The act of expressing in words, whether spoken or written the memory one has of a certain event makes that memory less accurate. You witness a road accident and are then called to testify. Your testimony will slightly distort your memory of what happened. Language by definition creates slots and every slot corresponds to a...
A fear of snakes and spiders is relatively common among adults, even when they live in places where seeing such animals is extremely rare. Are we born this way or does the fear have a social or cultural explanation. Six-month old infants who had never met these animals and who obviously had no idea of...
The most impressive feature of human evolution is the development of an amazing brain. The effort to develop such an ‘exaggerated’ organ was possible thanks also to limitations imposed on the development of other organs. If one makes an enormous mental effort together with a great physical one, the resulting efficiency of the two efforts...
Psychologists are learning how the geography of where we live affects the way we think. In China, south of the Yangtse river rice is mainly grown whereas north of the river wheat is prevalently grown. Rice requires an elaborate irrigation system and peasants must cooperate among themselves, if they want the year to be good....
Studies show how our emotions are influenced by the circumstances. Feelings of anger, anguish, hunger, fear or illness are not as precise as we may think and the relative signals may be confused. A tummy ache may be due to gastritis, but if it is the first time we are away from home, it may...
A small boy I recently spoke with gave me a recipe to reduce the number of wars fought around the world: “You know doctor, my mum has always woken us up in the morning, dressed us, given us breakfast, driven us to school, come to fetch us, prepared lunch, cleaned up after lunch, helped us...
While visiting my patients I sometimes ask them about what and where they study. If I ask why they go to school, the younger ones answer: “To find a job when I grow up”. The bigger ones say: “Because I want to become a lawyer, doctor or consultant”. Finding a job is very important, but...
By studying fossils belonging to our ancestors, researchers have concluded that six million years ago they took a giant leap forward when they started climbing down trees to pick up food that had accidentally fallen from their hands while eating. Everything that man did from then on from colonizing every corner of the earth, to...
Of the many innate social forms of behavior, maternal instinct is the strongest. Studies have attempted to establish the developmental stages behind this instinct. A Belgian study on worms could be helpful. Worms lead a simple life and they live off bacteria that populate places where there is fermentation. When the worms produce larvae that...
From the genetic point of view two very casual encounters are at the heart of our personality. The first concerns how mum and dad met and the second is how a particular sperm cell met a particular egg each having a casual assembly of half of the genome of each parent. The interactions of mixtures...
