To help relieve anxiety, you’ve probably heard of CBT – that’s Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which involves changing how you think about stuff in order to benefit your feelings and behaviour. For instance, if you see an upcoming work presentation as a banana skin and you begin catastrophising about all the ways it could go wrong and ruin your life, your CBT therapist might work with you to form a more realistic and less melodramatic interpretation of the challenge, which ought to lower your anxiety levels. However, there’s now an important new off-shoot of CBT called meta-cognitive therapy. Where CBT is largely concerned with what you’re thinking, meta-cognitive therapy focuses on what you think about what you’re thinking (hence the word ‘meta’ in its name). It’s not the thoughts themselves, but how your mind responds to them that’s the real focus here. For instance, when it comes to anxiety, the idea is that by changing what you think about your anxious thoughts, you’ll start t...
At least based on the popular imagination, you’d think having a big head would be an indication of greater intellect. Just look at the ultra-intelligent, bulbous-headed character Megamind (pictured above), from the movie of the same name. As with many neuromyths, there is a grain of truth to all this – among humans, brain size and intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) are correlated, albeit modestly (estimates place the correlation at around 0.3 to 0.4, where 1 would be a perfect correlation). But of course, correlation does not imply causation and there are many reasons to be careful about how we interpret the link. For starters, the modest correlation is based on an average of many people, and head/brain size will tell you nothing about a particular individual’s intelligence (bear in mind that Albert Einstein’s brain size was unexceptional, perhaps even on the small side). Consider too, that many animals have brains that are dramatically larger than human brains and yet we do n...
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