psychology dector

The following blog post is dedicated to friends who have suffered—recently or less recently—from the death of loved ones. Unfortunately I'm aware of an unavoidable problem in my reasoning. The basic idea that our human brains were never designed to handle philosophical and/or scientific thinking is best understood by those who've read a science book such as The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins. If you've never encountered such a book, then my elementary reasoning might fail to convince you. It is pointless to think of a deceased individual as “damaged”. He/she has simply disappeared. My use of the word “damages” refers to those who are left behind: relatives and friends of the deceased. Often they will have called upon subterfuges to weaken the blow of the death of their loved one. But this “solution” might not work successfully in the immediate future, if ever. In the past, religions provided the best subterfuges. But, with the disappearance of profound religiosity in ...

  Dmitri Mendeleev [1834-1907] While the world at large is preoccupied by ridiculous or uninteresting themes, I’m impressed to find that the Inorganic Chemistry Division of the IUPAC inserted officially, yesterday, four new elements into Mendeleev’s table:           • Nihonium and symbol Nh, for the element 113,           • Moscovium and symbol Mc, for the element 115,           • Tennessine and symbol Ts, for the element 117, and           • Oganesson and symbol Og, for the element 118. When I started my studies of chemistry at Grafton High School in 1952, this table terminated down in the vicinity of neptunium, symbol Np, whose atomic number was 93. Named after the planet Neptune , it came just after uranium, symbol U, number 92, named after Uranus . A lot of radioactive water has flowed under the...

Quick:   what do Michael Crichton, Saint Luke, Anton Chekhov, Copernicus, Ethan Canin, William Carlos Williams, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Carl Jung and Rabelais all have in common?   None of them are women?   Okay, throw in Tess Gerritsen, Alison Sinclair and Alice Weaver Flaherty.   They are doctors and writers.   What is it about the medical profession that along with the fragile art of healing comes the ability to tell a story?   Is it because the illness of the patient is steeped in narrative?   Is it that one cannot begin to heal what ails a patient until he or she understands that unique backstory? To that list of physician-writers must be added British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh.   His recently published memoir, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery (Thomas Dunne Books, 2015) is an insightful and poetic look inside the human mind.   It is, at the same time, technical but accessible, brilliant and beautiful.   We...

We’ve all been there:   the tightening of the throat, the shallow breathing, the twinge of pain around the heart, the dry mouth, the inability to focus.   It is anxiety.   We live in anxious times.   But when haven’t we lived in anxious times, and before we get too far into our own neuroses, are there not times in history when things might have been more precarious, more dangerous, more downright scary?   I am thinking now of the height of the Second World War when victory was not imminent, or in the late 60s when one had a reasonably good chance of being drafted, handed a weapon, and told to go fight in the jungles of Vietnam.   What about the Dust Bowl, the Plague, the Great Flu, the Great Depression?   Surely every age is one where anxiety might be the right and proper response to the circumstances that threaten the very existence of us. Scott Stossel, in his book My Age of Anxiety:  Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind (Vintag...

This summer for the third year in a row I’m teaching a writing workshop for college students called Writing In The Sciences .   My students are all freshmen biological sciences majors who have recently graduated from high school or are transferring to a four-year institution from a junior college.   The program is part of a STEM grant, an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In previous years, I focused on writing practice.   Since the students come from a variety of educational programs from Advanced Placement and honors to mainstream college preparatory courses, from public high schools to charters, magnets, and private institutions, I wanted just to get them writing every day with drafts submitted at the end of the week for my review.   That way I could respond individually to each student’s writing, and formulate lessons to address specific areas needing attention involving the whole class.   This worked well for two years, but at ...