I said I had to compose a simple quiz on Mendelian genetics today, and here it is. I’m drug-addled right now, so I couldn’t handle anything at all complicated, so you’ll probably laugh at how basic it is. My philosophy with these quizzes is that I just want to make sure they understand the fundamentals, and later (like next week) I give them something more challenging, and this quiz basically summarizes Mendel’s principles.

Being doped to the gills right now just guarantees that I won’t hit them with anything too tricky or difficult.

Briefly summarize Mendel’s first postulate, and explain under what conditions it fails.

Briefly summarize Mendel’s second postulate, and explain under what conditions it fails.

Briefly summarize Mendel’s third postulate, and explain under what conditions it fails.

Briefly summarize Mendel’s fourth postulate, and explain under what conditions it fails.

If you cross true-breeding vestigial winged, brick red eyed flies to true-breeding long winged scarlet eyed flies, what will the F1 progeny look like?
a. vestigial winged, scarlet eyed
b. long winged, scarlet eyed
c. vestigial winged, brick red eyed
d. long winged, brick red eyed
e. none of the above

What will the genotype of the progeny be?
a. vg+ st+
b. vg- st-
c. vg-vg- st-st-
d. vg+vg- st+st-
e. none of the above

If you cross the F1 progeny to each other, what proportion (0-1.0) of the F2s will have long wings?

If you cross the F1s to each other, what proportion (0-1.0) of the F2s will have scarlet eyes?

What proportion (1-1.0) of the F2s will have long wings AND scarlet eyes?

If you do a backcross, crossing a vestigial winged, scarlet eyed F2 to one of its F1 parents, what proportion (1-1.0) of the progeny will be long winged and brick red eyed?

In pea plants, white flowers (w) are recessive to violet flowers (W), constricted pods (c) are recessive to full pods (C), dwarf (d) is recessive to tall (D), and yellow pods (y) are recessive to green pods (Y). In your garden, you have some true breeding pea plants that are tall, white flowered, with full green pods, and another set of true breedings plants that are dwarf and violet flowered, with constricted yellow pods. By some whim of fashion, your friends would like some dwarf white flowered plants with full yellow pods.

You do a cross of your available plants. What will the progeny look like?
a. Tall white flowered with full green pods
b. Dwarf violet flowered with constricted yellow pods
c. Tall violet flowered with full green pods
d. Dwarf white flowered with constricted yellow pods
e. none of the above

None of the F1s meet your friends’ criteria. If you cross the F1s to each other, though, what proportion of the progeny will be dwarf white flowered plants with full yellow pods?

You have 10 friends. How many F2 seeds will you have to collect and grow to adulthood to find a perfect plant for each one?

Then you have a clever idea. What if you backcrossed the F1s to your existing stock of dwarf and violet flowered, with constricted yellow pods? What would be the frequency of dwarf white flowered plants with full yellow pods be in that cross?

At the end of your gardening exercise, you conclude that
a. that was easy! I should volunteer to do more gardening for my friends!
b. maybe I need to get less picky friends

Just letting you all know. I feel like I ought to remind everyone that you carry your self in a bloody gelatinous goo cradled in a bone bowl that you hold about 5 feet above the ground while tottering about on two long sticks, and a fall is a traumatic catastrophe, that no sensible designer would allow to persist. We ought to have four legs, or better yet eight, and our brain ought to be held much closer to the ground. Stupid evolution.

Also, the drugs we take to permit better healing ought not to put you in a stupor that leaves you chronologically confused and incapable of calculating the force generated by a 5 foot fall under an acceleration of 9.8 m/sec². Stupid medicine.

Stupid weather.

Anyway, I’m told it takes 3-5 days to recover from a stupid fall like this. I’m right on track, and insist that I will be recovered enough to inflict more genetics on my students by Monday. I’m supposed to be delivering an online quiz/exercise today, and I’ll have to see how that goes. Would you want to take a quiz composed by an addled brain?

My new year began not with resolutions, but with tentacled monsters menacing 1980s children and their trusted adults. At the crack of dawn, I was on the sofa with my 12-year-old daughter, gripped by the Stranger Things series finale.

Watching TV with my children is one of life’s great joys – and at 12, my daughter is at the in-between age when the pool of shows we both love watching isn’t all that vast yet. Stranger Things bridges the gap between us so perfectly that for a couple hours she forgot I was her desperately uncool mother. I was a fellow adventurer flying with her through the Upside Down, entirely absorbed in the fate of the characters we have watched grow up and grown to love.

This used to be the simplest pleasure: watching TV with your family. One set, one channel and everyone in the same room. The chances of a shared experience diminished once we could watch our favourite shows on a train or during a challenging bowel movement. And this speaks to the great paradox of being a Generation X parent. We are forever explaining to our children that we were exactly like them once, while also insisting that our childhoods were completely different.

We had no internet, no phones, no streaming platforms – yet we were the modern generation. We had E.T. and Star Wars. We skateboarded without helmets and drank drinks that glowed in the dark. We were supposed to remain eternally youthful, preserved in the amber of grunge and VHS. So the creeping suspicion that our children might see us as old is frankly unbearable.

This is why Stranger Things has been such a joy and relief. Set in the 1980s, it should by rights be pure nostalgia syrup: bikes, basements, synths, curly hair that crunches. Yet somehow it surpasses that. The kids in the midwestern town of Hawkins don’t feel like retro relics. They feel startlingly like Gen Z: clever, funny, emotionally alert, but with more face-to-face bullying than online.

Then there’s the particular joy of Winona Ryder in the series. In the 90s, she was my complicated dream girl, the patron saint of dramatic eyeliner. I so wanted to be like her. Now she’s playing a frazzled single mum – just like me (sort of). Watching her character develop, as her anxiety strengthens into iron-willed protectiveness, has been unexpectedly moving. The show is a meeting point of generations, where Winona is still cooler than all of us combined.

