Let’s imagine that you have to look after ten big dogs. They’re Rottweilers – big, healthy, robust animals that needs lots of food and exercise. Taking care of ten such animals would be a big responsibility, and require a lot of time, effort and resources. So you get stuck in as best you can. Unfortunately, [...]

So, apparently one of the London rioters has a day job as a teaching assistant in a primary school. He was arrested on the premises of an electrical goods store, although he had yet to take anything from it. There have been many comments on the rioters and their motivations, including the suggestion that the [...]

It’s interesting to me how viscerally an event like the current London riots can affect people. In 48 hours, we’ve gone from a peaceful, ordered society to a violently disordered one.  A large group of people is bent on destruction and looting, and an equally large group is baying for the first group to be [...]

There’s an interesting post today at the always excellent Science Based Medicine. Essentially it’s a discussion of a recent critical review of contemporary psychiatric practice. What’s interesting to me is that it both debunks a number of common myths, and indicates that many important questions about mental health still lack clear answers. I would suggest [...]

I do love a good TED talk, and this recent talk from Tim Harford was very illuminating for me. Put simply, Harford’s proposal is that humans suffer from the god complex – the tendency to believe that we know in advance exactly how a complex system works, and therefore can design a perfect solution on paper. [...]

I found it very striking to watch this interview with Rafael Nadal, shown on the BBC just after he had lost this year’s mens’ singles final at Wimbledon. What seemed important to me is Rafa’s language – how he explains what happened to him, and what it shows about his attitude and beliefs. This is [...]

We live, it seems, in the age of the scare. Nothing shifts papers like the news of some impending disaster or insidious threat, particularly if it affects our health. It would be easy to dismiss this trend as hysterical nonsense, save for the fact that it has real implications for people’s well-being. That much is [...]

It’s well worth reading Simon Baron-Cohen’s recent article on empathy in the Guardian. In essence, he argues that describing people as evil doesn’t do anything to explain why they behave as they do. It also doesn’t offer us much in the way of a solution. So he suggests instead that we should think of ‘evil’ people [...]

If I say the word ‘hypnosis’, what do you think of? People falling asleep? Deep trance? Swinging watches? These are fairly common associations, and it’s useful to think about them. There are many factors that explain why hypnosis works, and one of the most important is expectation. As soon as you tell someone you are [...]

I always enjoy watching Derren Brown at work, and last night’s Miracles For Sale was certainly enjoyable. It took a simple premise – could Derren show that faith healers are fake by taking an ordinary person and teaching them to perform ‘healing miracles’ on a group of unsuspecting Americans? The straightforward, and inevitable, answer was [...]