Jonah Lehrer to Join Creative Minds Panel!

Announcing Jonah Lehrer - Journalist, Rhodes Scholar, Author of How We Decide will be a panelist at Creative Minds on Friday, November 18, 2011

Hailed as “an important new thinker” by the Los Angeles Times and “a popular science prodigy” by The New York Times, Jonah Lehrer is the best-selling author of How We Decide, as well as a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, the Scientific American Mind, and NPR’s Radiolab. His work explores human creativity and decision-making as they relate to neuroscience, art, war, sports, politics, and more. He gathered much of the research that would become his first book while studying psychology, philosophy and physiology as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Captivating and accessible, Lehrer’s debut book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, argues for a more intimate relationship between science and the humanities, noting that many discoveries of neuroscience are actually rediscoveries of insights made earlier by artists, novelists, poets, and other creative types. With an engaging style and his own unique perspective, Lehrer examines works of Proust, Whitman, Stravinsky and more, finding parallels between them and important scientific breakthroughs in language, neuroplasticity and memory, among others.

Lehrer is a regular contributor for The New Yorker, Nature, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal. His most recent articles include, “The Web and the Wisdom of Crowds,” “Basketball and Jazz,” “How Power Corrupts,” and “The Rewards of Revenge.” While attending Columbia University, Lehrer worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and served as editor-in-chief of the Columbia Review.

If you're interested in learning more, you can check out his website, read his blog, read this article he wrote for the Feb 2011 issue of Wired Magazine, or read his latest book, How We Decide.