Caroline > Books: 5-star-books‎ (137)

Ridiculous marking to impress Ofsted 191

Special meetings to help teachers do anything to achieve the highest academic standards with their pupils, in an effort to placate Ofsted. 207/8

Michael Gove, when Education Secretary 212

Making exams more 'rigorous' 233

Knife Arch deterrent, after someone is stabbed at school 239

The government misleads about funding schools. 259

Antabuse/Disulfiram and Willpower 97

This is an effective deterrent for those who wake up in the morning determined not to drink, but by the evening have lost their resolve. It turns out that willpower is not an infinite human resource. It's more like exercising a muscle, and it can get tired the more we use it.

Depression and Addiction 78

Schuckit, a professor of experimental psychology, did a study of depressed men. They went into hospital for 4 weeks, during which time they received no treatment for depression, other than stopping alcohol. After one month of not drinking, 80% no longer met criteria for clinical depression.
This finding implies that for the majority, clinical depression was the result of heavy drinking and not a co-occuring depressive disorder. Of course there are explanations for these results....but the robust findings are remarkable given that standard treatments for depression, whether medications or psychotherapy, have a 50% reponse rate.

Depression and Anxiety 45

Anxiety is significantly more prevalent and impairing in high-income countries than in low or middle income countries.
The number of new cases of depression worldwide increased 50 % between 1990 and 2017. The highest increases in new cases were seen in regions with the highest income, especially in North America.

Dopamine 49

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. It may play a bigger role in the motivation to get a reward than the pleasure of the reward. Genetically engineered mice unable to make dopamine will not seek out food, and will starve to death even when food is placed just inches away from their mouth. Yet if the food is put directly into their mouth, they will chew and eat the food, and seem to enjoy it.
With repeated exposure to the same or similar pleasure stimulus, in initial deviation to the side of pleasure (on the pleasure/pain see-saw) gets weaker and shorter and the after-response to the side of pain gets stronger and longer. A process scientists call neuro-adaptation. With repetition, we need more of our drug of choice to get the same high we initially got.
Needing more of a substance to feel pleasure, or experiencing less pleasure at a given dose is called tolerance.
People on high doses of opioid therapy (OxyContin, morphine, fentanyl etc) for chronic pain, find that their pain gets worse and worse over time. Why? Because exposure to opioids had caused their brain to resent its pleasure-pain balance to the side of pain. Now they find that their original pain was worse, and they had new pain in parts of their body that used to be pain free.
This phenomenon, widely observed and verified by animal studies, has come to be called opioid-induced hyperalgesia. Algesia means sensitivity to pain. What's more, when these patients tapered off opioids, many of them experienced improvements in pain.
55
Neuroscientist Nora Volkow and colleagues have shown that heavy, prolonged consumption of high-dopamine substances eventually leads to a dopamine deficit state. She compared the brains of healthy controls v the brains of people who had given up taking heavy drugs 2 weeks ago. In the healthy controls the reward and motivation part of the brain was able to light up (indicating high levels of dopamine neurotransmitter activity. In the people who recently gave up drugs that part of the brain was showing little or no activity.
57
In the two years in which I compulsively consumed romance novels, I eventually reached a place where I could not find a book I enjoyed. it was as if I had burned out my novel-reading pleasure centre, and no book could revive it.

The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.
My patients with addiction describe how they get to a point where their drug stops working for them. They get no high at all any more. Yet if they don't take their drug, they feel miserable. The universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance are anxiety, irritability, insomnia and dysphoria.
A pleasure-pain balance tilted to the side of pain is what drives people to relapse even after sustained periods of abstinence. When our balance is tilted to the pain side we crave our drug just to feel normal (ie get a level balance.)
Here's the good news. If we wait long enough, our brain (usually) re-adapts to the absence of the drug and we re-establish our baseline homeostasis: a level balance. Once our balance is level, we are again able to take pleasure in everyday simple rewards. 60

Once we get the anticipated reward, brain dopamine firing increases well abou tonic baseline. But if the reward we anticipated doesn't materialize, dopamine levels fall well below baseline. Which is to say, if we get the expected reward, we get an even bigger spike. If we don't get the expected reward, we experience an even bigger plunge.

