What Makes People Tick?

In the fifties, when experiments of the kind no longer permissible today were still allowed, Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins university, did a famous psychology experiment using rats. As the World of Work Projec t website explains: " Curt’s experiments focused on how long it takes rats to die from drowning. He conducted his experiments by placing rats into buckets filled with water and seeing how long they survived. He introduced a range of variables into the experiment, that yielded some interested results. " Some of those different variables were to examine why domesticated rats swam and swam and swam, while wild rats gave up swimming and died, often within only a few minutes.  What makes the experiment noteworthy to me and why I'm writing about it is that, as Heartbeat Services' article Hope Floats explains: "I n a follow-up experiment, as the rats started to give up and sink, he pulled the drowning rodents to safety, dried them off, gave them a br...

Today, I'd like to write a bit about something that I've been dealing with for some time now. To say that I'm stressed is a little too simple. To say that I'm depressed isn't quite right either. Rather, I'm tired. Tired of restrictions. Tired of face masks. Tired of spraying disinfectant on my hands whenever I arrive anywhere. Tired of keeping my distance from other people. Tired of not being able to hug my friends when I see them. Tired of being cooped up inside. Tired of working from home. Tired of living my social life through a computer screen. And really, really ready to go back to normal life. Now, before you tune out, this isn't about covid/corona/whatever you want to call it. This is about me. And about how having a few days off from work last week finally made me realise that things need to change before I end up worse off than just tired... It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle somethin...

One of the reasons for not blogging for quite some time is, simply put, that real life intervened. I changed jobs, my long-term relationship ended, I started studying again... All of this, as well as me questioning whether blogging was still what I wanted to do with my time, led to not posting. Not posting for a month leads to not posting for a year, leads to not posting for almost three years. Which brings us to the here and now.  While I still have no interest in making this a personal blog, I do hope to get back to blogging about things that interest me. Things like psychology and anthropology, religion and spirituality, coaching and counseling, education and conservation, global warming and world peace. I'd also like to write about things that are perhaps a little less mainstream yet that very much interest me. Things like the possibility of alien life, parapsychology, meditation, telepathy, mindfulness, reincarnation, yoga and such. Simply put, I've been a little afraid to...