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. 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.
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. 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. In 2016, Lehrer published A Book About Love, to negative reviews.
Early life, education, employment 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; Search "Jonah Lehrer" at this site to access information used. 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.
Writing career Print and online periodicals 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 was a contributing editor for a variety of publications, including Scientific American Mind (2009-2012) and Radiolab (2007-2012, 38 episodes).
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.coms editor-in-chief, Evan Hansen, stating Lehrer's "failure to meet ... editorial standards", severed the relationship between that venue and the writer.
Books 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.
In print
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:
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".
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. Both had written about the same episode in the life of Darwin, using the same biography (that of Desmond and Moore) as a source. The book was published as A Book About Love in 2016. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Jennifer Senior described it as "a nonfiction McMuffin" and "insolently unoriginal," containing "a lot of dime-store counsel" and "a series of duckpin arguments, just waiting to be knocked down." She concluded, "Perhaps Mr. Lehrer has changed—personally. But not sufficiently as a writer. I fear it may be time, at long last, for him to find something else to do."
Withdrawn
In How We Decide, Lehrer argued that two main parts of the brain are involved in decision-making, the rational and the emotional. Steven Berlin Johnson, a technology writer with training in semiotics and English literature, reviewed How We Decide for The New York Times long before its withdrawal from market during the Imagine fabrication scandal, where he wrote,
Adam Kepecs, however, writing in the journal Nature called portions of the book into question based on current understanding of neuroscience. For instance, Kepecs noted that "Lehrer's insistence on attributing decisions to either an emotional brain or a rational one" was "problematic" because there "is no evidence that the brain has distinct and opposing emotional and rational regions." Kepecs laments that Lehrer's writing is "neurobabble [which] has unfortunately become commonplace in science journalism."
Before it was pulled from the shelves by publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), Imagine: How Creativity Works was on the Los Angeles Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list for 22 weeks. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called Lehrer adept for Imagines "teasing out ... social and economic implications of scientific theories while commuting easily among the realms of science, business and art ..." noting that "[h]e deconstructs the creative process behind a Bob Dylan song with the same verve he brings to the story of how Procter & Gamble created the Swiffer, its New Age mop. ... " But Christopher Chabris, writing in The New York Times Book Review, derided Imagine for its "many elementary errors" and formulaic approach, as well as for "Lehrer's failure to grasp some fundamental principles of scientific thinking". A review by Michael S. Roth in The Washington Post said, "Lehrer practices what he preaches, showing an appetite for learning, a determined effort to cross fields and disciplines, and a delight in exploring new possibilities," while Isaac Chotiner of The New Republic described Imagine as inaccurate, simplistic, and glib, and concluded, "Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it."
Plagiarism and quote fabrication scandal Findings of self-plagiarism On June 19, 2012, Joe Coscarelli of New York magazine and Josh Levin of Slate reported that five posts by Lehrer on The New Yorker blog had reused significant, identical portions of his own work without acknowledging having done so, referring to the practice as "self-plagiarism". Additionally, Edward Champion reported that portions of Imagine: How Creativity Works had been published previously in various forms by Lehrer, and that he had subsequently re-used parts of his books, unattributed, in further submitted publications, e.g., [Lehrer's] Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007), p. 185:
The most mysterious thing about the human brain is that the more we know about it, the deeper our own mystery becomes. [Lehrer's] Review of Out of Our Heads, by Alva Noë. San Francisco Chronicle (March 1, 2009):
The most mysterious thing about the human brain is that the more we know about it, the deeper our own mystery becomes.
All five of The New Yorker blog posts now appear on the magazine's website with editor's notes listing where Lehrer had previously published related sentences, a list that included The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Wired, and The Guardian. In a response soon after, a spokesperson for Lehrer's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), stated: "[Lehrer] owns the rights to the relevant articles, so no permission was needed. He will add language to the acknowledgments noting his prior work." Lehrer apologized for this unattributed reuse of his own work. In a related matter, a correction was appended to a January 30, 2012, article by Lehrer on The New Yorker website, noting that quotations published in the original version of that article had been taken from the work of another writer, Peter Dizikes, at another publication, the MIT Technology Review (i.e., without permission or attribution). See the undated Editor's Note at the end of this article.
Imagine fabrications, The New Yorker resignation