Nobody Can Explain Love

Years ago when I became interested in science and would attempt to explain all the exciting things we can learn through science, it was not uncommon to get the rejoinder that "science cannot explain everything" (no scientist ever said it could).

The example that was often given to explain this belief was love. "Science will never be able to explain love." Of course, the human race has made this blunder ever since the dawn of science. Every time some says "Science will never be able to . . ." the prediction inevitably fails.

During my early years, grownups tried to convince me that a car could not be built to exceed sixty miles an hour. Even if the technology could pull this stunt off, I was told the human body would not be able to stand the force of such speeds. At the beginning of the twentieth century the idea of putting someone on the moon was laughable. There is a very long list of common bonehead statements like this and they are the result of our limited imagination. Science fiction writers and other novelists, like Ursala Le Guin, have been able to envision future human achievements that seem incredibly far fetched.

"Nobody can explain love." Like so many statements that have put constraints on scientific endeavors, this one is about to be thrown into the historical dustbin. Love is so powerful, so universal, so . . . unexplainable. Its mystery is probed in poetry, novels, movies, daily conversation and now by science.

You are probably already aware of the fancy tools scientists are using to peer into our brains. The human brain may be the most complicated thing in the universe and we are just barely beginning to understand how it works.

A recent study was conducted at State University of New York, Stony Brook. The researchers studied college students who had recently fallen in love (maybe we should call universities and colleges "love factories.") and the effect it was having on their brains. They watched the brain's reaction when these people were shown pictures of their beloved.

Sure enough, as soon as they glanced at the picture, a specific part of their brain lit up like fireworks. The interesting part is that this part of the brain is the same one that gets lit up for cocaine and nicotine users. It gets flooded with the brain chemical dopamine. We know that dopamine flooding is so rewarding that humans will do almost anything to make it happen.

Another love chemical in the brain goes by the tongue twisting name of isphenylethylamine. It is easier to call it PEA which scientists do. PEA is produced by the brain and is a naturally occurring amphetamine. These chemicals work in tandem. Amphetamines cause brain synapses to release this little, tiny spray of dopamine into the brain. There's the buzz — the same high after someone snorts a line of cocaine.

Using cocaine is illegal, smoking cigarettes should be illegal, but love will never be illegal. Many of my clients have told me that they have kicked highly destructive habits after they have fallen in love. A female client was relieved of her depression when she fell in love; a male client stopped having panic attacks when he fell head over heels for the "most beautiful woman" he had ever seen; a teenage client "cured" her bulimia when she met the perfect boy. And so on.

Guess what happened when these relationships ended? The dopamine no longer overrode the other chemicals that were making these people's lives miserable. This may be why some people have so many relationships. After one fails, they need a fix, another love fix. Some people who are not so intensely caught up in the cycle may still complain they just can't live by themselves and are continually on the prowl for someone to fill that emotional/chemical void.

This is not to say that we should have to enjoy being alone. After all, we are social creatures and find comfort and meaning within relationships. However, the people I have known who enjoy their relationships the most are the ones who are comfortable being by themselves.

Dr. Helen Fisher is a researcher in this field who did a similar experiment with a simple revision. She also showed her subjects a picture of another person who was neutral. You can probably guess the first picture released all the chemicals and the second picture did not get the same response. That is what happened.

Another research project wanted to find out what the brain chemistry was like for couples who had been together for many years. They chose couples who had been married for at least twenty years and said they were still deeply in love. Not surprisingly, their brains also showed increased levels of dopamine. However, something else was discovered.

Have you ever heard older couples talk about how love is even better after the initial burst of chemistry begins to subside? When I was younger, my friends and I thought this was laughable. All we knew was the dopamine high. Well, these scientists found that older love birds had another chemical in their brains called oxytocin. This brain chemical is often called the "cuddling chemical" because it helps new mothers make milk and be more capable of bonding with their babies.

Another brain chemical is released when we start experiencing puberty. Do you remember your days of pre-teen infatuation? How could we forget. This state of mind is caused by still another drug called norepinephrine. Because this is the first experience of a love chemical, pre-teens get jolted by this strong drug and think it is The Real Thing. Not that it doesn't feel good. It is just the brain's way of getting young people together to learn the social skills needed for The Real, Real, Thing (dopamine and associates).

