Essays

The Apgar Score and Its Hidden Lessons

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The first test newborns have to pass is the Apgar score, a rating system from zero to ten used by healthcare providers to determine how thriving a newborn is.  Appearance (skin colour), Pulse (heart rate), Grimace (reflexes), Activity (muscle tone), and Respiration (breathing rate), these categories are each rated from zero to two so that midwives, nurses or obstetricians can quickly assess a baby’s condition after birth. A score of seven or above indicates the baby is in good health. A lower score does not …

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When Incentives Fail. A Story about Rats, Cobras, Nails, and Atrocities. 

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Part 1: When Incentives Fail. A Story about Rats, Cobras, Nails, and Atrocities.  Part 2: Avoiding Perverse Incentives  More than a century ago, the French colonialists decided to modernize the French Indochina, especially its capital, Hanoi. Large areas of Hanoi were cleared to accommodate French-style districts with boulevards, bridges, palaces, villas and gardens. This major infrastructure project was supposed to transform Hanoi from a cramped and narrow city into a symbol of France’s “civilising” mission in Indochina.  A sign of cleanliness and civilization was …

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How to Reduce Biased Thinking

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The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on its owner the comforting delusion that he or she does not have any.  Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson – Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)   Every day an overflow of thoughts dashes through our minds as we must adapt as efficiently and quickly as possible to everchanging environments. We can’t process all streams of information around us at once, so we turn to mental shortcuts …

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An Overview of the Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Its Effects on Us

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Cognitive dissonance is a theory proposed by Leon Festinger in the 1950s related to how we react in the face of conflicting behaviours and cognitions (ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions). According to this theory, people strive to keep their knowledge, attitudes or behaviours consistent (consonant). So, when we encounter contradictory information, we try to reduce contradicting (dissonant) cognitions and restore equilibrium by altering our attitudes, beliefs or behaviours.   Festinger argued that to cope with contradictory ideas or experiences, some of us would blindly believe what we …

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Dilemmas in Approaching Scientific Content

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Understanding some basic neuroscience can be highly liberating as it can undo some of our apparently irreversible limitations or failings. As you can imagine, much of this content is based on scientific research. Reading studies about neuroscience, procrastination, productivity, etc., is where the waters become muddier because scientific research often has an agenda that can lead to the “file drawer problem” or publication bias. This bias states that research results that don’t validate the researchers’ hypothesis tend to end up in the file drawers. …

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Address Unknown: an Anti-Nazi Storytelling Masterpiece

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At only 66 pages, Address Unknown by Kressman Taylor proves that you don’t need to write hundreds of pages to deliver a gut-wrenching story. This book can be borrowed for free and read online from the Internet Archive library.  Address Unknown tells the story of two friends that co-own an art dealing business. Max is a Jew living in San Francisco, and Martin is a German who returns with his family from California to Germany. The story is told in an epistolary manner, with letters dated …

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What Makes Finland a Happy Country

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A few weeks ago, the World Happiness Report published its yearly global survey results about how people from more than 150 countries worldwide evaluated their lives. The full report can be found here (page 22). What is the methodology for ranking countries based on their happiness? The polling company Gallup conducts interviews with hundreds of thousands of people across the nations included in the report. People assess their own happiness using a scale from 1 to 10, responding to questions such as if they smiled, laughed or experienced …

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How Elden Ring Tests the Player’s Learning Ability

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Note: I wrote this article in collaboration with my husband.  Hidetaka Miyazaki grew up in an impoverished family in Shizuoka, Japan. Although he didn’t fully understand English, he borrowed many English fantasy and science fiction books from his local library. The boy let his imagination fly and fill the language barrier gaps by creating stories from the books’ illustrations, a skill that would prove helpful in a few decades. Later, he would say about his childhood: Unlike most kids in Japan, I didn’t have a dream… I …

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