Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Jonah Lehrer has written a book about love. In case the name of the author rings a bell, but you aren't quite sure why ... that is THIS fellow. Lehrer was a high-flying pop-science pundit over a five year period, from 2007 until 2012. He wrote a series of books with such titles as Proust Was A Neuroscientist with a lot of specific messages but with the over-arching meta-messages that Neuroscience is Wonderful and Explains Everything about Us. The link I provided you above takes you to a blog entry I posted here in August 2012, amidst Lehrer's fall from grace. The specific cause was a lot of crap he wrote about Dylan. But, as is often the case in these scandals, once some blood is in the water other sharks arrive, and other chunks of flesh are torn away from the reputational body. In this case, the "sharks" weren't doing anything more predatory than fact checking, and source checking. Which turned out to be quite predatory indeed for Lehrer. For example: W...

I wrote in early August of  Jonah Lehrer , and of the circumstances that led to his departure from The New Yorker. Briefly, he invented Bob Dylan quotations with which to fortify his thesis in his book, Imagine, about the neurology of imagination and creativity (two terms he uses as synonyms). I said in that post that I hoped this scandal would prove "a setback for the cause of contemporary neuroscience or for its prestige with the broader public." It now appears I may have had that wish granted. My evidence is a piece in a recent issue of The New Statesman , "Your Brain on Pseudoscience: The Rise of Popular Neurobollocks." (For those who don't know the Anglicism, "bollocks" literally means "testicles," and is used as a general term of exasperation. One of the Urban Dictionary's definitions for it is "unfathomable rubbish," which seems to fit.) Steven Poole, the author of this article, couples Lehrer with Malcolm G...

Jonah Lehrer has left his post at The New Yorker amidst a bit of scandal . Lehrer is the author of a non-fiction book on neurology, called Imagine, published in March of this year. The subtitle of Lehrer's book sounds a bit ironic now, "How Creativity Works." Lehrer uses Bob Dylan as one of his examples of a creative individual, someone whose creativity can be understood through contemporary neuroscience. Well, this is how creativity doesn't work: making up sh!t and attributing it to someone else. Michael Moynihan pointed out in the devastating article that forced Lehrer's admission and resignation at TNY, Lehrer had simply lied. He had invented some Dylan quotes out of thin air, and in other cases terribly distorted their significance to fit his broader neurological  narrative. Lehrer has now admitted as much , "The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquoations, or represented improper combinations of previously existi...