There is no question that love is the result a drug. Anyone who has been addicted to this drug and then done something incredibly stupid will not deny its power. Science and human experience know that love is such a powerful experience that it can completely override common sense and rational decision making. When hit with this emotional genie we can go hungry, avoid sleep and cause our friends to shake their heads in disgust and confusion.

So what does this all mean? Has love now been relegated to something so mundane as a drug? Has science taken away the mystery and excitement of falling in love? I don't think so. Knowledge is always better than ignorance. Do astronomers yawn and become bored when looking at a beautiful galaxy or nebula in their telescope? Most certainly not. They go back again and again to gaze at these heavenly wonders. Do English professors stop reading because they have the ability to dissect and discuss the fine points of an author's work? The opposite is true. They have a deeper appreciation of what they are reading. How about musicians? Does their knowledge of the link between music and neurology of the brain lessen their love of music? Not at all. This type of knowledge enhances the music. Even religious people who read the Bible can have a more profound experience of its contents when they begin to understand the insights of professional scholarship from the last two hundred years.

So in summary, this is what love is about: oxytocin makes you want to cuddle and touch; PEA gets your juices and energizes you to lose sleep; dopamine makes you crave more of what you have; and norepinephrine makes you have sweaty palms and a pounding heart when you are near to or even think of that really special person.

Although we have only mentioned a few brain chemicals, Dr. Mary Cochrane at the University of Buffalo says there are many more chemicals involved in romantic love. Her article, Psychologist Says Neurochemical Processes Explain Romantic Attraction explains what those other chemicals are.

Additional Reading:

Fisher, H. (2004). Why we love: The nature and chemistry of romantic love. (Holt Paperbacks)

Regan, P. (2008). The mating game: A primer on love, sex, and marriage. New York: Sage Publications.

Science, Food & All That Jazz

It seems like these summer blogs are becoming less about psychology than they are about my travels and hobbies. Last Saturday, Sharon and I left early in the morning and headed to San Francisco for my Birthday Boy Bash weekend (July 5). She wouldn’t tell me where we were going exactly but we had to get there by 9:00 in the morning.

Day 1: July 3, 2009
When we arrived at Golden Gate Park I followed her directions and found the destination was the new Academy of Sciences Museum. Even though we got there before the doors opened, the lines were so long it took us thirty minutes to enter the building. Once inside, we stayed there until closing at 5:00. A surprise benefit was the food available in the two cafes. Usually, food in these places is overpriced and underwhelming. We forgot we were in San Francisco, the Mecca of fine food. The meals were delicious.

The California Academy of Sciences is a world-class scientific and cultural institution based in San Francisco. The Academy recently opened a new facility in Golden Gate Park, a 400,000 square foot structure that houses an aquarium, a planetarium a natural history museum and a 4-story rainforest all under one roof.

The new facility is also home to the Academy's staff of world-class scientists, an education department that provides a wide range of student and teacher services, and an extensive science library with over 20 million specimens and artifacts.

This place is a stunning science museum. The building, itself, is a wonder to behold. It is the world’s greenest museum. The roof is called a "living roof" because it is composed of plants, soil and solar panels. You can see a picture of the roof here. Visitors can visit the roof and see why it is the largest public energy efficient building in the world. The website, itself, is quite educational and entertaining.

Inside we attended an amazing planetarium show with the latest digital effects. The aquarium consists of many different nooks and crannies for seeing a large selection of marine life. There is also a natural history museum and the one place we were not able to get to – the tropical rain forest.

After closing, we left the Academy and walked across the street to the De Young Museum. Since it was Friday night there was no admission charge. It was open to the public with entertainment by members of Stellamara. They presented live music and dance from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Roma "Gypsy" trail. You can hear a sampling of there music here. At 9:00 we drove to our hotel in the financial district for a good night’s sleep.

Day 2: July 4, 2009
The Ferry Building by the Bay is an unusual building. Not only is it a ferry landing but it is also the site of one of the best Farmer’s Markets in California. The large Saturday market is found in front of, inside, and behind the building that overlooks the Bay. About ten to fifteen thousand people crowd into this place each Saturday. Being San Francisco, the food is exquisite.

We left the Ferry Building around noon and caught a bus to The Fillmore, land of jazz, to wander around the Fillmore Jazz Festival. It stretched up and down Fillmore Street for about seven long blocks and touts itself as the Largest Free Jazz Festival on the West Coast. We listened to Sam Reider, a local twenty-something who is making his musical mark in the New York jazz scene. Later in the day we listened to another local musician, Bobbie Webb and his Smooth Blues Band. Bobbie is a local legend. Although he has played with every great Blues musician in the world, he was never a full-time musician until recently. He realized early that he needed to take care of his wife and eight children which would have been difficult as a musician. He became a mechanic by day and a musician on weekends and during vacations. Now that he is retired and has a pension and social security he has devoted himself to playing non-stop.