That said, sometimes there are little jolts. Like when Will came out as gay, and my daughter informed me that “there was way more homophobia in the 80s, so Will is really brave and really felt he was risking losing his friends”. She said this, very earnestly, as though I wasn’t from that decade myself, when Section 28 set hatred into law. She speaks as though the 80s weren’t a real period of time, but more like a historical reenactment village.

But there’s something beautiful about that too. My daughter feels ownership over the 80s of Stranger Things – not as my past, but as her story-world. She meets me there, half in history, half in fiction. And for a moment, the generational performance drops away. I’m just a person who was once a child, watching children navigate the strangeness of growing up, next to my own actual child doing the same.

The finale of the show left me aching for my own childhood, where there were endless, wide-open skies of possibility. The writers, Matt and Ross Duffer, in their creation of a world that is part Star Wars, part Godzilla and part Eastenders, gave a glorious piece of my childhood back to me for a moment. As Bowie’s “Heroes” rang out in the final credits, I sobbed and said to my daughter, “See darling? The wonder, the magic never leaves us! It just changes shape and we forget to look for it, but it’s there, darling, the wonder is always there.”

She raised her eyebrows and got up, muttering, “Oh my god, Mummy, it’s just a show”.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.

This morning I started walking to work, and I stepped on some ice and went flying, to fall flat on my back, my neck, and my head. I remember that, and I recall curling into a fetal position, and then somehow magically I had gotten up and walked to the science building, climbed the stairs, and gotten in to my office. I have no memory of walking. But a half hour later I texted my wife, “I might need hospital” and blacked out again. Then she showed up in the office, and then somehow I’m in the emergency room. I kept blacking out.

Lots of tests followed. I was concussed but there was no brain bleed and no broken bones. I’m in serious pain, and my rib cage periodically clenches like a fist, but I’m coping with the aid of tramadol and some other muscle relaxant. I have a note from the doctor to excuse me from work for a few days, but come on, my job is not physically demanding, I think I can power through with the assistance of my wheelchair and a few drugs. Because I’m a stupid macho man.

I’m somehow on this email list called “evolutionary leaders,” which is not what it sounds like. This is an organization led by a gang of New Age weirdos, and I only remain on it for the hilarity. I thought I’d share a little bit of my amusement.

This morning I received an announcement that this is the Year of the Fire Horse.

Why the “fire horse”? They don’t explain. I think they just liked the graphic.

They were announcing an event on February 20, which has historical precedent. They’ve done it before!

In 1987
Thousands gathered in sacred sites for the Harmonic Convergence, ushering in a planetary frequency shift.

In 2003
The Harmonic Concordance marked a cosmic alignment of healing and divine feminine resurgence.

You all remember those amazing events with all their wonderful consequences, right? Are you prepared for what will happen on the 20th of February?

Now in 2026
Harmonic Emergence is a planetary activation—an invitation to embody the coherence we’ve long cultivated and step into the living reality that many cultures have prophesied and named throughout centuries: the Unitive Age, The Golden Era, The Age of Aquarius, The Rainbow Prophecy, The Great Turning, The New Dawn, to name a few.

Harmonic Emergence completes the triad. It is the moment we stop preparing for the New Earth—and begin living it.

Simultaneously nebulous and dramatic–impressive. In case you want to participate, the instructions are even more vague.

In addition to attending the online global event we encourage you to amplify your impact locally in some way.
Host a circle or meditation with neighbors, friends, family
Gather around a bonfire, river, or sacred site
Create ceremony, blessing the land and waters
Offer poetry, prayer, silence, music, dance
Organize a potluck or celebration of joy, resilience, and emergence
Hold a moment of stillness with others in your town square or backyard
Bring your community into coherence with song or sacred sound
Anchor the transmission in your unique way

The important part, though, is attending the online global event, which means “sign up for our mailing list which we can monetize.” You could listen to these impressively vacuous people.

The Harmonic Emergence Experience is hosted by the Connection Field, and a luminous circle of musicians, mystics, artists, and planetary stewards—including Jude Currivan, Kristin Hoffmann, Amma Li Grace, Reverend Rhetta Morgan, Julie Krull, Wolf Martinez, Rev. Canon Charles P. Gibbs, Teresa Collins, Marshall Lefferts, Theo Grace, and other ceremonial leaders—this global online experience will be both poetic transmission and living ceremony, holding a field of resonance across time zones.

I think I’ll skip it. It is amazing how little these people will do while claiming to change the world.

The lesson for today includes an introduction to pedigree analysis. You all know the conventions of a human pedigree, right?

I also include an addendum.

Genetics science is gradually catching up and recognizing that trans people exist, although there is still some confusion about precisely how to acknowledge them.

This week we have a quick quiz to test your understanding of sleep and dreaming. Please decide whether each of the following 7 statements are TRUE or FALSE. Here we go….

1) When I am asleep, my brain switches off.

2) I can learn to function well on less sleep.

3) Napping is a sign of laziness.

4) Dreams consist of meaningless thoughts and images.

5) A small amount of alcohol before bedtime improves sleep quality.

6) I can catch up on my lost sleep at the weekend.

7) Eating cheese just before you go to bed gives you nightmares

OK, here are the answers…..

1) When I am asleep, my brain switches off: Nope. When you fall asleep, your sense of self-awareness shuts down, but your brain remains highly active and carries out tasks that are essential for your wellbeing.

2) I can learn to function well on less sleep: Nope. Sleep is a biological need. You can force yourself to sleep less, but you will not be fully rested, and your thoughts, feelings and behaviour will be impaired.

