The assignment for today is to write something that is not true about human nature. While it’s not impossible, the assignment may take a moment’s thought. Whatever human nature is, it’s full of contradictions, varying with one’s heredity and with the situations we face. The term is irreplaceable, but it’s slippery and treacherous. It’s worth …
Airplanes are required to carry more than the minimum weight of fuel that could insure a safe flight. In seeming analogy, humans overproduce neurons in preparation for the journey that starts in early development, then discard the unneeded surplus. Tiny microglia remove excess neurons soon after birth and, later, the unnecessary connections that would otherwise …
When we’re with other people, we tend to act as they do, and they act as we do. We synchronize, in walking, singing, alerting to danger, violin playing (research here), and many other kinds of behavior. We’re not unique in this, but the extent of it can be surprising because we rarely label it the …
OK, can you can multitask, as long as the tasks don’t conflict with each other. You can hold your breath while you text a message (no conflict). However, you can’t sing a song while you’re drinking a glass of water (conflict). The brain can experience conflicts, too. While it’s easy to recite a telephone number …
Here and there, Americans are looking for reasons to swallow hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19, often brandishing studies that show positive effects of the drug. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has so far rejected each of the studies as failing to meet the requirement for a “randomized, placebo-controlled” …
There were no psychologists to right the boat the last time we went overboard for nature. There was Wordsworth, lamenting that “the world [of affairs] is too much with us”, and there were brilliant chemists, physicists and astronomers (enjoyably described here) trying to make nature intelligible, but there was no Romantic Age of Psychology to …
We make up a lot of what we see and hear. Most situations are ambiguous. Every perception is an interpretation, a choice among alternatives. Consider the McGurk effect, for example, or mondegreens. We decide on an interpretation using context, including the context of our bodies, and mood. Damasio has argued that moods and emotions are …
A global pandemic doomed a lot of social and commercial predictions for 2020, but the epidemiologists have reminded us of the potential that still exists for accurate forecasting. The progress of the disease has matched scientific models better than politicians’ hopes. Still, predictions in any large social concern is about groups rather than individuals, meaning …
The blog post on “Play” would have been a good time to bring up game behavior, but I was preoccupied with the issue of prematurely identifying the origins of the behavior. Besides arguments about origins, the Internet contains a number of definitions and classificatory schemes, which seem to be beside the point in explaining the …
Are you feeling cold? That’s not a problem, in principle. We all have a heater inside the body that brings warmth within seconds. Chilly offices and frigid houses are one price we pay for the miracle of air conditioning. Unfortunately, the way our brains keep our bodies’ temperature constant ensures that there is no ideal …
Parenting invites dichotomies: Not only are there two kinds of parent, mother and father, but their skills provoke questions about nature vs. nurture. In what sense are they innate or acquired? Are they necessary or superfluous? In each case the answer is “some of both” and we need to beware of false dichotomies. Single parents …
Some people cannot follow a beat. Such beat deafness, a form of amusia, appears in people who can hear, even in people who can dance, though some can’t clap or dance to a beat. (Here’s more.) Now, we all do things differently. Perhaps two percent of adults are unable to use mental imagery, and variations in …