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 behavior. 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, fabricated or misused quotations and facts, and allegedly plagiarised from colleagues. The 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) was 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.

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.[6] 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.