In the late afternoon we drifted into Yoshi’s, one of the premium jazz locations in the Bay Area. We got good seats and were entertained by a Latin jazz group. Around dinner time we went to the Jazz Club (another jazz room in Yoshi’s) for a jam session. We were lucky to get one of the last tables. We had missed Marcus Shelby on the street but caught him at a jam session in Yoshi’s Jazz Club. He had just come back from Jazz Camp West. Marcus brought four people with him from the jazz camp and they improvised for an hour and a half. BTW, Yoshi’s has great ribs.

Around 8:30, as it was getting dark, we got on another bus and headed to Pier 39 to see the fireworks over the Bay. We thought it started at 9:00 but it didn’t get going until 9:30. Even so, there were a lot of people. Everyone had taken all the places for sitting so we, and hundreds of others, had to stand. It was a beautiful night and everyone was friendly and in a good mood. As we waited for the light and noise to begin, we watched about half a dozen cruise ships take their place out in the Bay for the paying customers on board. Along the waterfront, there were four different locations where the fireworks were being set off. We could just barely see another location at Pier 27 and noticed that their fireworks were perfectly synchronized with the fireworks we were watching.

It was a spectacular show and when it was over, we walked to Fisherman’s Wharf and had a snack. From there we walked a few more blocks and caught a free bus (have I mentioned that all the entertainment during this day was free — even the music at Yoshi’s?). The city provided free bus service back to the Ferry Building. From there we walked the mile or so back to our hotel.

Day 3: July 5, 2009
We were planning to get up early, drive to Muir Woods on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge and do some hiking. Instead, we slept in and just goofed off for a time. At 10:00 we walked about a mile to the new Contemporary Jewish Museum. Quite a place! Although founded in 1984 it took over a historical landmark, the Jessie Street Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Power Substation. They hired the renowned architect Daniel Libeskind to design their new home. The architecture is full of contrasts: historic and contemporary; subtle and boisterous. The blue cube in the picture on the right looks like it is falling down but is actually a part of the museum’s external structure. The inside is open and airy and is full of surprising angles. One of the exhibits we enjoyed highlighted the work of Marc Chagall and his work with the Russian Jewish Theater in the first half of the twentieth century. Other exhibits included "Being Jewish": A Bay Area Portrait, Jews on Vinyl, and Susan Hiller: The J Street Project. Fascinating.

It was finally time to head back to Sacramento except we took a side trip to the Stern Grove Festival. This is an annual summer event held in a beautiful setting among trees and hills. Roberta Flack appeared here in June. The San Francisco Ballet will be performing in August. We were privileged to listen to the San Francisco Symphony with an exciting and very young conductor James Gaffigan.

Prior to the symphony we were surprised with a half hour of jazz by the Inouye Jazz ensemble. The leader is the principal trumpet player of the SFS. The bass player is the principal bassist of SFS and the drummer is also a member of the SFS. They had added a non-SFS member, Jeff Massanari, to play guitar. Jeff is one of the most in-demand guitarists in San Francisco.

It was engaging to listen to musicians who are so talented they can be stars in both classical and jazz music. It reminds me of the young Andre Previn who is a virtuoso jazz pianist and a top-ranked orchestra conductor.

And then we had to go home.

Science Doesn't Know Everything

Have you ever heard someone say that science doesn’t know everything? I hear it often when a someone is trying to explain something based on science. A listener may nod sagely and respond with the above observation. For example, at a party someone mentions they have found that psychics are really good at what they do. Eventually, someone else will say there is absolutely no scientific evidence that psychics can do what they claim to do: talk to dead people, read the future, know something private about someone they have never met. The person who finds psychics helpful will retort that it doesn’t make any difference that science doesn’t support psychics because "science doesn’t know everything."

