At her Zoologic blog, over at my old haunts at Wired Science Blogs, Mary Bates looks at an absolutely fascinating study of how temperament is linked to certain behavior. In this case, researchers measured two independent traits in baboons, boldness/shyness and (separately) anxiety/calmness — and found that in new situations, baboons who were both bold and […]
Continue reading →Scott Stossel’s fine vivid account of his spectacular struggles with anxiety — an Atlantic article excerpted from his new book —carries, among other pleasures, a splendid answer to the question of how temperament arises: Is pathological anxiety a medical illness, as Hippocrates and Aristotle and many modern psychopharmacologists would have it? Or is it a […]
Continue reading →A glorious find for any Virginia Woolf fan. For a Virginia Woolf fan writing a book about a scientifico-botanical metaphor about the nature of sensitivity and flexibility, it is a treasure. This is from Forster’s slim 1942 volume, Virginia Woolf, taken from lectures he gave in Cambridge and London in the year after her suicide. There […]
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