In yesterday’s Montreal Gazette, former editor Norman Webster wrote about Tuol Sleng, the former high school that became S-21, the Khmer Rouge’s primary prison and torture center. Tuol Sleng and the Khmer Rouge regime represent everything that is wrong with human nature. And it is merely a single chapter in the long history of man’s [...]
Category Archives: Human nature
Segregation
Us versus Them… From time to time you will notice how themes keep coming back again throughout my posts. That’s because I believe we are not very complicated creatures. We just appear so. In reality, human nature appears complex because there are an infinite number of combinations and permutations that can manifest themselves as a result of [...]
Knowing the limits of knowledge
I used to teach a class at McGill called “Advanced study in behavioural disorders.” It was a course that gave students a chance to get some fieldwork experience in their final undergraduate year. Each year I would tell students the following in their first class: “When you don’t know something, you don’t know something. When [...]
Memories: True or false?
Memory, more specifically false memory, is a topic I wrote about for a column a few months ago. I kept the final product on the back burner before finally deciding to publish it last week. I hesitated because of the trauma that sexual abuse causes. Research into false memories has had a major impact on [...]
Transferable skills
Here is something I published last week on the idea of skills being part of us regardless of the situation we find ourselves in. Personality is extremely stable. (This does not mean we can never change. It’s just that changes are difficult. This fact is not as discouraging as you might think. People can still [...]
The two-step learning process
How do we learn things? We read, we attend lectures, we listen while others share experiences. It’s all good! And yet there are times when, despite hearing something over and over again, it just never seems to really click. Conversely, we sometimes do things over and over again and never seem to learn. Our experiences [...]
When everything is a priority, nothing is.
Here is a column I published last week. I have been giving a number of talks on burnout and stress recently. It seems that in our modern world of management by objectives, the number of people on the verge of a breakdown is rising dramatically. The source of overwork can come from others (superiors, public [...]
How good is this post?
I have a confession to make. I sometimes make careless mistakes with my writing. Although I don’t like to let obvious grammatical or spelling errors slip by, I figure the alternative is worse. The alternative is spending an inordinate amount of time checking my posts and columns for accuracy. Frankly, I’d rather be golfing, or [...]
Put that on my expense account
I don’t mind spending money but I really really hate to waste it. This past week, I wrote a column on third party payments and how much easier it is to spend other people’s money than it is our own. It was inspired by a conference that was paid for by the taxpayer that I [...]
Acting like a jerk
So, it looks like rioting along Ste-Catherine street is now to be expected after every playoff series win. When did that become the norm? The first time that rioting happened in victory was following the 1986 Stanley Cup win by Montreal. It happened again in 1993. I guess this means that we can no longer [...]
