Jonah Lehrer has an interesting article in the NYT magazine about a recent Psych Review article by Paul Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson. The basic claim Andrews and Thomson make in their paper is that depression is “an adaptation that evolved as a response to complex problems and whose function is to minimize disruption of [...]... Andrews, P., & Thomson, J. (2009) The bright side o
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February 27, 2010
what’s adaptive about depression?
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August 24, 2009
Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
A fair amount has been written about the topic of motivatedreasoning. Jonah Lehrer explainsthe relationship between motivated reasoning and the political process;Orac addressesthe issue with regard to quantum woo. (Plus more at MixingMemory, here)Getting back to the political realm, now comes a research articleabout a study of the mother of all misperceptions: the supposed linkbetween Sadda
11 Vote(s)
11 Vote(s)
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May 26, 2009
Freestyle Lehrer
Edge has an excellent interview with science writer Jonah Lehrer who riffs on consciousness, the joy of discovery, the importance of the marshmallows in psychology and how he fell in love with science.It's interesting because rarely do science writers get the opportunity to give their own opinions on the big questions in neuroscience, despite the fact that, as Lehrer mentions, they have a distinc
10 Vote(s)
10 Vote(s)
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April 26, 2009
The beautiful baby brain
Jonah Lehrer has an excellent piece in today's Boston Globe about how babies' brains develop and what psychologists are starting to understand about the infant mind.It's largely riffing on the work of Alison Gopnik, one of the world's leading developmental psychologists, who has long argued that babies might be more conscious than adults and that we learn to filter the world and mentally manage i
14 Vote(s)
14 Vote(s)
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