This actually is a correct statement. Every scientist I have known has readily admitted that as a scientist they cannot explain everything. Not even close to everything. Why would a smart scientist admit such a thing? Doesn’t this just bolster the notion that science is not such a big deal after all? Even the great Einstein said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

Wow! How could such a hard-headed egghead make such an admission? It’s because the job of science is to probe the mysteries of life and the universe. Science is always wandering into areas that are not understood or not yet explained. They can do this because the tools they use are the most powerful ever developed by the human mind. Who would have ever thought that we would even attempt to try understand emotions such as love or even the nature of consciousness? Yet, this is what psychologists around the world attempt to understand daily.

But, since science can’t explain everything, doesn’t this take the glow off the adoration that people have towards science? Not really. The average person loves absolutes, but science does not deal in the absolute. Instead of concentrating on "everything" what if we were to emphasize what science can actually explain. Think about what humans did not know before the advent of science about 400 years ago.

Contributions of Science
Here are some discovers made by scientists in the early years:

• Johannes Kepler (1609) was able to figure out that the planets in our solar system had orbits that were elliptical. Prior to this everyone knew (because Aristotle said so) that the orbits were circular.


• William Harvey (1628) found out how blood was circulated through the body. His discovery was the beginning of modern physiology.


• Robert Boyle (1661) made an important distinction between alchemy and chemistry. He introduced the concept of earth’s building blocks, the elements, and helped found the new science of chemistry.


• Isaac Newton (1687) revolutionized how we understood our world. He was able to show us that natural laws exist in nature. For example, the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.


• Edmund Halley (1758) was the first person to accurately predict the appearance of a specific comet.


• Joseph Priestley (1774) found out through the scientific method that the air we breath is made up of oxygen and carbon dioxide.


• Richard Trevithick (1804) was able to use the principles of science to invent the steam locomotive.


• Michael Faraday (1823) was the first person who was able to turn a liquid into a gas.


• Friedrich Wilhelm Essel (1838) used science to shrink the size of our solar system by finding out that a star, 61 Cygni, turned out to be 35 quadrillion miles away. It is so far that it takes six years for the star’s light to reach us.


• Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1847) gathered enough scientific data to show that the total amount of energy in the universe was constant. This came to be known as the law of conservation of energy and was later called the first law of thermodynamics.


• Charles Darwin (1858) published The Origen of Species which rocked the world of science and became the basis for a new biology. Some scientists consider his painstaking data collection and conclusions to be the equivalent of the accomplishments of the great Isaac Newton.


• William Huggins (1863) discovered that everything was made up of the same elements.


• Alexander Graham Bell (1876) invented the telephone.


• Charles-Louis-Alphonse Laveran (1880) isolated the microorganism that causes malaria.

This is an incredibly small sampling of what science discovered in its first two hundred years. From then on the scientific discoveries came faster and faster. The speed of light was measured at 186,000 miles per second. The bacterium that caused tuberculosis was found. A vehicle was designed to be driven by internal combustion. More elements were discovered. Science found out about radio waves.

You get the idea. We haven’t even listed any discoveries of the twentieth century. You may want to think of the contributions that science made in the last hundred years. As you make your list, you will notice that the rate of discovery is accelerating.

The Power of Prediction
Anyone can make predictions. And many have tried. Market analysts are constantly making predictions about what direction the market will take. Some religious people love to predict the end of the earth. Psychics make predictions of what will happen in the future: meeting someone to fall in love with; natural disasters; what is going to happen to famous people in the next year.
It only takes a few minutes of reflection to realize how inaccurate nonscientific predictions are. If you listen to the talking heads on the financial channels you will quickly notice that everyone contradicts everyone else. One says the market will soar in the next year, while the next expert says we will have a financial melt down.

Christianity has a long list of dates when momentous events were supposed to happen but didn’t. One of the favorite predictions by "end times" Christians is the date of the world’s end (the rapture): a dozen predictions were made that 1988 would be the year of earth’s demise. Even the great apostle Paul predicted that Jesus would return in his lifetime.

For many years an acquaintance of mine would cull all the tabloids on January 1st in order to list all the predictions psychics made for the coming year. On December 31, he would publish the predictions. Year after year, every psychic failed to make a single prediction that came true. Yet, year after year people continue to be amazed at the non-predictions of psychics.

Only scientists consistently make accurate predictions. Of course they cannot do this with 100% accuracy because the data they use is sometimes faulty or skimpy. What other group or institution could predict within minutes the sunrise for any date in the distant future? What other group devised a tool that can predict—with an 87 accuracy—which newlywed couple will divorce? What other non-scientific organization can accurately determine the age of the earth and its moon?

