Centuries of Craving Caffeine, particularly in the form of tea and coffee, has enjoyed a long history of adoration and exaltation the world over, dating back nearly 5000 years to ancient China. When coffee was introduced in Europe in the seventeenth century, its powers of wakefulness were immediately recognized as a fortuitous boon, coming, as…
The Apparent Race You’re a proud new parent and you’ve spent innumerable hours—months, probably, if not years—poring over parenting books. You’re practically an expert on the subject now, even though your child is only a month old. You wanted to get it all just right, so you’ve read up on “the Mozart Effect” and Attention…
An Ugly Little Secret Charles Darwin had a very dark secret, one made all the darker because he was a moneyed gentleman of polite society, a man of scientific leisure, and one with ties to England’s governmental, religious, financial and academic elite. That is to say, he was someone with a significant reputation at stake,…
The emotional intelligence revolution has already impacted the education and corporate worlds. Is it possible that it is the answer we’ve been waiting for? IQ’s Shortcoming If there is anything close to a consensus in the understanding of intelligence, it is that the Intelligence Quotient, or “IQ” does not wholly account for an individual’s success…
What Draws Us To Films About Mental Illness? There is, arguably, something at stake in a movie about mental illness that is hard to find elsewhere, something maybe best described as identity itself. Unlike a movie about other serious illnesses — cancer, say — a movie about mental illness transcends ordinary issues of health. It’s…
Clever Hans As the story is told, sometime late in the first decade of the twentieth century, a retired German mathematics teacher named Wilhelm von Osten discovered an odd thing about his horse. He had reason to believe that this particular animal, whose name was Hans, was capable of amazing, human-like powers of intellect. Von…