How does cue-induced craving translate to our pleasure-pain balance? The balance tips to the side of pleasure (a dopamine mini spike) in anticipation of future reward, immediately followed by a tip to the side of pain (a dopamine mini deficit) in the aftermath of the cue. The dopamine deficit is craving and drives drug-seeking behaviour.

Dopamine Fast 79

(For instance stopping drinking, social media activity or gambling for a month.)
I never suggest a dopamine fast to individuals who might be at risk to suffer life-threating withdrawal if they were to quite all of a sudden (eg severe alcohol, benzodiazepine or opioid dependence.) For those patients, medically monitored tapering is necessary.
Sometimes, patients ask if they can swap one drug for another: cannabis for nicotine, video games for pornography. This is seldom an effective long-term strategy.
Any reward that is potent enough to tip the see-saw balance towards pleasure can itself be addictive, thereby resulting in trading one addiction for another (cross addiction) Any reward that is not potent enough won't feel like a reward, which is why when we're consuming high-dopamine rewards, we lost the ability to take joy in ordinary pleasures.
A minority of patients (about 20%) don't feel better after the dopamine fast. That tells me that the drug wasn't the main driver of the psychiatric symptom and that the patient likely has a co-occuring psychiatric disorder that will require its own treatment.

Gastric Bypass Surgery 98

One in four gastric bypass surgery recipients develops a new problem with alcohol addiction.
Most people who are obese have an underlying food addiction, which is not adequately addressed with surgery alone. These people don't get the behavioural and psychological interventions they need to help them change their eating habits. Hence many of them resume eating in unhealthy was, expand their now smaller stomachs, and end up with medical complications and the need for repeat surgeries. When food is no longer an option, many switch from food to another drug, like alcohol.

Genetic Inheritance & addiction 20

The risk of addiction increases if we have a biological parent or grandparent with addiction, even when we're raised outside the addicted home.

Honesty 205

I am convinced as a parent that I can and should emphasize honesty as a core value in raising my children.
For me honesty is a daily struggle There's always a part of me that wants to embellish the story just the slightest bit, to make myself look better, or to make an excuse for bad behaviour. Now I try hard to fight that urge.
Although difficult in practice, this handy little tool - telling the truth - is amazingly within our reach. Anyone can wake up on any given day and decide, "Today I won't lie about anything." And in doing so, change their lives for the better
224 If we are open and honest with our children about our struggles, we create a space for them to be open and honest about their own. We must also be ready to admit when we are wrong in our interactions with them and with others. We must embrace our own shame and be willing to make amends.
234 Honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a mindset of plenty.

Medication problems in the long term.

Patients with anxiety and insomnia who take benzodiazepines and other sedative-hypnotics daily for more than a month may experience worsened anxiety and insomnia.
Patients with pain who take opioids daily for more than a month are at increased risk not only for opioid addiction but also for worsened pain. (opioid-induced hyperalgesia.
Medications like Adderall and Ritalin prescribed for attention deficit disorder promote short-term memory and attention, but there is little or no evidence for enhanced long term improvement. Public health psychologist Gretchen LeFever Watson has written "Compelling new evidence indicates that ADHD drug treatment is associated with deterioration in academic and social-emotional functioning.
Recent data show that even antidepressants may lead to tolerance and dependence, and possibly even make depression worse over the long haul, a phenomenon called tardive dysphoria.

Mental Illness & addiction 20

Mental illness is also a risk factor for addiction, although the relationship between the two is unclear: Does the mental illness lead to drug use, does drug use cause or unmask mental illness, or is it somewhere in between.