3) Napping is a sign of laziness: Nope. Your circadian rhythm make you sleepy towards the middle of the afternoon, and so napping is natural and makes you more alert, creative, and productive.

4) Dreams consist of meaningless thoughts and images: Nope. During dreaming your brain is often working through your concerns, and so dreams can provide an insight into your worries and help come up with innovative solutions.

5) A small amount of alcohol before bedtime improves sleep quality: Nope. A nightcap can help you to fall asleep, but also causes you to spend less time in restorative deep sleep and having fewer dreams.

6) I can catch up on my lost sleep at the weekend: Nope. When you fail to get enough sleep you develop a sleep debt. Spending more time in bed for a day will help but won’t fully restore you for the coming week.

7) Eating cheese just before you go to bed gives you nightmares: Nope. The British Cheese Board asked 200 volunteers to spend a week eating some cheese before going to sleep and to report their dreams in the morning. None of them had nightmares.

So there we go. They are all myths! How did you score?

A few years ago I wrote Night School – one of the first modern-day books to examined the science behind sleep and dreaming. In a forthcoming blog post I will review some tips and tricks for making the most of the night. Meanwhile, what are your top hints and tips for improving your sleep and learning from your dreams?

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Well, it happened again. I’m mentioned in the Epstein files. Again. You probably saw my first video on this topic and you came away thinking that I’ve spent the past decade being as awesome …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Back in 2008, one of the very first talks I started giving on speaking tours was about “Women’s Intuition,” and how that’s a made-up idea that allows society to continue to think of logic …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: God help me, but in this video, I’m going to defend “AI.” For those who are new to this channel, I have to start by saying this is a real outlier for me. I …

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (William Collins) by Laura Spinney

In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British philologist and judge, made the remarkable discovery that the ancient Indian language Sanskrit resembled Latin and Greek, “bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident”. So was born the knowledge that has now expanded to recognise almost all of the modern European languages as Indo-European – alongside the main northern Indian languages, and some western Asian ones, such as Farsi.

A book by science journalist Laura Spinney now gives us the background on how the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language was discovered, with linguists ingeniously managing to trace dozens of languages back to construct a hypothetical source language, estimated to have been spoken from 4,500 to 2,500 years ago. Most of the book is taken up with the question of where the language originated, and how it managed to spread so successfully across the globe.

The search for the region that birthed the language had proved elusive, until Svante Pääbo, in 2010, developed the technique of ancient DNA sequencing, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2022. Originally used to sequence the Neanderthal genome, the work expanded so rapidly, especially in David Reich’s laboratory at Harvard, that in 2015 the renowned British archaeologist Colin Renfrew wrote that “In just five years the study of ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of world prehistory.”

That same year, a paper was published by Reich’s group, imperiously titled “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe”. This, along with another, similar paper, proclaimed the end of the PIE mystery. The steppe is the vast region of grassland that runs for 5,000 miles from central Europe to Manchuria. The origin of PIE (and hence the languages now spoken by almost half the world’s people) was judged to be the Pontic-Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea – land that is now part of southern Russia and Ukraine. The population of the steppe, the Yamnaya, were animal-herding, horse-riding and chariot-driving nomads.

However, as Spinney explores, the mystery hasn’t been quite resolved. An earlier theory had proposed that PIE originated in Anatolia, land that now makes up the majority of Turkey – and it turns out that both might be correct. In 2022, Reich and his group showed that there had been an earlier migration from the mountains of Armenia, around 5000 BC, to both the Black Sea and Anatolia. In this theory, one branch of an archaic root language became the Anatolian languages, and another – via the Yamnaya culture – went on to produce the plethora of Indo-European languages.

Spinney shows us why this debate matters to us today. One pressing reason relates to false ideas around racial superiority. Yamnaya is the greatest part of the genetic heritage of most white Europeans (including in North America); English is the world lingua franca today; and from 1492 Europeans colonised a large part of the rest of the world. For some people, the belief that so many of our languages were birthed from the Yamnaya lent spurious credence to the notion that it was natural for white Europeans to conquer other peoples. The Nazis were invested in this idea, falsely locating the Indo-European source in Germany.

But how did the Yamnaya manage to dominate other cultures and impose their language? They were highly mobile nomads, and may have been physically stronger. Spinney writes, they are thought to have been “10 centimetres taller than the male farmers they encountered”. But were they violent conquerors? In Britain around 4,000 years ago the population was 90 per cent replaced by people with Yamnaya genes. But Spinney reports that, as with the British colonists in North America, who carried lethal smallpox (to which they were immune), the cause of the population change might have been infectious disease.

As a story emerges, what are we going to make of our exceedingly murky heritage? These issues are only hinted at in Proto but it is the best source – as up to date as possible – on the fantastic odyssey of our languages and the migrating peoples that carried them.

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: It’s almost that time again: time for the BIG GAME, the finale of the 2025-2026 National Football League, the Superb Owl, and as I have mentioned in the past, American football is a problematic …

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I am a huge fan of Dale Carnegie and mention him in pretty much every interview I give. Carnegie was American, born in 1888, raised on a farm, and wrote one of the greatest self-help books of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book has now sold over 30 million copies worldwide.

I first came across his work when I was about 10 years old and read this book on showmanship and presentation….

According to Edward Maurice, it’s helpful if magicians are likeable (who knew!), so he recommended that they read Carnegie’s book. I still have my original copy, and it’s covered in my notes and highlights.

One of my favourite — and wonderfully simple — pieces of advice is to smile more. Since the book was written, psychologists have discovered lots about the power of smiling. There is evidence that forcing your face into a smile makes you feel better (known as the facial feedback hypothesis). In addition, it often elicits a smile in return and, in doing so, makes others feel good too. As a result, people enjoy being around you. But, as Carnegie says, it must be a genuine smile, as fake grins look odd and are ineffective. Try it the next time you meet someone, answer the telephone, or open your front door. It makes a real difference.

In another section of the book, Carnegie tells an anecdote about a parent whose son went to university but never replied to their letters. To illustrate the importance of seeing a situation from another person’s point of view, Carnegie advised the parent to write a letter saying that they had enclosed a cheque — but to leave out the cheque. The son replied instantly.

Then there is the power of reminding yourself how much the people in your life mean to you. Carnegie once asked the great stage illusionist Howard Thurston about the secret of his success. Thurston explained that before he walked on stage, he always reminded himself that the audience had been kind enough to come and see him. Standing in the wings, he would repeat the phrase, “I love my audience. I love my audience.” He then walked out into the spotlight with a smile on his face and a spring in his step.

This is not the only link between Carnegie and magic. Dai Vernon was a hugely influential exponent of close-up magic and, in his early days, billed himself as Dale Vernon because of the success of Dale Carnegie (The Vernon Touch, Genii, April 1973). In addition, in 1947 Carnegie was a VIP guest at the Magicians’ Guild Banquet Show in New York. Here is a rare photo of the great author standing with several famous magicians of the day (from Conjurers Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 4; courtesy of the brilliant Lybrary.com).

Front row (left to right): Elsie Hardeen, Dell O’Dell, Gladys Hardeen, J. J. Proskauer
Back row: E. W. Dart, Terry Lynn, Al Flosso, Mickey MacDougall, Al Baker, Warren Simms, Dale Carnegie, Max Holden, Jacob Daley

If you don’t have a copy, go and get How to Win Friends and Influence People. Some of the language is dated now, but the thinking is still excellent. Oh, and there is an excellent biography of Carnegie by Steven Watts here.

“Let us compare our consciousness to a sheet of water of some depth. Then the distinctly conscious ideas are merely the surface; on the other hand, the mass of the water is the indistinct, the feelings, the after-sensation of perceptions and intuitions and what is experienced in general, mingled with the disposition of our own will that is the kernel of our inner nature.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

For many of us today, it is commonplace to talk about the “unconscious”. We might use it to explain our own behaviour, or that of others, or try to uncover its secrets in therapy. We convince ourselves that a friend who finds a new partner soon after a breakup is “on the rebound” – we know their motivations better than they do, we think. Perhaps we ourselves struggle with relationships, and believe this is due to something that happened in our childhood, rather than that we have not yet met someone who makes us want to commit. Our moods, our hopes, our actions, are ascribed again and again to hidden impulses.

The unconscious is not a new idea. It was of course given huge impetus by the work of Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, but the waning of his influence has had little effect on what we might call his cultural – we might even say “pop-cultural” – influence. From Freudian slips to the search for secret motivations, his ideas are now embedded in the way we talk and live. But there is no hard evidence for the existence of something called “the unconscious”. Is the idea just a way of removing blame from ourselves, and placing it elsewhere?

A brief history of the 'unconscious'

In the late 18th century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant produced his masterwork, The Critique of Pure Reason. In it, he put forward a theory of mind which, for the most part, claims that all cognition is conceptual – that is, conscious. According to Kant, we are – or can be, if we take the time to reflect – fully self-aware, and can proceed by reason. As a founding text of modern philosophy, Kant’s theory has remained incredibly influential. But in the eyes of many philosophers, he left something crucial out of his picture of the human mind – what his contemporary Friedrich Schelling named “the unconscious”.

We might think the idea is uncontroversial. There are, of course, many things of which our brain is unconscious, even when they are being processed. If we were conscious of every sound around us, or everything within our field of vision, we would be overwhelmed – our brain is constantly filtering these things for us. But this is not what Schelling meant by the unconscious – the above examples are better described as nonconscious. For Schelling, the unconscious was not simply the passive activities of a brain (while thinking about other things), but an active and dynamic component of mind – it influences consciousness.

Arthur Schopenhauer took the idea further. In his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, not only is consciousness not the whole story of mind, it is merely the surface. For Schopenhauer, the active force of the universe was what he termed “Will”. The whole of the phenomenal world – that which we can see, touch, smell, which we can apprehend rationally and so on – is actually the manifestation of a huge irrational and impersonal drive. This is also the condition of each individual. While we believe our thoughts and motivations are explicable through rational thought, we are deluded. Rather: “The intellect remains so much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will that sometimes it can only get to know them, like those of a stranger, by spying out and taking unawares; and it must surprise the will in the act of expressing itself, in order merely to discover its real intentions.”

In fact, Schopenhauer was sceptical that we can ever get to know our secret decisions. We can only get at the representations of the truth of the universe, and the truths of ourselves. In this he was heavily influenced by Indian philosophy.

In works such as the sacred canonical text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, dating from at least 3,000 years ago, Schopenhauer’s theory of the world and the mind finds an early parallel, which he was quick to acknowledge. The phenomenal world is, in the Veda, an illusion, with true reality lying behind it – whether we can pull back the veil remains a matter for debate. Similarly, our human self is, in some key sense, ultimately unknowable to itself.

The three 'Master's of Suspicion'

One of Schopenhauer’s great followers – and, later, great critics – Friedrich Nietzsche, is often credited as Freud’s most immediate precursor. As with so much of Nietzsche, his position regarding the unconscious is difficult to pin down. But it remains fascinating. He wanted to question Kant’s idea that we were in control of our chain of thoughts: that when a person goes from thought A to B to C, that is because A led logically to B, which led logically to C. This, to Nietzsche, is to use a current term, “retrofitting” what is actually occurring – finding logical links where none exist. Rather, he argued that “the events which are actually linked play out beneath our consciousness: the emerging sequence and one-after-the-other of feelings, thoughts, etc., are symptoms of the actual event!” The “actual event” is what has happened beneath our thinking, in our unconscious.

In fact, the later French thinker Paul Ricoeur identified Nietzsche as one of what he famously called “the Masters of Suspicion”, each of whom called into question human confidence in our own self-knowledge. The second for Ricoeur was Karl Marx, who saw our minds as created not from within, but out of the social fabric which surrounds us. The third of the three Masters was Sigmund Freud.

Born in 1856, Freud, while being an avid reader of philosophy, trained in medicine before branching off into the field of psychology, establishing his own practice in 1886. While “psychology” as the study of the workings of the mind has been around since the Greeks, the late 19th century saw a great flowering of the discipline, and the Freudian unconscious grew out of a number of similar ideas that were being debated at the time.

Two immediate predecessors were the French psychologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet. Charcot was making groundbreaking discoveries in understanding and treating hysteria, which included the use of hypnosis, while Janet was among the first thinkers to directly link patients’ present conditions to past traumas – in particular traumas which the sufferer had forgotten, or where they were not themselves conscious of a link.

Janet termed this breaking of the link between the trauma and the later symptoms “dissociation”, and placed responsibility in what he called the “subconscious”. Failing to integrate these traumatic experiences with normal selfhood led, he believed, to neurosis. Like Charcot, he used hypnosis, seeing what he called a “magnetic rapport” between the hypnotist and their patient, which allowed for a cure to be performed. This is close to the Freudian model, with hypnosis replaced by “the talking cure”, and the magic rapport being termed “transference”.

Freud's 'internal censor'

But Freud did not just draw on philosophy and psychology as he moved towards his own version of the unconscious. An acute reader of literature, he credited writers such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky with leading him to theories of unconscious motivation, while of course, his famous – or infamous – concept of the Oedipus Complex is drawn from Greek drama.

There was also his religion. As the French writer Clémence Boulouque analyses in her excellent new book, On the Edge of the Abyss: The Jewish Unconscious Before Freud, the Jewish tradition, both religious and secular, has a strong tradition of engagement with the unconscious – from early works of mysticism and Kabbalism (with their beliefs in an underlying reality generally inaccessible to human understanding) through to the work of Schelling himself, who drew on these traditions. While Freud grew more and more to argue that religion is something to be overcome – in his The Future of an Illusion, religion is the illusion – his work remains peppered with religious symbolism.

For all that, Freud’s version of the unconscious is a more unequivocal one than anything that had preceded it. The unconscious is not, as in Schelling’s understanding, just a place where we store various random parts of our memory and experiences, nor just where we store things we believe we have forgotten.

The unconscious that Freud engages with is one where nothing is random, where nothing psychologically unimportant is stored. It is, specifically, a place formed of our repressed traumas. We have, according to Freud, an “internal censor” that is, in some sense, protecting us from harmful thoughts, by forcing them into the unconscious.

What is crucial here is that, for Freud as for Janet, the unconscious is formed by what happens to us. While Schopenhauer’s version of the unconscious can be criticised for being so impersonal that our individual lives become meaningless (to which criticism Schopenhauer, the great pessimist, might have simply said, “Yup”), for Freud the unconscious is perhaps more personal to us than the selves our conscious thoughts make us believe we are. While some of the behaviours caused by the unconscious of person A might give us clues as to the case of person B, our traumas are deeply individual.

Where, who and what is the 'unconscious'?

Fast forward to the 21st century and, despite criticism of his work, Freud’s ideas on the unconscious have, as we have seen, proved influential on popular beliefs around the workings of the mind, not forgetting the fields of psychotherapy and therapeutic practice. However, the very concept of the unconscious remains a problematic one. Many question whether there is such a thing, and if the idea is even comprehensible.

There is of course the question of location – where is the unconscious exactly? – but this mirrors the question of where consciousness is. Others have raised the question of what it means for Freud (and any psychoanalyst) to “know” about something that is, by its own definition, unknowable.

Further, what sort of game is our internal censor playing that it would hide information from us, and then not only leave clues for us as to its existence (such as, in Freud’s case, slips of the tongue or dream symbols), but also allow us enough access to un-censor the material in some way? And in a way that is good for us – why bother to censor it in the first place? What even is an “internal censor”? Is it part of the mind, too? How? Or we might even ask, “Who?”

This is a version of the homunculus fallacy, where there is a person inside a person inside a person. One thinker to raise it was Jean-Paul Sartre. If “we” are censoring material to keep it away from consciousness, how is that happening? Do we have another consciousness inside us – a little person or homunculus – which knows what is or isn’t acceptable, then makes a decision? But wouldn’t they need another one inside them, like a Russian doll? Finally, how is what is to be censored decided?

A bid to evade responsibility?

Sartre, for whom personal responsibility is paramount, thought the idea of the unconscious was the product of the human desire to evade responsibility. Rather than blaming ourselves for any wrongdoing, we are able to pass on the blame to our unconscious, and then, through psychoanalysis, on to those who have shaped it – our parents, for example.

This is Sartre joining the dots between the gods of the Greeks, the primal Will of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and the unconscious of Freud – they are all of them, in his belief, mythical beasts which allow us to evade culpability. As the first humans invented gods to hold responsible for the great mysteries, so have we, but placed them inside us.

This is not to say that Sartre dismissed Freud’s work entirely. In fact he attempted to create a psychoanalysis aligned to Freud’s – just without the unconscious. This he termed existentialist psychoanalysis. He too believed we were shaped by external forces, but there was no extra layer of repression and censoring which needed to be accounted for.
While he admitted, with Nietzsche, that our motivations and indeed our consciousness might be opaque, opacity does not mean something inside us is performing an act of mysticism. Chinese mathematics is opaque, but it can be learnt. As a contemporary of Sartre’s, Eric Fromm, put it:

“The term ‘the unconscious’ is actually a mystification … There is no such thing as the unconscious; there are only experiences of which we are aware, and others of which we are not aware, that is, of which we are unconscious. If I hate a man because I am afraid of him, and if I am aware of my hate but not of my fear, we may say that my hate is conscious and that my fear is unconscious; still my fear does not lie in that mysterious place: ‘the’ unconscious.”

Sartre’s argument is also one against determinism. Given facts A, B and C, Freud seems to suggest in this account, we will have outcome D. Freud believes he can argue, for instance, that a person behaves in a certain way because of this or that childhood trauma. Determinism was anathema to Sartre – we must, in his philosophy, have the ability to shape our own ends.

So, where does this lead us, when we reflect on the workings of our own minds, and the minds of others? We might like to think, as Kant did, that we are entirely rationalist thinkers, or as Sartre did, that we have absolute responsibility. But many of us still speak of, and believe in, the existence of the unconscious. It’s a belief that predates Freud and will undoubtedly continue in different forms for as long as humans try to pin down the self. Much of our burgeoning therapeutic industry relies on the idea, so it’s easy to forget that it is contested.

As Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” The sheer amount of “life” to which we are all exposed makes consciousness seem a thin tool for apprehending it. Perhaps science is not the place to seek the unconscious. Perhaps, like god, the unconscious may simply be a powerful metaphor – one that helps us understand and deal with our experience – rather than a thing?

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.

A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir (Macmillan) by Jacinda Ardern

Jacinda Ardern was the 40th prime minister of New Zealand, but the first to become an internationally recognised figure – certainly, Keith Holyoake and Robert Muldoon never appeared on the cover of Vogue. Ardern became an instant object of fascination because – at least when measured against her fellow national leaders, an overwhelmingly male, middle-aged-and-upwards and mostly somewhat dreary cohort – she seemed different: a 37-year-old woman of generally cheerful demeanour. As the title of her book suggests, Ardern also sees herself as different, in substance as well as style.

Ardern is, at the very least, a different kind of political memoirist. A Different Kind of Power is short on wearisome policy minutiae, and petulant score-settling. The book’s strength is that it depicts, very capably, the human experience of national leadership – its pressures and dilemmas, its drama and slapstick, its gravity and absurdity. The prologue captures the moment amidst the post-election negotiations which brought her to power in 2017 when Ardern discovers she is pregnant.

After which, Ardern starts at the start: her childhood in small rural towns where her father served as a police officer. Ardern clearly believes this was the making of her: the conscientious, empathetic child becoming a prime minister of similar qualities (if the book has one minor but recurring fault, it is an over-emphasis on the “if anything, I just care too much” schtick).

Ardern grows up a Mormon, but drifts from the church in her twenties. It is always illuminating to discover why people reject the faith in which they are raised. It is not an easy call, risking as it does the ostracism of family, friends and community.

Her departure from the Church of Latter-Day Saints is admirable in motivation and execution. She reaches a point at which she cannot accommodate both her belief in equal rights for gay people and the LDS’s institutional animus towards them – but she moves on without bitterness, while maintaining admiration for the good the Mormons do, and the good people among them. She also drily notes that the experience of knocking on strangers’ doors, trying to interest them in new ideas while they’re trying to eat dinner or watch the match, is excellent practice for becoming a campaigning politician.

The most gripping sections of A Different Kind of Power are those that recall the two worst moments of her premiership – neither of which any incoming prime minister of New Zealand would have imagined likely. One was the predicament that confronted everybody in a job like hers in 2020. Though Covid-19 menaced New Zealand less than it did most countries – far-flung islands had a considerable advantage – its prime minister still faced excruciating choices. “For each decision we made,” Ardern writes, “hundreds of new ones presented themselves.” This summary of the infernal complexity of politics would be lost, regrettably, on the sorry mobs of social media-addled bozos who besieged New Zealand’s parliament, having convinced themselves that they were subjects of a tyranny, as opposed to the supernaturally fortunate citizens of a lavishly blessed nation. (“At one point,” Ardern deadpans, “I even saw the glint of literal tinfoil hats.”)

The other defining crisis of Ardern’s term was the terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, in which 51 people were murdered and dozens more injured, by a lone maniac. Ardern deserved the plaudits she received for her calm and thoughtful leadership in the hours and days immediately following this atrocity, but as she tells it here, her initial reaction was less composed. “All of the confusion and frustration I felt,” she writes, “turned into one singular emotion: blinding rage.” A pertinent reminder that despite the perennial voters’ complaint about politicians not saying what they actually think, there are times when it really wouldn’t be helpful, or appropriate.

When Ardern stepped down in 2023, citing exhaustion, cynics claimed that her polling ahead of that year’s election may have been more of a factor. She was, by this time, one of those leaders vastly more popular abroad than at home, and her Labour Party were duly clobbered. But if she was tired, she was entitled to be. The great service A Different Kind of Power performs is that it reminds us that politicians are people – people to whom we give impossible jobs, and of whom we demand impossible results.

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.

In We, a dystopian fable written in 1921-22 and set in the 26th century, the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin imagined a totalitarian regime called “OneState”. The buildings in this urban civilisation are uniformly constructed out of clear glass bricks, through which the sinister “Guardians”, its law enforcers, can monitor their subjects’ every move. As the automaton-like protagonist, D-503, puts it, “We live in broad daylight inside these walls that seem to have been fashioned out of bright air, always on view.” The use of glass is thus a key component of the state’s attempt to annihilate the individual personality in the machine-like collective. Zamyatin’s vision would influence George Orwell’s 1984.

At the turn of the 20th century, the introduction of machines that could manufacture large-scale flat glass led to the increasing use of glass in architecture – for better or worse. Among the vitro-optimists was Paul Scheerbart, an eccentric German writer and critic who produced both a treatise and a novel on the potential of glass architecture. The novel, entitled The Gray Cloth and Ten Per Cent White (1914), imagined a fantastical mid-20th-century society in which superstar architects travelled around the globe in airships, admiring their colossal buildings of coloured glass.

A century after Zamyatin and Scheerbart, glass has, to an extent unprecedented in human history, become ubiquitous not only in architecture but in technology, industry and daily life. Indeed, 2022 was the United Nations International Year of Glass. The official booklet proclaimed a new Glass Age and highlighted the material’s importance in areas including communications, biomaterials, energy generation, sustainability, healthcare and aerospace.

Despite its topicality, however, there is one field in which glass remains undervalued: contemporary art. Artists who work mainly in glass, especially if they actually handle the material themselves, have trouble getting their pieces accepted by the art world. “Glass is usually perceived as a traditional material for craft rather than for fine art galleries,” says Marieta Tedenac, a Prague-based conceptual artist who works in glass and other media.

This sort of attitude perhaps says more about the art world than it does about glass. Be that as it may, in the last few decades several artists, whether working alone or collaboratively, have laboured to demonstrate the potential of glass as an artistic medium – a means of free creative expression – and one which benefits from a combination of imaginative vision and inspiration, scientific and technical knowledge, and painstaking, skilful craftsmanship. Arguably, their achievements show that art in glass has a distinctive contribution to make to our uniquely glassy age.

Glass is certainly important for the digital world and Big Tech, most visibly through its use in computer and smartphone screens. This importance is reflected in the glass-heavy architecture adopted, for instance, in Apple stores. In 2013-14, Google even tried, unsuccessfully, to trademark the word “Glass” in a particular font for its “smart glasses”. It is thus surely significant that when Apple wanted to commission a public artwork for the Apple Park outside its headquarters in Cupertino, California, the proposal it selected in 2021, submitted by the Scottish conceptual artist Katie Paterson and the architectural studio Zeller & Moye, was made of glass.

Completed in 2023, Mirage is an installation of 448 glass columns, each standing two metres tall and weighing 90kg, and varying in colour from deep green to mineral blue to near-transparent. It represents a monumental collaboration involving artist, architects, Apple staff, scientists and glassmakers, as well as sand sourced from 70 deserts around the world. The columns are arranged in a pattern of three wavy lines, which, from a drone’s-eye view, suggest “desert dunes”, according to the creators – or, on a more subversive interpretation, a pixellated corporate logo.

Mirage is full of ambivalence, ostensibly being constructed for the benefit of Cupertino’s citizens, but redolent, beneath the glittering surface, of Apple’s apparent ambitions for technological supremacy – in which glass plays an essential role.

One specific type of glass that has been used effectively in art is optical glass. Made with a range of specialised chemical compositions, it was originally developed for lenses and prisms, including in a military context, which needed to refract light precisely. In the 1960s, Václav Cigler, a leading Czech artist and founder of the Glass in Architecture department at Bratislava University, began experimenting with optical glass. He designed sculptures that were precisely cut, ground and polished to achieve brilliantly reflective surfaces. His pure, minimalist forms – an egg, a pyramid, a cone – distil the essence of shapes found in nature and architecture, functioning as almost mathematical focal points which encourage detached contemplation.

One of the reasons that the art world is suspicious of glass art may be the technical challenges involved in its creation. Some contemporary artists have an awkward relationship with the act of “fabricating” (or making) artworks, following current wisdom that what matters is choosing the material that best suits what the artist wants to say, rather than one that he or she has the most skill in manipulating. Yet this attitude may itself owe something to advances in digital technologies such as graphics, 3D printing and generative AI, compared to which, these days, a human’s ability to make things can seem less impressive. Not only are machines better at fabricating, but the virtual world has become ever more sophisticated and enticing. Why bother to make anything that will be subject to the laws of nature, when you could conjure up impossible objects on the screen?

Last year, Luca Curci Architects, an Italian firm, published the “Floating Glass Museum” project on its website. This quixotic museum, designed with the aid of AI, takes the form of a curved white building with fluorescent panes of glass that floats on a swimming-pool-like sea. Inside are rooms filled with large numbers of huge glass spheres. Some of the spheres even seem to float above the ground, in defiance of gravity – which AI had apparently not quite grasped at the time. It is pretty to look at, and yet the very ease with which scenarios like this can be produced, once the limitations of the empirical world are removed, arguably makes them less interesting.

To return to “reality”, the paradox of glass is that on the one hand it is so elusive, but on the other so tactile, heavy and difficult to handle. Glass can be shattered, even on a smartphone, and be transformed instantly from something smooth and self-effacing into something sharp and destructive that also does violence to the image within it. No wonder the breaking of a mirror has traditionally been associated with bad luck.

An example of an evocative aesthetic effect derived from breaking glass occurs in the 2022 film The Glass Onion, in which, in a climactic scene, the collection of clear glass sculptures belonging to a villainous tech entrepreneur is smashed by his guests – as though the sculptures’ entire raison d’être was their destruction.

The brittleness of glass, the risk of chipping or breakage that could annihilate a work’s perfection in an instant, doubtless contributes to its perception as a challenging, even off-putting artistic medium. On the other hand, this same quality can be used as a metaphor to express contemporary concerns. One example is in Stampede, a collection of clear glass animal paws, hot-sculpted by the New York-based artist Deborah Czeresko. The sculptures are carefully modelled on real paws, both live and stuffed, and include a range of species – bat, camel, mole, ostrich, platypus, penguin. With silent eloquence, the fragility of the material, together with its phantom-like transparency, reminds us of the ease with which animal species may be destroyed. Once gone, it would be as impossible to bring them back to life as to reconstitute a shattered glass paw from its fragments – which, since glass is an amorphous solid, will always be irregular and chaotic.

The rich versatility of glass, both as material and as store of imagery, is further exemplified in the work of the American artist Jon Kuhn, who makes sculptures in the form of geometrical solids containing hundreds of facets of glass that refract the light from within like tiny prisms. He does this by a time-consuming process of cutting and polishing segments of optical glass and then laminating them together in a complex structure.

It is a piece by Kuhn, if I am not mistaken, that appears on a table just behind the eminent philosopher and public intellectual Martha Nussbaum, in a photograph taken in 2017 and published alongside an interview in the New York Review of Books in 2021. The positioning creates a connection between the jewel-like interior of the glass and the clarity and sparkle of the sitter’s mind.

As the work of artists like Cigler, Czeresko or Paterson shows, in our new Glass Age, this material can no longer be dismissed as old-fashioned or suitable merely for craft. Instead, it can be an eloquent means of imaginative creation and self-expression.

In a world where our attention is increasingly occupied by images and events behind the glass screen, the material from which that screen is made, with its combination of smoothness and sharpness, liquidity and solidity, depth and surface, can remind us of how dependent we are, despite ourselves, on physical things.

It can thus function as an empirical and metaphorical barrier – the modern equivalent of a looking-glass – between the digital realm and our own. Finally, a key function of art in our image-conscious age is as status symbol and personality extension. In this respect, while some artists may still dismiss it as a medium, glass can surely give bananas, Lego bricks or even paintings a run for their money.

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.

It’s time for some obscure magic and music hall history.

I’m a fan of a remarkable Scottish conjurer called Harry Marvello. He was performing during the early 1900s and built a theatre in Edinburgh that is now an amusement arcade. I have a previous post on Marvello here and have just written a long article about him for a magic history magazine called Gibecière (the issue is out soon).

I am staging a one-off performance of the World’s Most Boring Card Trick at Magic Fest in Edinburgh on the 27^th December. Tickets here. Anyway, I digress. I have long been fascinated by the psychology of humour and once carried out a project called LaughLab. Billed as the search for the world’s funniest joke, over 350,000 people submitted their top gags to our website and rated the jokes sent in by others. We ended up with around 40,000 jokes and you can read the winning entry here (there is also a free download of 1000 jokes from the project).

It was a great project and is still quoted by media around the world. I ended up dressing as a giant chicken, interviewing a clown on Freud’s couch, and brain scanning someone listening to jokes.

A few years ago, I came up with a theory about Christmas cracker jokes. They tend to be short and not very funny, and it occurred to me that this is a brilliant idea. Why? Because if the joke’s good but you don’t get a laugh, then it’s your problem. However, if the joke’s bad and you don’t get a laugh, then you can blame your material! So, cracker jokes don’t embarrass anyone. Not only that, but the resulting groan binds people together. I love it when the psychology of everyday life turns out to be more complex and interesting than it first appears! As comedian and musician Victor Borge once said, humour is often the shortest distance between people.

I recently went through the LaughLab database and pulled out some cracker jokes to make your groan and bond:

– What kind of murderer has fibre? A cereal killer.

– What do you call a fly with no wings? A walk.

– What lies on the bottom of the ocean and shakes? A nervous wreck.

– Two cows are in a field. One cow: “moo”. Other cow: “I was going to say that”

– What did the landlord say as he threw Shakespeare out of his pub? “You’re Bard!”

– Two aerials got married. The ceremony was rubbish but the reception was brilliant.

– What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back? A stick.

– A skeleton walks into a pub and orders a pint of beer and a mop.

The BBC have just produced an article about it all and were kind enough to interview me about my theory here.

Does the theory resonate with you? What’s your favourite cracker joke?

Have a good break!

First, a quick announcement – I will be presenting a special, one-off, performance of The World’s Most Boring Card Trick at the Edinburgh MagiFest this year. At a time when everyone is trying to get your attention, this unusual show is designed to be dull. Have you got what it takes to sit through the most tedious show ever and receive a certificate verifying your extraordinary willpower? You can leave anytime, and success is an empty auditorium.  I rarely perform this show, and so an excited and delighted to be presenting it at the festival. Details here.

Now for the story. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by a magazine called World of Wonder (WoW). Each week it contained a great mix of history, science, geography and much more, and all the stories were illustrated with wonderful images. I was especially delighted when WoW ran a multi-part series on magicians, featuring some of the biggest names in the business. My favourite story by far was based around the great Danish-American illusionist Dante, and the huge, colourful, double page spread became etched into my mind.

A few years ago, I wrote to the owners of WoW, asking if they had the original artwork from the Dante article. They kindly replied, explaining that the piece had been lost in the mists of time. And that was that.

Then, in July I attended the huge magic convention in Italy called FISM. I was walking past one of the stalls that had magic stuff for sale, and noticed an old Dutch edition of WoW containing the Dante spread. I explained how the piece played a key role in my childhood, and was astonished when the seller reached under his table and pulled out the original artwork! Apparently, he had picked it up in a Parisian flea market many, many, years ago! The chances!

I snapped it up and it now has pride of place on my wall (special thanks to illusion builder Thomas Moore for helping to make it all happen!). My pal Chris Power made some enquirers and thinks that the art was drawn by Eustaquio Segrelles, but any additional information about the illustration is more than welcome.

So there you go – some real magic from a magic convention!

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]