Sublime

The experiment was elegant in its simplicity. Using a toy lion and a toy zebra, Barrett asked each child, “When the lion sees the zebra, what does the lion want to do?” The results were surprising: 75 percent of the three-year-olds in both groups answered with some variation of “The lion wants to chase/bite/kill the zebra.” (It must be remembered t

If you spend time with the primates closest to human beings, you’ll see female chimps having intercourse dozens of times per day, with most or all of the willing males, and rampant bonobo group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and maintains intricate social networks.

The legend of Theseus and the Minotaur is full of imagery and incident that lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation: the minotaur - half man, half animal - embodies the essential conflict between ego and id; the labyrinth, which coincidentally resembles the sulci of the cortex, suggests the complexities of the mind. In 1927, Freud told an int

There are five monkeys in a room, and there is a basket of bananas at the top of a ladder. The monkeys, of course, want to climb the ladder to get the bananas, but every time one tries, they are all sprayed with cold water. After a few times of being sprayed by cold water, the monkeys learn to not climb up the ladder to get the bananas. . . . [The