80 Co-occuring psychiatric disorders should be treated concurrently with any form of addiction (or withdrawal from an addictive substance), Managing addiction without also addressing other psychiatric disorders typically leads to bad outcomes for both.

Mental illness in wealthy countries 37

Over the past 3 decades, I have seen growing numbers of patients who appear to have every advantage in life - supportive families, quality education, financial stability, good health - yet develop debilitating anxiety, depression and physical pain.

Moderation 86

Emerging evidence suggests that some people who have met criteria for addiction in the past, especially those with less severe forms of addiction, can return to using their drug of choice in a controlled way In my clinical experience, this has been true.

Older women and alcohol. 20

Between 2002 and 2013 diagnosable alcohol addiction rose by 50% in older adults (over the age of sixty-five) and 84 percent in women, two demographic groups who had previously been relatively immune to this problem.

Pain 148
Hormesis is a branch of science that studies the beneficial effects of administering small to moderate doses of noxious and/or painful stimuli such as cold, heat, gravitational changes, radiation, food restriction and exercise.
Intermittent fasting has become somewhat popular as a way to lose weight and improve well-being. Not long ago fasting behaviours would have warranted the label "eating disorder, but in many circles it is considered normal and even healthy.
Exercise increases many of the neurotransmitters involved in positive mood regulation. Just walking for 30 minutes a day can effect mood, anxiety, cognition, energy and sleep, & has a more profound effect than any medication.
ECT is still practised today to good effect, although much more humanely than it used to be, with muscle relaxants paralytics to prevent painful contractions. Anaesthetics allow patients to remain asleep and mostly unconscious throughout the procedure. So, although not painful as such, ECT provides a hormetic shock to the brain, which in turn spurs a broad compensatory response to reassert homeostasis.

Prohibition verses Availability 20

Increased access to addictive substances may be the most important risk factor facing modern people. We all fall prey to the vortex of compulsive overuse. For instance the cigarette-rolling machine invented in 1880, made it possible to go from 4 cigarettes rolled per minute to a staggering 20,000
Prohibition - the ban on selling alcoholic beverages in the US from 1920 - 1933, led to a sharp decrease in the number of Americans consuming and becoming addicted to alcohol. Rates of public drunkenness and alcohol-related liver disease decreased by half during this period.
There were unintended consequences of course, such as the creation of a large black market run by criminal gangs. But the positive impact of Prohibition on alcohol consumption and related morbidity is widely under-recognised.
The reduced drinking effect of Prohibition persisted through the 1950s. Over the subsequent thirty years, as alcohol became more available again, consumption steadily increased.
By the 1990s, the percentage of Americans who drank alcohol increased by almost 50 percent, while high-risk drinking increased by 15 percent.

Trauma: Social Upheaval: Poverty

These also contribute to addiction risk. Drugs become a means of coping and lead to epigenetic changes - heritable changes to the strands of DNA outside of inherited base pairs - affecting gene expression in both an individual and their offspring.

Victimhood versus taking responsibility. 186

Patients who tell stories in which they are frequently the victim, seldom bearing responsibility for bad outcomes, are often unwell and remain unwell. They are too busy blaming others to get down to the business of their own recovery. By contrast, when my patients start telling stories that accurately portray their responsibility, I know they're getting better. Even when people have been victimized, if the narrative never moves beyond victimhood, it's difficult for healing to occur.
One of the jobs of a good psychotherapy is to help people tell healing stories. Even if we can take responsibility for the event itself, we can take responsibility about how we react to it in the here and now. We are then empowered to move forward with your lives.

White Working Class & death via addiction. 30

Middle-aged white Americans without a college degree are dying younger than their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. The top three leading causes of death in this group are drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide.

SOME OF THE THINGS THAT DIFFERENT BIRD SPECIES CAN DO
* Anticipate the arrival of a storm
* Find it's way to a place it has never been before, though it may be thousands of miles away.
*Imitate the complex songs of hundreds of other species.
*Hide tens of thousands of seeds over hundreds of square miles and remember where it put them six months later.

