Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Richard Lehrer (born June 25, 1981) is an American author, journalist, blogger, and speaker who writes on the topics of psychology, neuroscience, and the relationship between science and the humanities. He has published three books, two of which, Imagine and How We Decide, were withdrawn from the market by publishers after it became known that Lehrer had fabricated quotations.


 * "I've talked to enough scientists who thought that LSD would be a great way to study it if it weren't so tough to get it in the lab. Here are these drugs that profoundly and reliably and in ways you can actually measure distort our experience, and you can study what LSD does to serotonin in the prefrontal cortex You can study how it affects dopamine projections from the ventral striatum.


 * I was talking to a scientist last year who studies 'aha' moments. What happens in your brain when you have an epiphany? He was saying it would be great for him to use LSD in the lab, because when you take a hit of acid, you're a eureka machine. You think you've solved the world. You think you've solved the cosmos. You're just writing down notes on cocktail napkins. Not until you wake up in the morning do you realize you wrote down the most banal things ever — in the moment, you're just having one epiphany after another. Wouldn't it be great for him to give people LSD and study what happens in their brain? It turns out that it's very tough to do. It's very tough to get grant funding. People still remember Tim Leary at Harvard in the early '60s. There's still a stigma attached to it. We joke about it, but it could still be a very, very useful experimental tool."
 * - Chimeras of Experience: A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer