Jonah Lehrer
Author of How We Decide
About the Author
Jonah Lehrer is a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, and Imagine: How Creativity Works. Jonah is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Radiolab, and the Wall Street Journal. (Bowker Author Biography)
Image credit: The Colbert Report
Works by Jonah Lehrer
The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior (2015) — Author — 53 copies, 1 review
Associated Works
This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking (Edge Question Series) (2012) — Contributor — 907 copies, 17 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Richard, Jonah (birth name)
- Birthdate
- 1981-06-25
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Columbia University
University of Oxford (Wolfson College) - Occupations
- journalist
non-fiction author - Organizations
- Wired
Scientific American Mind
WNYC
The New Yorker - Awards and honors
- Rhodes Scholar
- Short biography
- Jonah Lehrer (born Jonah Richard, June 25, 1981) is an American author. He was a widely sought-after writer and speaker prior to having major published works recalled for irregularities in their intellectual content. Lehrer received Columbia University neuroscience training and graduated with humanities coursework. He was a Rhodes Scholar, and attended Wolfson College, Oxford. Thereafter, he built a rapidly successful book, magazine, and new media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour. Having been contracted to write for The New Yorker and Wired.com (until 2013), Lehrer was discovered to have routinely recycled his earlier work, plagiarised press releases, and misused quotes and facts. His third book, Imagine: How Creativity Works (2012), was the starting point of scrutiny, when quotes attributed to Bob Dylan were discovered to be fabrications. His earlier book, How We Decide (2009) was recalled after a publisher's internal review found significant problems in that material as well. In 2016, Lehrer published A Book About Love. Jonah Lehrer in Wikipedia
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- California, USA
Members
Reviews
This is one of the more thoughtful explorations of neuroscience I have read, and a refreshingly positive exploration of our ability as humans to know and understand our true natures through artistic self exploration. It actually made me want to read Walt Whitman, and I've been ducking that since university. For musicians, the essay on Stravinsky and the process by which we understand and enjoy music was particularly enlightening and also helps explain why I find no enjoyment in modern show more country music. show less
This book never excited me the way Lehrer's How We Decide did. It rarely was as concise or as powerful or as clear as the earlier book. On occasion, I felt he came to questionable conclusions on issues, primarily because I found it very easy to come up with alternative explanations for his findings. Moreover, I would change the subtitle from "How Creativity Works" to "How to Promote Innovation and Facilitate Problem-Solving", but maybe that's just my slant on what "creativity" means. show more Nevertheless, there are sections, especially during the later half of the book, that are well worth reading. Serious educators should read "The Shakespeare Paradox". For instance, he points out how American teachers show a preference for teaching students with less creative characteristics, because those with traits most closely aligned with creative thought were too hard to teach and under performed on standardized tests. He also points out how well we encourage talent in sports, but don't apply the same system for identifying and encouraging engineers or other non-sports talent. show less
This is a book that links neuroscience/how the brain works to artists (poets, fiction, painters, composers, etc). And it kind of succeeds. Each chapter portrayed a different artist (with mentions of other people in that movement). Sometimes it makes sense, the language that Walt Whitman uses (I feel with my whole body) is where current neuroscience has shown, where during Whitman's time, it was thought that only the brain matters. This is the strongest chapter in the book.
The chapter on Igor show more Stravinsky, while very interesting in itself, is basically about how the brain predicts music it is hearing, so when it encounters something different, it hears it as bad, or awful. Unlike Whitman who was making connections about how a person feels emotion in his poetry, Stravinsky wasn't out to test a theory about music. He just wanted to write something different.
And that is the case with many of authors selected - they might have created a different way of doing something, but it was no different than the guy who creates a new recipe with unusual ingredients, or the person who wrote the first computer operating system.
However, the book is interesting in the people that is highlighted - names I've heard about, but didn't know why they were important (Gertrude Stein) the biography and what they did was well done - I learned a bit, and enjoyed these sections. It was when these people's accomplishments were compared to what has been discovered in neuroscience, the connection was weak and at times, a bit of an eye roll. show less
The chapter on Igor show more Stravinsky, while very interesting in itself, is basically about how the brain predicts music it is hearing, so when it encounters something different, it hears it as bad, or awful. Unlike Whitman who was making connections about how a person feels emotion in his poetry, Stravinsky wasn't out to test a theory about music. He just wanted to write something different.
And that is the case with many of authors selected - they might have created a different way of doing something, but it was no different than the guy who creates a new recipe with unusual ingredients, or the person who wrote the first computer operating system.
However, the book is interesting in the people that is highlighted - names I've heard about, but didn't know why they were important (Gertrude Stein) the biography and what they did was well done - I learned a bit, and enjoyed these sections. It was when these people's accomplishments were compared to what has been discovered in neuroscience, the connection was weak and at times, a bit of an eye roll. show less
When it comes to truths about cognition, art usually gets there first, and art can do what science cannot: describe human life from the inside. Lehrer gushes too much sometimes, and there are some holes in his thinking - it's too in love with the individual - he says we can never be intimate with anyone but ourselves, but that's patently only true in what some psychologists are now calling the WEIRD culture (Western - or White - Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic)- not at all show more representative of human experience in general. Collective intimacy is perhaps the major hallmark of many traditional cultures - an intimacy with time, the natural world and one another. But this is still a useful defense of the truth of artistic insight that the fragmented, increasingly reductionist WEIRD world ought to hear. And the great quotes, from Walt Whitman, William James, Virginia Woolf and many others are going straight into my commonplace book. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 9
- Also by
- 2
- Members
- 4,934
- Popularity
- #5,091
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 154
- ISBNs
- 105
- Languages
- 14
- Favorited
- 5