MANY TALENTS LIE WITH SPECIFIC SPECIES
* Pigeons are outstanding when it comes to navigating skills.
* Mockingbirds and thrashers can learn and remember hundreds more songs than most of their fellow songbird species.
* Scrub jays and nutcrackers have extraordinary memories for where they put things.

BLUE AND BLACK TITS AND MILK BOTTLES 16
These tits picked up the knack of opening the caps of milk bottles delivered to people's doorsteps, to get at the rich cream on top (Birds can't digest the carbohydrates in milk, only the lipids.) The tits first learnt this trick in the town of Swaythling in 1921 and by 1949 the behaviour had been noted in hundreds of localities throughout the UK. The technique had apparently spread by one bird copying another.

MOVEMENT IN FLYING BIRD FLOCKS. 42
This used to be thought to be done telepathically, but this is not the case. Instead, each bird is interacting with up to seven close neighbours, making individual movement decisions based on maintaining velocity and distance from fellow flock members and copying how sharply a neighbour turns, so that a group of, say, four hundred birds can veer in another direction in a little over half a second. What emerges is almost instantaneous ripples of movement in what appears to be one living curtain of bird.

CHICKADEES AND FOOD MEMORY 58/9 & 75
Chickadees are possessed of a prodigious memory. They stash seeds and other food in thousands of different hiding places to eat later and can remember where they put a single food item for up to six months.
All of this with a brain roughly twice the size of a garden pea. Interestingly though chickadees have double the brain size of birds in the same body-weight range, such as a flycatcher or a swallow.

Mountain chickadees who live in the colder, snowier conditions of higher elevations have bigger hippocampi than their lower-elevation chickadee peers. Those from the highest peaks in the Sierra Nevada, for instance, have almost twice the number of hippocampal neurons than their peers living only 650 yards lower down. (They are also better problem solvers.) This makes sense. At higher elevations, where it stays cold longer, birds must store more seeds and remember where they put them. Recovering caches is not so critical in milder climates.

PECTORAL SANDPIPERS AND LACK OF SLEEP 71
Most birds, like us, need regular sleep, but pectoral sandpipers forgo sleep for weeks in favour of constant activity under the perpetual light of the Arctic summer.

MIGRATING BIRDS HAVE SMALLER BRAINS.76
This makes sense, as a brain that consumes a lot of energy and develops slowly would be too costly for birds that travel a lot. It may also be that a hardwired brain is more useful for birds that move between vastly different habitats than learned, innovative behaviour.

INTELLIGENCE AND NEURONS IN THE BRAIN 77
The brains of birds may be small, says Brazilian neuroscientist Herculano-Houzel, but they "pack surprisingly high numbers of neurons - really high - with densities at least akin to what we find in primates. And in corvids and parrots, the numbers are even higher."

Much depends on where the neurons are. Herculano-Houzel has shown that elephant brains have three times the number of neurons found in the human brain, but 98 percent of them are in the elephant cerebellum , where they may be involved in control of the trunk. An elephant's cerebral cortex on the other hand, which is twice as big as ours, has only a third the number of neurons found in our cerebral cortex. To Herculano-Houzel, this suggests that what determines cognitive abilities is not the number of neurons in the whole brain, but in the cerebral cortex - or its equivalent in birds.

NEW CALEDONIAN CROWS & TOOLS 100 & 122 & 136

New Caledonia - a group of islands between Australia and New Zealand.
These crows are exceptional with tools. Only chimps and orangutans match or exceed their sophistication - and they surpass the primates with hooking tools. It may be that their beaks, which are straight and conical - free of fancy hooks or curves like other crows - have given them an advantage in this respect.
They will also add things like pebbles to a container of water, if they are thirsty and the water level is too low for them to reach. They will go out of their way to drop heavy objects as opposed to light objects in the the water.
Researchers are curious as to whether the birds' intelligence generated their interactions with tools, or whether it was through these interactions with tools that their intelligence increased.

