Best-selling author Jonah Lehrer to speak at Kenyon College

GAMBIER, Ohio (September 10, 2009)

Art and science meld at Kenyon College this month as author Jonah Lehrer speaks at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 23, in Higley Auditorium and again on Thursday, at 11:10a.m. on September 24, in a Common Hour presentation in Peirce Hall Lounge.

Wednesday evening's lecture is titled "The Future of Science is Art: Or, What We can Learn About the Brain From a 19th Century French Chef and Kanye West." Thursday's Common Hour discussion is titled "Thinking about Thinking: What Dopamine, Marshmallows, and Aha Moments Teach Us about Human Nature."

Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He makes a compelling case that new visions can sometimes be found in unusual places and that innovation is fostered by interdisciplinary communication. In his best-selling book How We Decide, he explores how the brain makes decisions and how people can make better decisions. At the age of twenty-seven, Lehrer has been called "something of a popular science prodigy" in a New York Times book review.

Lehrer graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He has written for the New Yorker, Nature, Seed, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He is a contributing editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio's Radio Lab. He worked in the lab of the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and writes his own blog, The Frontal Cortex.

Lehrer's appearance at Kenyon is sponsored by Faculty Lectureships. Both talks are free and open to the public.