Jonah Lehrer is contributing editor at Wired and the author of the bestselling books How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. His articles regularly appear in The New Yorker, Nature, The New York Times Magazine, Seed, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He is also a contributing editor at Scientific American Mind and NPR’s Radio Lab. Lehrer graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

Past Events

• You and Your Irrational Brain: An Evening of Experimentation Under the Stars

  2008 Festival

  n this special presentation of WNYC’s popular show Radio Lab, behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, joined science writer Jonah Lehrer and program hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich to explore the often surprising factors which motivate and dictate human behavior.

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Blog Posts

• Creation on Command

  Al Kooper didn’t know what to play. He’d told some half-truths to get into Bob Dylan’s recording session — the musicians were working on some song tentatively titled “Like A Rolling Stone” — and Kooper had been assigned the Hammond organ. There was only one problem: Kooper didn’t play the organ. He was a guitarist. The first takes were predictably terrible — Kooper was just trying not to get kicked out of the studio. But on take four, he suddenly found his chords. Kooper’s playing was pure improv — “I was like a little kid fumbling in the dark for a light switch,” he would later remember — but he ended up inventing one of the most famous organ riffs in modern music. Read »