DO BIRDS PLAY 128/9
This seems restricted to about 1% of about 10,000 species. Usually birds with a larger brain and with a longer developmental period - such as crows and parrots.
It may reduce stress, aid social bonding, or just be done for pleasure. Members of the parrot family seem to be an irrepressibly playful lot. Sometimes they get so lost in their fun they fall off their perches.
The kings of of play are keas, parrots from New Zealand. They are bold, curious and ingeniously destructive. Clowns or hooligans depending upon how you regard them. One flew into someone's camper van whilst occupied and stole a cloth bag from the dashboard containing $1,100. It was not recovered.

SOCIAL RELATIONS 142
The world's thousands of bird species display a dazzling array of social organisations. Some, such as the belted kingfisher are solitary and ferociously territorial, hanging out only in mated pairs. others are born for group company, rooks, for instance. Kind eiders, large ducks of Arctic coastal waters love to mingle and gather in prodigious collective flocks of up to ten thousand.

MAGPIES & THEIR REFLECTIONS 145.

Magpies recognise their own image in a mirror, a form of self-awareness that we once believed was restricted to humans and a handful of other sophisticated social mammals.

GIVING GIFTS 146

Reciprocity in the form of gift giving is another kind of social behaviour unusual in non-humans but fairly common among certain birds, including crows. In recent years, tales have rolled in from all over the country of crows offering up gifts of jewellery, hardware, shards of glass etc to humans who feed them.

SOCIAL LEARNING 159
Social learning clearly plays a major role in the lives of birds, and not only in the food domain. Female zebra finches learn about mate choice from other females.... Then there's the matter of learning to recognise predators and threats. Crows have even been found to pass along to other crows information about people whom they deem dangerous (eg people who have captured them in the past.)

BIRDS VOCALIZING AND SINGING 199
All birds vocalize, the call to warn of predators and to identify family and so forth. Calls are typically short, simple and innate....But singing is something special. Close to half the birds on the planet are songbirds. Birds that sing do so because the have a unique instrument called syrinx and this has only recently been identified. The brain is involved as well - enabling birds to perform vocal gymnastics to an astonishing degree.

BIRD PAIRINGS SEXUAL BEHAVIOURS.

Birds used to be considered the model of sexual monogamy, but DNA analysis has revealed that extra-pair copulations occur in about 90 percent of bird species. In any given nest, up to 70 percent of chicks are not sired by the male caring for them. Pair-bonded birds may be socially monogamous, but they're rarely sexually monogamous.

BIRDS COMFORTING ONE ANOTHER 188.
For 2 years young ravens were studied. It was noticed that after a fight or scuffle between ravens, by-standing ravens offered consoling gestures to the victim of a conflict. The gestures, offered most often by a partner or an ally, included sitting side by side with the victim, preening it, bill twining, or touching its body gently with the bill while uttering soft, low 'comfort' sounds. The scientists studying the birds felt this might be indicative that ravens may be responsive to the emotional needs of others.

BIRDS IMITATING HUMAN SPEECH 206
This is very difficult, but some birds have an exceptional gift for it. The African grey parrot, the mynah and the cockatoo. We form vowels and consonants with our lips and tongue - among the strongest muscles per inch in the human body. For birds, with no lips and with tongues that generally aren't used for making sounds, it's a tall order to take on the nuances of human speech. Parrots are unusual in that they use their tongues while calling and can manipulate them to articulate vowel sounds.

BIRDS IMITATING THE SPEECH OF OTHER BIRD SPECIES 208
Mockingbirds imitating songs is a marvel. A tally of one reached twenty imitations in one minute.

BIRDSONG GENERALLY 220
This tends to be of much better quality when a male is singing to a female.

SONGBIRDS 231
Many of them sing in regional dialects.