The answer, of course, is that only scientists can accomplish these amazingly difficult tasks. Many other organizations have attempted through the millennia to explain how nature works. Philosophers have debated and disagreed among themselves how things are. Theologians try to explain life but have no data to back it up so find themselves fractured and disagreeing vigorously between each other.

Since the dawning of humans on our planet people have tried many methods to discover the truth about life and the world in which we live. Humans have tried to increase knowledge by an appeal to authority and this works sometimes. However, smart authority figures still make mistakes because of the biases built into the human brain. This may explain why so many intelligent people will follow the lead of a powerful figure: Jim Jones and Adolf Hitler are only two examples of the power of authority. Authority figures usually have a public platform they can use to constantly pass on ideas and information to their followers. the problem with this is that experiments have shown us that simply repeating a false statement over and over leads people to believe that it is true. Accepting the words of an authority figure must be done cautiously.

Societies have used tradition to establish what we must believe and how we must behave. One problem with tradition is that each new generation wants to put its own stamp on the traditions of their elders. This introduces differences between the old traditions and the new traditions. Another problem is that each culture has its own tradition. No matter how revered the traditions are they often contradict one another — they can’t all be right.

Humans love to decide what is right and true by attending to testimonials. This is why advertising relies so heavily on testimonials. Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist and author of the powerful book Influence, discovered that people make decisions on what to believe or how to act by looking at what other people believe. If they know or like the other person they are even more likely to be persuaded to adopt the other person’s beliefs. Advertising has made us cynical because we all know that famous people are paid enormous sums of money to say what the advertiser wants them to say. Nevertheless, testimonials still convince people to believe the unbelievable.

In more recent times, humans have turned to majority opinion to determine what is right. Although this works sometimes, we have also discovered what is called the "tyranny of the majority"—when a majority of people decide that wrong is right. Slavery is an excellent example of majority opinion going down the wrong path.

Faith is another method for determining what is right and good. Yet even faith has its limitations. Since faith is defined as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," each person or group of individuals can believe what they want without any evidence to back it up. Some people believe that God will heal their sick child even when the parents avoid any medical intervention. This kind of faith almost always ends in disaster and grief. As philosophers often disagree, people of faith disagree, sometimes violently, with people of a differing faith. To guard against someone else’s faith interfering with their own, many people declare that their faith is the only true faith. When thousands of groups demand that their version of faith is right (orthodox) and all other faiths are heretical, something must be amiss. How can everyone be right at the same that everyone is wrong?

A more recent style of discovering truth is the use of personal experience. Have you ever heard someone say, "I don’t care what the evidence is, I know what I believe." People who believe they have seen or experienced a UFO from somewhere outside our solar system or galaxy use this method a lot. "You can tell me all you want about how impossible it is for someone that far away to get to our planet, but you can’t convince me that I didn’t experience it." If personal experience is the final word, we are all in trouble. It only takes two people to be in the same location for a disagreement to arise. With six billion people on planet earth, there is a lot of divergent experience.

All of these methods for finding knowledge are flawed in that they have extremely high error rates. When the scientific method became a viable option, people realized that science was now the method with the lowest error rate. Though not perfect, science has reduced human error dramatically. Scientists are trained to put aside all the above methods for increasing knowledge.

When they do this (even though they also can slip up) the results are stunning. What other organization of people have given us the wonders of modern medicine? No other group. What other collection of humans have discovered how the world operates? There aren’t any. Science is the only organization that has made any significant contribution towards increased life expectancy. Science alone has shown us how vast our universe is. Only science can explain the microscopic world of molecules, atoms and leptons. Will power and determination did not land people on the moon — scientists did that.

More importantly, only science is willing to say, "we were wrong" because that is the nature of science. By definition every scientist is supposed to be skeptical of the work of all other scientists. Science is not a method driven by opinion, faith, authority, or majority vote. No association of scientists voted on whether or not to believe in gravity. The secret of science’s amazing productivity is the reliance on what the evidence says. When scientists disagree it is because the evidence is not yet complete.

Science doesn’t know everything and never will. Science is based on understanding the unknown by letting the unknown speak forth its truths. Once the unknown is known the scientist moves on to the next unknown. Why will science never finish its job? The editors of The Encyclopedia of Ignorance wrote, "Compared to the pond of knowledge, our ignorance remains atlantic. Indeed the horizon of the unknown recedes as we approach it." This is the job of science—to light candles in the darkness of our ignorance.

