written March 30th, 2009 · 1 comment

This guy is great. I find it really interesting to think about what our brain simply can and cannot do. We’ve all felt this before: Too much information that paralyzes us. Jonah Lehrer in this interview with Terry Gross talks about how our brains aren’t designed to deal with a lot of information. Our rational faculties are limited and he says our pre-frontal cortex can only hold 7 pieces of information at a given time! In order to combat this, Lehrer tries to listen to his emotions more, for instance, when choosing cereal in the supermarket, to decide what he really wants to eat, vs only what he should eat. If we were cut off from our emotional signals completely, Lehrer says decisions would be impossible to make. So I guess we need both. But to make decisions easier, we should limit the about of equivalent options and the amount of variables in total, otherwise our rational decision making will be greatly limited, leading us to buy only junk food for breakfast. Brain scans actually allows scientists to see the tug of war going on in our brains when we are making decisions!

He also has a great blog that I am reading where he discusses all kinds of other current events he likes to weigh in on.