Jonah Lehrer – författare

''A must-read for investors, business owners, and anyone else with a stake in how people make decisions in the digital age'' Bill Harris, CEO of Personal Capital and former CEO of PayPalThe typical office worker now spends the majority of their waking hours staring at a screen. In the 21st century, every business is a digital business, which is why it''s so critical to understand how we think and behave online.Acclaimed behavioural economist Shlomo Benartzi has teamed up with science writer Jonah Lehrer to reveal a toolkit of cues and nudges for the digital age. Using provocative case-studies and engaging reader exercises, Benartzi shows how businesses can update their nudges to help consumers make better decisions on screens. Up-to-the-minute research will help optimise your business''s online presence, from designing a webshop that helps your customers find what they are looking for, to laying out your website so that it both attracts and holds attention.This book will help you transform the challenges of the digital world into powerful new opportunities that will drive your success.

In this technology-driven age, it’s 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 brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier identified umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne 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. It’s the ultimate tale of art trumping science.

More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and this is what art knows better than science. 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.