Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Richard Lehrer (born June 25, 1981) is an American author and blogger.

Lehrer studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Rhodes Scholar.

Thereafter, he built a media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour.

Jonah Richard Lehrer was born on June 25, 1981, in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.

His mother, Ariella (born Jean Hively), a developer of educational software, converted to Judaism to marry his father, David Lehrer, a civil rights lawyer.

Lehrer graduated from North Hollywood High School.

When he was 15, he won $1,000 in an essay contest run by NASDAQ.

In 2000, he worked as a line chef at the Midtown Manhattan restaurants Le Cirque and Le Bernardin.

Lehrer majored in neuroscience at Columbia University.

While an undergraduate, he worked in the laboratory of Eric Kandel, "examining the biological process of memory and what happens in the brain on a molecular level when a person remembers or forgets information".

He appears on one published paper from that laboratory, as fourth of eight authors on a primary report in a three-laboratory collaborative genetics study characterizing homologs of the human DYRK1A gene from model organism C. elegans, a gene believed to "play a significant role in the neuropathology of Down syndrome".

While at Columbia, Lehrer also contributed to the Columbia Review, and was its editor for two years.

He tied for second place for the Dean Hawkes Memorial Prize in the Humanities.

Lehrer was a 2003 Rhodes Scholarship recipient, supporting his study at Wolfson College at Oxford University; while he is reported to have planned to study "philosophy, physiology and psychology", he is further reported to have instead studied 20th century literature and philosophy.

Between 2007 and 2012 Lehrer published three non-fiction books that became best-sellers, and also wrote regularly for The New Yorker and Wired.com.

Lehrer is the author of three best-selling books: Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007), How We Decide (2009), and Imagine: How Creativity Works (2012).

The latter two books were withdrawn from the market by their publishers after "internal review uncovered significant problems" with the books.

These and other work by Lehrer were characterized as having misused quotes and facts, plagiarized press releases and authored work, and to have otherwise recycled earlier published work.

These acts and the process of uncovering them are recounted in So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist is a collection of biographical essays on creative figures such as Marcel Proust, Paul Cézanne, Walt Whitman, and Auguste Escoffier.

Chris McManus, professor of psychology and medical education, University College London, writing in Nature, opens his review, saying "'Oh No he wasn't!' might well be the response to ... Lehrer's claim ... ," continuing with "Lehrer's conceit of the artist as a neuroscientist is not unique" (University of London Semir Zeki and Dartmouth's Patrick Cavanaugh having preceded him with the general point), that the "impressions [of artists] are neither experiments nor science" and that the "conceit remains exactly that, if the term 'neuroscientist' is to retain any serious meaning".

McManus goes on to quote Lehrer, with this analysis:

"What did Proust learn from [the] prophetic crumbs of sugar, flour, and butter [Lehrer asks]? He actually intuited a lot about the structure of our brain."

These intuitions included "smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory, [whereas] all other senses are first processed by the thalamus, the source of language and the front door to consciousness."

[McManus concludes:] If indeed Proust intuited this anatomy, it was unfortunate because the taste pathway is wrong, and few regard the thalamus as the source of language ..."

On a more positive note, McManus notes that "The most interesting parts of Proust ... are its manifestos on art and science in the prelude and coda" that begins with C.P. Snow; however, Lehrer proceeds (McManus notes) with "attacks" on Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, Steven Pinker and E. O. Wilson for failing to engage in a "dialogue of equals" with nonscientists.

McManus closes, stating that while Lehrer's notion of a "fourth culture" is a "grand dream", his "attempt at [it] fails" since the neuroscience laid out by Lehrer "seems 'sheer plod', undermining the central conceit—for what artist would partake in such a paltry matter?"

Nonscientists, on the other hand, mostly offered praise for Proust. Science journalist and Guggenheim Fellow D. T. Max described it for The New York Times as "a precocious and engaging book that tries to mend the century-old tear between the literary and scientific cultures".

The review by music critic Helen Brown in The Telegraph stated, "Lehrer is a dazzlingly clever young man whose writing bears witness to both the clarity of his scientific training and the humanity of his literary studies. The Whitmanesque electricity of all the thought and heart he has put into this book fizzes from each sentence."

Jonathon Keats at Salon, writing as an artist, approached the "conceit" noted by McManus from the opposing perspective, and described Proust as being written "arbitrarily and often inaccurately".

Imagine and Lehrer's earlier book How We Decide (2009) were recalled after a publisher's internal review found significant problems in that material.

He was also fired from The New Yorker and Wired.

Lehrer was a contributing editor for a variety of publications, including Scientific American Mind (2009-2012) and Radiolab (2007-2012, 38 episodes).

Starting in 2012, Lehrer was discovered to have routinely recycled his earlier work and fabricated or misused quotations and facts, and was alleged to have plagiarized from colleagues.

Scrutiny began when freelance journalist Michael Moynihan identified multiple fabrications in Lehrer's third book, Imagine: How Creativity Works (2012), including six quotations attributed to musician Bob Dylan.

Lehrer has written for The New Yorker (July 2008-March 2012; staff writer June 2012), Wired (July 2010-June 2012) Scientific American Mind (June 2008-July 2009), Grantland, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, as well as the journal Nature, and Seed magazine.

Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker on July 30, 2012, after accusations of fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in Imagine surfaced.

On August 31, 2012, Wired.com's editor-in-chief, Evan Hansen, stating Lehrer's "failure to meet ... editorial standards", severed the relationship between that venue and the writer.

On June 6, 2013, Simon & Schuster announced that it would publish a book by Lehrer with the working title The Book of Love. In Slate.com, Daniel Engber suggested that Lehrer might have plagiarized portions of his book proposal from the work of his former New Yorker colleague Adam Gopnik.

In 2016, Lehrer published A Book About Love, to negative reviews.