Matilda's Lab

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. – Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Own…

I am, as I’ve said, merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary. – Billy Joel, Appearing on ‘60 Minutes’, 1998 One way to mitigate the issue that we’ve just covered is to know your business. If you are confident that your knowledge base is reliable then that saves a lot of self questioning. It is what we would refer to as competence. The problem with competence…

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holders lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately. – Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays. 1928 He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other…

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. – Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895 Welcome to the second part of the book. Now that we have covered the basic elements of what makes humans tick we can now start to consider how we get the most out of this human condition and how we can make the tools that we were born with work in our favour.  The first point is brief, but it is…

Comedy has to be truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end. Sid Caesar, The New Yorker, 29th November, 1982 Let’s end part 1 on a slightly lighter subject. By now it should be clear that the arts play a very important part of our human experience, but we’ve not touched on comedy yet, and now is the ideal time to do it. They say that great art transcends boundaries,…

Tribe, race, clan, family. Deep within us all are the seeds of hate for what is different. We do not have to be taught these things. We have to be taught not to give in to them! They are in our blood, but in our minds is the charity and the love to overcome them. – Anne Rice, Taltos, 1994 The parallels between status games and tribes are so stark because the two concepts are intertwined. They…

“I suppose Epsilons don’t really mind being Epsilons,’ she said aloud. ‘Of course they don’t. How can they? They don’t know what it’s like being anything else. We’d mind, of course. But then we’ve been differently conditioned.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. 1932 Of all the books that I have read, none have given me a more clear vision of human behaviour than Will Storr’s The Status Game. In…

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours. – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. 1957 Whilst we are all…

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“The heart has its reasons,” said Will, “and the endocrines have theirs”. Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962 Perhaps the reason why the silent mind holds so much more power than the speaking mind is because it has the ability to access more of the body’s control systems. Whilst it sounds like it would be great if we could make the silent mind understand the rational course to adopt when it is…

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. – Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments – 1977 The silent mind speaks. Whilst exquisite spoken and written language is unquestionably one of the great advantages that humanity possesses, it is not the only means of conversing that we have at our disposal.  With great power comes great…

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things. – Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight – 2010 Placebo divides opinion. Many within healthcare consider it dishonest to treat people with fake medication, regardless of how effective that fake medication actually is. Whilst there is potential for the use of placebo in mainstream medicine, it does have its limitations and over excited…

Ah, it’s time to relax, You know what that means, A glass of wine, your favorite easy chair, And of course, this compact disc, Playing on your home stereo. So, go on, and indulge yourself. That’s right, kick off your shoes, Put your feet up, Lean back and just enjoy the melodies. After all, music soothes even the savage beast – Time to Relax: The Offspring. Smash 1994 Not only does music soothe…

Ah, music,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A magic beyond all we do here! – J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter, #1), 1997 I hope that I’ve successfully linked the subjects covered so far back to our biology and how understanding our animal nature helps us to make sense of how we are as a species.  One of the most important aspects of our biology is that we are a…

Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right —the feeling of living a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. – Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. 2023 Brainwashing leads us beautifully…

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. – Carl Sagan, The…

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. – Friedrich Nietzsche. The Dawn. 1881. Our hypothetical court case is the perfect place to start a conversation on bias. Regardless of the case, and regardless of the people involved, we know, before the first words are even spoken, that the prosecution is going…