The Brain Eating Vaccine That Wasn't

Jonah Lehrer rejected the bizarre, politicized distortions of his most recent Wired piece on the search for a stress vaccine. Then he explained the cognitive dissonance of said distortions and how the Internet feeds them:

While neuroscientists have begun to decipher the anatomy of this mental flaw - you can blame your anterior cingulate cortex - I sometimes worry that the internet is making things worse. Although we're all vulnerable to cognitive dissonance (and the paranoid style has always been a loud presence in American politics) we seem to squander ever more oxygen on worthless conversations about Obama's birth certificate or the spurious link between autism and vaccines.