Bøger af Jonah Lehrer

A sumptuous presentation of the extraordinary hotel casino design of AD100 interior designer Roger Thomas, who has conceived some of the most spectacular interiors in the gaming world.Thomas has transformed Las Vegas casinos from low-ceilinged, claustrophobic mazes into luxury interiors adorned with antiques, fine fabrics, and custom fittings for Wynn Resorts. His maximalist interiors summon drama, joy, mystery, surprise, and more.This dazzling book’s essays discuss these emotional design themes and the alluring configurations of Thomas’s resort spaces. The profiled hotel and casino interiors (the properties of Wynn Las Vegas, Encore Las Vegas, Wynn Macau, Encore Macau, Wynn Palace Cotai, and Encore Boston Harbor) include grand lobbies, gaming rooms, restaurants and bars, and hotel guestrooms and suites. Outrageous accents abound, among them giant lampshades festooned with lacquer tassels and shimmering gold drapery that frames a garden view. For Thomas, inspiration for his resorts begins at home; he shares insights from designing his own houses in Venice, Italy, the San Francisco Bay area, and Las Vegas. This gold-embellished tome is for fans of fantasy and luxury design.

Number one bestselling science writer Jonah Lehrer explores the “only happiness that lasts”—love—in a book that “is interesting on nearly every page” (David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review).Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer’s A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives. Love confuses and compels us—and it can destroy and define us. It has inspired our greatest poetry, defined our societies and our beliefs, and governs our biology. From the way infants attach to their parents, to the way we fall in love with another person, to the way some find a love for God or their pets, to the way we remember and mourn love after it expires, this book focuses on research that attempts, even in glancing ways, to deal with the long-term and the everyday. The most dangerous myth of love is that it’s easy, that we fall into the feeling and then the feeling takes care of itself. While we can easily measure the dopamine that causes the initial feelings of “falling” in love, the partnerships and devotions that last decades or longer remain a mystery. “Lehrer uses scores of detailed vignettes to traverse a complicated intellectual landscape, eventually arriving at modern theories of love…He is a talent” (USA TODAY), and A Book About Love decodes the set of skills necessary to cultivate a lifetime of love. Love, Lehrer argues, is not built solely on overwhelming passion, but, fascinatingly, on a set of skills to be cultivated over a lifetime.

Why does mystery create a mental itch that must be scratched? In Mystery, #1-bestselling author Jonah Lehrer unlocks the secrets of mystery's allure, putting together recent discoveries in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology and revealing how they influence everything from the formulas of our favorite detective shows to the tricks of successful advertising campaigns and the calculated risks of the stock market.

New York Times bestselling author Jonah Lehrer “unravels the mystery of mysteries” in this “absolute delight” (Malcolm Gladwell) of a book that blends psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology to shine a new light on everything from the formulas of our favorite detective shows to the tricks of successful advertising campaigns and the calculated risks of the stock market.Why is mystery so compelling? What draws us to the unknown? Jonah Lehrer sets out to answer these questions in a vividly entertaining and surprisingly profound journey through the science of suspense. He finds that nothing can capture a person’s attention as strongly as mystery, and that mystery is the key principle in how humans view and understand the world. Whenever patterns are broken, we are hard-wired to find out why. Without our curiosity driving us to pursue new discoveries and solve stubborn problems, we would never have achieved the breakthroughs that have revolutionized human medicine, technology—and culture. From Shakespeare’s plays to the earliest works of the detective genre, our entertainment and media have continually reinvented successful forms of mystery to hook audiences. Here, Lehrer interviews individuals in unconventional fields—from dedicated small-business owners to innovative schoolteachers—who use mystery to challenge themselves and to motivate others to reach to new heights. He also examines the indelible role of mystery in our culture, revealing how the magical world of Harry Potter triggers the magic of dopamine in our brains, why the baseball season is ten times longer than the football season, and when the suspect is introduced in each episode of Law & Order. Fascinating, illuminating, and fun, Mystery explores the many surprising ways in which embracing a sense of awe and curiosity can enrich our lives.

In this technology-driven age, its tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first. Taking a group of artists a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brains malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Czanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. Its the ultimate tale of art trumping science. More broadly, Lehrer shows that theres a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.

An illuminating and unusual book about how famous artists have anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience.