Tag: BBC news
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Mind Games
I have of late been attracted to mind games –not, you understand, the one-upmanship power struggles that are reputed to go on in corporate businesses, nor even the more hurtful kind that used to happen in high school classes, usually initiated by those who sat in the front seats. No, I refer, rather, to the…
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Unregarded Age in Corners Thrown
I worry too much; I didn’t used to, but it kind of crept up on me along with my aches and pains over the years. Age is something that has always been fraught with tensions as we stumble through the calendar first wanting more, then less and then, I suppose, trying to forget about it…
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Disparate Opinions
I am always puzzled by assumptions of equivalence. Does success in one field attest to the quality of an opinion about another? I am usually suspicious of the value of, say, a celebrity commenting on the significance of a particular product. It may be interesting, but does that actually certify its worth? I realize that…
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The Problem of Puberty
Puberty is alchemy, don’t you think? Like the chrysalis of a butterfly, the girl emerges from the pupal case of her childhood into an adolescent -an almost-woman- with hormones ablaze. It is a magic time of change, both in growth and physiology, but also in cognitive development. It is a time of evolving expectations, but…
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Stereotypes in Medicine
I suppose we are all, at times, seduced by stereotypes. They are, after all, a simplified way of processing the other world –underlining how they are different from us. Even the etymology of the word, derived from Greek, seems as if it would be helpful: stereos –firm, or solid; typos –impression. But unfortunately it has…
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Miasmatics
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be, For my unconquerable soul. This may be how we choose to think about ourselves as we screw our courage to the sticking place. And yet, much as we hate to admit it, there is…
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Food for Thought
There’s something encouraging about the fact that we are not simply our genes. We’ve moved on -evolved, I guess. They are still the recipes, the instructions, but as every chef knows, you don’t always have to include all of the ingredients to get a good result. Genes are perhaps more akin to a first draft…
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The Uber-obvious in Medicine
I don’t know what atavistic urges compel me to rail against reporting the obvious as if it were something new -something clever. Reporting something as if the rest of us would do well to take note of it and spread the revelation to the uninformed like evangelists. Of course I don’t mean to confuse the…
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Aphantasia?
We are a culture of categorists. Slotists. Namists. It is a society of Nomino, ergo sum. It’s as if we can sleep more securely knowing we have named and categorized everything we have seen that day –no matter how bizarre, no matter how unimportant. No matter, even, how mistaken the belief that by so doing,…
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