Nick Haslam
Nick Haslam is professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, where he teaches social and personality psychology. His most recent book is Psychology in the Bathroom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
All in the Mind has oscillated the ABC Radio National airwaves for a remarkable twenty-one years. Founded by Natasha Mitchell (2002–12), carried forward by Lynne Malcolm (2012–20), and now hosted by Sana Qadar, the show has created a roomy and inviting space for listeners intrigued by the mind, brain, and mental illness. That space is much more crowded now than it was when the program launched ... (read more)
Once, when we humans reflected on what made us special, we latched on to those qualities that distinguished us from the rest of creation. We were smarter, more rational, more cognitively capable. The philosopher Joseph de Maistre, for example, proposed that ‘the concept of number is the obvious distinction between beast and man’. More recently, with the onrush of the digital age, we have come ... (read more)
A few intellectually superior women exist, conceded nineteenth-century anthropologist Gustav Le Bon, but ‘they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads’. Armed with cephalometers, scales, and birdseed for measuring skull volumes, Le Bon and his peers found that women’s heads tended to contain smaller brains than men’s. The five missin ... (read more)
How does consciousness, the feeling of what happens, emerge from the object that Tim Parks describes in this engaging book as ‘a gruesome pinkish grey, vaguely intestinal lump’? Is mind identical with brain, is it secreted by it in some fashion, or does it, as some philosophers suggest, mysteriously ‘supervene’ on neural processes? Dualism is deeply unfashionable, and the rise of brain sci ... (read more)
Social psychology has a few iconic experiments that have entered public consciousness. There is the shaken but obliging participant who delivers potentially lethal electric shocks to another person in Stanley Milgram’s obedience research. There are the young Californians who descend into an orgy of brutality and degradation while enacting the roles of prisoners and guards in Philip Zimbardo’s ... (read more)
Shortly after Sigmund Freud’s death in 1939, W.H. Auden published an elegy to the famous Viennese refugee. Auden’s Freud is flawed and fallible – ‘He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told / the unhappy Present to recite the Past’ – but unquestionably great. ‘If some traces of the autocratic pose, / the paternal strictness he distrusted, still / clung to his utterance and features, / ... (read more)
Along time ago in a university far, far away, I received an application for graduate study in psychology. The applicant claimed to have no particular orientation to the field, just a broad and open-minded curiosity. In her own words, she was a ‘tabula rosa’: a rose tablet. The student had misrendered John Locke’s famous tabula rasa, the empiricist metaphor of the human mind as a blank slate ... (read more)
The youthful genre of popular neuroscience enjoys a few advantages that popular psychology, its older sibling, does not. The general public holds neuroscience in higher esteem, more confident in its scientific legitimacy. The concreteness of brain science – its colourful scans, its focus on a kilogram or so of custardy matter rather than a weightless cloud of mind – gives it a solidity that ps ... (read more)
The spectrum of opinion on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD in the acronym-crazed world of psychiatry – runs from the firiest red to the deepest purple. At the radical red extreme, critics see the diagnosis as a dangerous fiction, scripted by Big Pharma so that rambunctious youth can be profitably pacified. At the violet end, advocates view the condition as a disorder of the bra ... (read more)