It’s not what’s in your jeans (or your genes) Nature versus Nurture has been a hotly debated topic since Pa fell off the proverbial bus but no scientist worth their salt would waste one molecule of energy on such an argument today. In Bruce Lipton’s book – The Biology of Belief – he sets out [...]
Writer: Steph Vermeulen Neuroscientists confirm that Shakespeare was right: all the world is a stage, and it appears that we’re all hard-wired to play make believe. A popular social media post reads; ‘I wish your life was as dazzling as it appears on Facebook’. It neatly captures the ‘inconvenient truth’ revealed in Ian Leslie’s [...]
Is your Brain a Con Artist? Neuro-economics shows that large parts of the brain – virtually unchanged since the Stone Age - are quite hopeless at managing money because too often our grey matter reacts to finances by rewarding us for all the wrong things. In his book - Your Money and Your Brain - [...]
Molecular emotions Candace Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion: The Science of MindBody Medicine, is the scientist who proved that emotions are the link between the brain and the body. She says the brain is just a big bag of chemicals which are known as ‘neurotransmitters’ because they literally pass (or transmit) messages from one [...]
Daniel Goleman is the name most associated with the field of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) purely because he was the first author to publicise the topic rather than the person to coin the phrase. Goleman’s first book of the same title was intended as an academic tome for psychology students and, in his own words, no one [...]
A version of this article was published in Health Intelligence Magazine July/August Issue 2015 Even a sceptic would probably concede that magical thinking is more fun than reality, but myth busting authors like Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, show us that there isn’t a smidgeon of [...]
Since a 1990 edition of Time Magazine featured the antidepressant drug – Prozac –on its cover as a ‘miracle cure’ for depression, it seems a little curious that the world has become more depressed, not less. It’s well known that a severe clinical depression is a debilitating condition that one can’t snap out of (like [...]
Published in Health Intelligence Magazine – May 2015 South Africa’s EQ expert (or guru) Steph Vermeulen explains why the “self-esteem movement” has made narcissism look normal. Countless books and self-help programmes have been dedicated to the subject of cultivating self-esteem. With a few generations having been raised to believe the central importance is self-worth, the [...]
If you’ve ever learnt anything about the brain it probably involved remembering specific functions of the various regions that register sight, sound, speech, memory etc., and mamage to these specialised areas meant a loss of functioning that could never be restored. But fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) have now given scientists a peek into the [...]
Human beings are followers of fashion and most are quite brazen about copying popular ideas, mannerisms, inventions, poetry, art, songs, recipes or even stories from one another. Learning by imitation is what the biologist Richard Dawkins termed ‘memes’ in his book The Selfish Gene. The word is derived from the Greek term ‘mimemes’ - meaning [...]
