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…
G.A.S. Spells Stress As with so many wondrous discoveries of science and medicine, it was by chance that Hungarian-born Hans Selye (1907-1982) stumbled upon the idea of the General Adaptation Syndrome (G.A.S.), which he first wrote about in the British journal Nature in the summer of 1936. The G.A.S., alternately known as the stress syndrome,…
In 1998, California, bolstered by a 31 percent Hispanic population—up from 26 percent in 1990—became the first U.S. state in which Anglo-Americans were no longer a majority. This news may shed light on a debate that has been brewing for some time in California and elsewhere in this country over a fundamental—if often overlooked—educational question:…