Lost for Words? You’re not the only one.

November 30, 2015

The seminal 1970s concept album Tales of Mystery and Imagination by the Alan Parsons Project begins with the recorded voice of the legendary Orson Welles. In his inimitable voice Welles reads out an extract from Edgar Alan Poe’s Marginalia (1844 – 1849) in which the...

Was Plato Right?

November 11, 2015

Plato’s definition of what knowledge is, ‘justified true belief’, has been trotted out by countless IB students for generations, often without much thought as to its genuine value or validity as a definition of what knowledge is. However, what are we to make of the...

Two Cultures?

October 7, 2015

Do you think of yourself naturally as an artist or a scientist? Do you instinctively lean towards culture or technology? Are you predominantly left or right brained? Do you struggle with families of subjects which seem to belong either to the Humanities or the...

What’s the Story?

August 28, 2015

Human beings see the world in stories. Whatever we put our minds to is naturally furnished with a narrative which gives our thinking a context – it seems to be built into our DNA. Whilst we are all familiar with some of the ancient stories our ancestors created...

In Two Minds

July 31, 2015

Being in two minds usually refers to occasions when we struggle to make up our minds about choices in front of us, like whether to have the healthy option for lunch or indulge one last time before we begin that diet tomorrow. One could also use the expression for when...

Thinking: Fast or Slow?

June 10, 2015

For most of human history we have assumed our decisions to be the result of a conscious and rational process, and that we are in control of our most of our decisions and actions most of the time. Now a whole raft of research and books has called this into question and...