Chocolate has a psychology. Nougat does not, even though both confections are popular, with long histories. According to legend, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés did not enjoy his first cup of chocolate, offered to him by the Aztec ruler Montezuma. It was bitter; but, with the addition of sugar became a fad that swept Spain …
When it comes to avoiding nasty surprises, most of us rely on our experience to get by. We understand less of the physical world than we should, but we have our hunches, our clinical judgment, our gut feelings, and sometimes we’re successful. In linking vaccines to autism or fluoridated water to common cancers, we don’t …
Amid the grieving and financial desperation that arrived with COVID-19, the difficulty in recognizing our masked friends must seem like small potatoes. It’s apparently a big concern for security systems that no longer work as well and a headache for programmers who must develop new algorithms. Officials can detect whether masks are being worn, but …
Though it’s not a published category, disgust of natural causes belongs among the six or seven kinds of disgust. Ekman recognizes seven “states” of disgust, ranging from loathing to mere dislike. In discussing the topic on behavioral immunity, I suggested that other people’s bodily wastes provoke a lively sense of disgust, and that this reduces …
Some folks just don’t make sense to others, eating fugu or cave diving when the mortal threat is plain to see and easy to avoid; but that’s what makes thrills interesting. We seem to share many of the same brain mechanisms (research here) for generating emotion, though it’s far from certain that it’s a universal …
The recent coronavirus has taken us back in time, from luxury travel last year to subsistence travel this year, from an inviting vacation world to countries barricaded in fear of disease-bearing migrants. There is a big difference between the pursuit of pleasant adventures in other lands as we experienced travel a year ago, versus launching …
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 …