces using any medium. His rivals persuaded Junius II to hire him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, because they knew Michelangelo had rarely used color and had never painted in fresco. They were sure he would turn down the commission due to his inexperience. They planned to use his refusal as proof of his lack of talent.
Are Your Co-Workers Killing You?
We spend a large percentage of our lives at the office, engaged in the drudgery of work. Although we obsess over the medical benefits of various leisure activities - should I do yoga? take long walks? not watch television? – the amount of time we might spend in downward facing dog pose pales in comparison to the amount of time we spend seated in our chair, staring at the computer screen, surrounded by co-workers.
Jonah Lehrer on Problems With SATs, GREs, the NFL Combine and Other Performance Tests
In the early 1980s, Paul Sackett, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, began measuring the speed of cashiers at supermarkets. Workers were told to scan a few dozen items as quickly as possible while a scientist timed them. Not surprisingly, some cashiers were much faster than others. But Mr. Sackett realized that this assessment, which lasted just a few minutes, wasn't the only way to measure cashier performance.
The Too-Much-Talent Effect — Jonah Lehrer
A few years ago, the psychologists Adam Galinsky and Roderick Swaab began working on a study that looked at the relationship between national levels of egalitarianism – the belief that everyone deserves equal rights and opportunities – and the performance of national soccer teams in international competitions like the World Cup. It was an admittedly speculative hypothesis, an attempt to find a link between a vague cultural ethos and success on the field.
Can Irrational Decisions Be Corrected? A Football Case Study
A few years ago, the economist David Romer got interested in the fourth down decisions of NFL coaches. He saw the sport as a novel way to test a basic assumption of macroeconomic models, which is that business firms in a competitive environment will maximize expected profits. While executives aren't perfect, they should, over time, converge on an ideal set of decisions.
How Power Corrupts
The news abounds with stories of powerful men behaving badly. It's a depressing yet predictable spectacle – those in positions of power can't help but help themselves to the help. They scream at underlings and have sex with the secretaries; they assault hotel maids (or at least are accused of such) and sleep with the nanny. The question, of course, is what motivates this awful behavior? Why does power corrupt? Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power.
Does Music Change The Taste Of Wine?
Let's be blunt: The tongue is really dumb. Unlike the rest of our sensory organs, which are exquisitely sensitive, that lump of exposed muscle sitting in the mouth is a crude perceptual device, able to only detect five different taste sensations. (Your cochlea, in contrast, contains thousands of different hair cells, each of which is tuned to particular wavelengths of sound.) What makes the tongue even worse is that we have no idea how useless it actually is.
Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code
Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk. The tickets were cheap scratchers—a gag gift from his squash partner—and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating.
Love Is The Opposite Of Underwear
On Monday, I had the honor of delivering a convocation speech at Earlham College. I won't clog up this blog with the full text of my talk, but I thought a few readers might be interested in the brief excerpt below. I've written a few times about grit, a personality trait first identified by Angela Duckworth that predicts a large amount of the individual variation in success.
The Near-Miss Effect
I've always believed that Las Vegas is a powerful window into human nature. On the one hand, the act of gambling in a casino is a deeply irrational behavior: the odds are clearly stacked against us. Over the long run, we are all going to lose lots of money playing these dumb games of chance.
Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative
For thousands of years, people have speculated that there's some correlation between sadness and creativity, so that people who are a little bit miserable (think Van Gogh, or Dylan in 1965, or Virginia Woolf) are also the most innovative.
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.
Out of the Blue § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
A computer simulation of the upper layer of a rat brain neocortical column. Here neurons light up in a “global excitatory state” of blues and yellows. Courtesy of Dr. Pablo de Heras Ciechomski/Visualbiotech In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second.
How Should We Make Hard Decisions?
We live in a world filled with difficult decisions. In fact, we've managed to turn even trivial choices - say, picking a toothpaste - into a tortured mental task, as the typical supermarket has more than 200 different dental cleaning options. Should I choose a toothpaste based on fluoride content? Do I need a whitener in my toothpaste? Is Crest different than Colgate?
Steve Jobs: “Technology Alone Is Not Enough”
Editors’ Note: Details from this post appeared in similar form in a July, 2011, piece by Jonah Lehrer for Wired magazine, U.K. We regret the duplication of material. On January 30, 1986, shortly after he was forced out of Apple Computer (and years before his return), Steve Jobs bought a small computer manufacturer named Pixar from George Lucas, the director of Star Wars.
Choice Blindness
The problem with our sensory world - this "blooming, buzzing confusion" of sights, sounds and smells - is that we put so much faith in it. We believe that the world we experience the world as it is, and that our sensations are an accurate summary of reality. But that's a convenient illusion. In fact, it is the one illusion that makes every other perceptual illusion possible.
The Unexpected Consequences of a Tennis Racquet
The Unexpected Consequences of a Tennis Racquet Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via APIn the winter of 1947, Howard Head, an aerospace engineer, was skiing down Stowe Mountain when he decided that wooden skis were a terrible idea. He kept tripping on the long hickory blades; the material was too heavy for such a nimble sport.
Weekend Essay by Jonah Lehrer: How Power Affects Us
When CEO Mark Hurd resigned from Hewlett-Packard last week in light of ethics violations, many people expressed surprise. Mr. Hurd, after all, was known as an unusually effective and straight-laced executive. But the public shouldn't have been so shocked. From prostitution scandals to corruption allegations to the steady drumbeat of charges against corporate executives and world-class athletes, it seems that the headlines are filled with the latest misstep of someone in a position of power.
The Physics of Grass, Clay, and Cement
The official rule book of tennis is 35 pages long. For the most part, the document is a case study in compulsive precision. Here are a few of the exacting guidelines: Amid all this punctiliousness, however, the rulebook contains one glaring omission: There are no rules about the surface of the court.
The Corrupting Comforts of Power
The psychology of power is defined by two long-standing mysteries. The first is why people are so desperate to become powerful. Although power comes with plenty of spoils, it’s also extremely stressful. In a study of wild baboons in Kenya, a team of biologists found that those alpha males in charge of the troop exhibited extremely high levels of stress hormone. In fact, the stress levels of primates at the top were often higher than those at the very bottom.
The Neuroscience Of Music
Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal.
When Reinforcement Fails
The world is a complicated place. Reality is dense with patterns, but these patterns are often subtle and inconsistent. We think we understand how things work – X always causes Y – but then Z happens. It's very confusing. Needless to say, such complexity poses a big problem for biology. How should animals learn from such unpredictable situations? What's the best way to cope with contingency?
What Can Novelists Learn From Neuroscience?
In Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I argued that, even in this age of glittering science, we still have a deep need for the musings and mysteries of art: I went on to (grandiosely) propose the formation of a fourth culture, which would "freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience." There are many wonderful examples of such works, from the novels of Richard Powers to the mathematical essays of David...
How Much Should We Practice?
Somewhere, right now, a little kid is fighting with his parents about how much he needs to practice the piano. Or maybe it's the clarinet. I fought with my parents about practicing everything. I didn't want to practice my major chords, or my tennis swing, or my multiplication tables. I insisted that I already knew how to do it - I'd just done it - so why did I need to do it again? Well, it turns out that 10 year-old Jonah had a point.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Jonah
Contact Jonah, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack