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 …
If you tend to be a target for ads about everyday-carry tools, as I am, it’s understandable that you would want to sleep better, because sleep—despite its uncertain origin and adaptiveness—is the original EDC tool. It appears to benefit creativity, emotional regulation, threat evaluation, memory processing and other covert cognitive processing, waste disposal, and maybe …
Prominent psychologist Jordan Peterson has undergone recent treatment for a drug habit. He has found it impossible to quit taking clonazepam voluntarily, though he insists that his problem is physical dependence and not addiction. I hope he will find an effective treatment soon. In the meantime, his dependence raises an interesting question: How should we …
Some people like the thrill of falling from a great height, while many others find it hard to decide about taking a jump from a high diving board. Both groups pay attention to what they’re doing. We can call them aroused. They differ on their decisions to jump, presumably because the adventure strikes some as …
Our ability to see with our eyes hardly attracts the attention that the eyes capture with social signals. First, of course, it’s the pupils that attract the curious and the health-conscious and even the prurient. But eye movements are not far behind in lurid speculation. They “give away your secrets”, “betray your thoughts”, and even …
For many of us, the voice is an unreliable tool. Through inflammation, stress, injury, and emotional trauma, we may lose our voices and discover that, for all its limitations, speech is an unreplaceable means of communication (though speech contains may unvoiced sounds also). We have an impressive ability to yell, though it’s not recommended. Yelling …
Years ago, William Calvin wrote a popular book attributing the evolution of right-handedness to the way it allowed women nursing an infant to still throw stones at a threatening predator. On the other hand, Faurie and Raymond thought it was left-handedness that carried the selective advantage in combat with righties. The fact is that no one knows where left-handedness comes …
Most of us experience loneliness. The need to be with others helps us survive, but when the threat of disease drives us apart, our public health policies confront the germs of crowding but not the gloom of loneliness. Loneliness doesn’t mean we’re sick, though it might lead to sickness. It can become an affliction, and …
Paraphrasing Robert Benchley, we may say that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who do not. Were you an orchid or a dandelion? Do you resemble a chimp or a bonobo? And of course most of us fall between the extremes. …
Is your pain the same as my pain? And how much worse is a toothache than a mosquito bite? Do some people exaggerate their pain to get more drugs? In a hospital or clinic you may have been asked to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10. Has it struck you that that …