Psychology — What Is It? Really?

Psychology has many faces. When a person tries to manipulate someone by telling them the opposite of what they really want the other person to do ("Oh, no, you really don’t have to help. I’ll just struggle along the best I can") they are said to be using "reverse psychology."

Some people think being a psychologist means being able to know what someone else is thinking. More than once I have had someone tell me, "If you’re a psychologist, I better be careful what I say so that you don’t try to analyze me."

Other people think that a psychologist is just someone who has good insights and intuitions into people. In this sense everyone is a psychologist because we all have theories about human behavior. This type of untrained psychological insight is called "recipe knowledge."

Helping others work out their problems is sometimes seen as "doing" psychology. There are many different kinds of helpers: non-professional (friends, lay counselors, religiously trained people) and professional (therapists, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists).

These last two are often confusing to many people. They are similar in that both professions try to help people make their lives better and both include post-college school and training for about the same amount of time. The basic difference is that psychiatrists are physicians and can prescribe medications — although psychologists are beginning to make inroads into this once private domain. Psychologists spend their training learning about psychological research and application with some medical (neurological and pharmacological) training. The reverse is true for psychiatrists. Both professions can legally get paid for helping people, teaching, and engaging in research.

So what does psychology really consist of? This is often asked because there are many misconceptions about the core of psychological knowledge. Many people think that the greatest psychologist that ever lived was Sigmund Freud. This is far from true. Psychology existed long before Freud; he was also a medical doctor, not a psychologist. Even though there are psychologists who practice what is known as Freudian psychoanalysis, they are a very small minority of psychologists — less than ten percent.

Since its modest beginnings, psychology has branched out into almost every area of human existence. The American Psychological Association has over fifty divisions and publishes over sixty-five journals. The subject covers a wide variety of human activity. A small sampling includes the psychology of: arts, law, ethnic minorities, military, environment, neuropsychology, gay/lesbian issues, and peace.

When psychologists study some aspect of human existence they use the tools of science. This means they use a technique called "systematic empiricism." It’s a fancy phrase for observing something. This means that when a psychologist "looks" at something and says, "this is what I saw," other psychologists also look to see if they can see the same thing. If others cannot verify the observation, then it becomes merely an interesting idea. All research findings are open to anyone else who would like to take a look.

This type of looking is limited to questions or problems that can be looked at using the tools of science. However, this does not mean that psychologists are uninterested in problems that cannot be tested scientifically. I remember in college that many people thought psychology could never study human emotions like love. Back then it was difficult to study because the tools for doing so were not yet developed. Now it is a subject that is drowning in research studies.

Like other sciences, it takes awhile for research results to trickle down to the average person. Some results hit the media if they have emotional impact and can make money for the media. These reports are a tiny fraction of what is currently happening in psychology at any given point in time. For example, the media has told us that talking on a cell phone while driving is not not a good idea. Psychologists want to know how bad it can be. They have found that the attention needed to talk on the phone while driving decreases the attention one needs to drive safely by a factor of forty percent!

Merely talking to a passenger while driving only has a minimal effect on driving attention. Drivers who use cell phones have the same probability for an accident as someone who has a blood alcohol-level of 0.08. What is more surprising is that this effect is the same whether one is using a hands-free cell phone or not.

What about research for other driving distractions? Did you know that text messaging while driving makes your chance of having an accident six times more likely? If you own an iPod and just scan for music while driving you double your chances of having an accident. Cars with TV screens reduce action times and increase the probability for swerving into another lane. Even drivers who use GPS navigation systems will drive outside their lane twenty-one percent of the time. This is compared to drivers not using such a system — they only stray outside their lane 1.5 percent of the time. Children who talk on cell phones while crossing a street are forty-three percent more likely to be hit by a car.

Psychology has also spent time studying common sense and folk wisdom. For example, most people think that religious people are more likely to be charitable than non-religious people. Research says it ain’t so. The following beliefs are held by many people. Psychology has shown them to be wrong.

• The full moon has an effect on human behavior.


• Opposites attract more than similarities.


• Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.


• Blind people compensate by having supersensitive hearing

If you are interested in reading more about false common beliefs you can check out the book, You Know What They Say . . . ; The Truth About Popular Beliefs by Alfie Kohn.

This has been a quick dash through what is known as the field of psychology. If you would like to know more about psychology as a science you can check out the excellent book, How To Think Straight About Psychology by psychology professor Keith Stanovich.