BOWERBIRDS 247
These are noted for their outstanding intelligence. Large brains, long lives and extended periods of development (it takes them 7 years to mature.) They are the only animal on the planet besides humans, which use objects in extravagant displays to attract mates.
Very few male bower birds are able to attract mates, but the few that do will mate with up to twenty or thirty different females.
The nature of their displays change in different areas, but they are incredibly intricate. The satin bowerbird favours blue decorations. If a red object is placed amongst their blue display they immediately remove it and drop it out of sight.

BIRD NAVIGATION 277
This is a very big issues, which may involve a wide range of senses, including sensing, learning and mapping. Pigeons are better than most people - in fact even better than some mathematicians - at solving certain statistical problems - like The Monty Hall Dilemma.
They are also very good at distinguishing arbitrary visual stimuli - discerning between the paintings of Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso and Chagall. They can even read emotional expressions on people's faces. They can learn and recall more than one thousand images, storing them in long term memory for a least a year.
At its peak in World War II, the US Pigeon Service possessed fifty-four thousand birds. "We breed for intelligence and stamina," explained one handler.

The Chinese have lately built a force of ten thousand messenger pigeons to deliver military communications between troops stationed along their boarders, in case of "electromagnetic interference or a collapse in our signals", as the officer in charge of the pigeon army explains.

They use a sort of map and compass strategy to negotiate their way home, consisting of multiple elements involving different types of information - sun, stars, magnetic fields, landscape features, the wind and the weather. Even smell/scent may be involved. Memories are important as well.

HUMMINGBIRDS 303
They harvest from hundreds of flowers a day, and they keep track of the flowers they have taken nectar from so they don't have a wasted journey.

HOUSE SPARROWS 346
These are very innovative birds. They have been observed foraging for insects late at night in the floodlights around the observation floor of the Empire State Building, eighty stories up. The often pluck feathers from living pigeons to line their nests, and have been known to use old cigarette butts as well (the nicotine in them acts as a repellent to many parasites.) All over the world they are incredibly innovate in getting food - and in the wide range of foodstuffs that they will eat. They are also gregarious, sometimes operating in very large groups. Finally, they are happy with novelty and trying new things. All of this has made them well suited to city life.

WILD TURKEYS 373
A new study comparing the genomes of birds suggests that, genetically speaking, the turkey is closer to its dinosaur ancestors than any other bird is; its chromosomes have undergone fewer changes than other birds since the days of feathered dinosaurs.

Suicide.
In 2016, someone committed suicide in British prisons once every three days. While Aitkins was at Wandsworth a young man called Osvaldas Pagirys was found with a noose around his neck on 5 different occasions. The authorities treated his mental illness as bad behaviour, and he was sent to the punishment block. The sixth time he hung himself he succeeded in killing himself.

Spice
Spice is a drug very common in British prisons. It's a synthetic version of cannabis that is undetectable by sniffer dogs and can even be soaked in paper and posted. A report found that one in five addicts actually picked up their habit while serving their sentence.

Over-population
Wandsworth was designed to house 963 inmates, but in 2016 housed over 1500.

Upkeep of prison
Infrastructure and repairs at the prison were supposed to be handled by a company called Carillion, who won the contract in 2012. It emerged they underbid by 15 million. The state of the prison was appalling. Even the water in the showers veered between boiling or freezing. The company collapsed in 2017, leaving prisons in a far worse state than when they had taken over. Due to lack of staff, everyday facilities were also in a dreadful state "Rubbish has gone uncollected for weeks, there are rats everywhere and the laundry stinks of sewage."

Education
Half the inmates in British jails are functionally illiterate and up to 30% have learning difficulties.

Phones
Making phone calls from the landline phones in prisons was extortionate. It cost 37p a minute to call an external mobile. Also all calls were recorded. As a result most of the prisoners had mobile phones, even though they were banned. They were also needed for drug trafficking. Cash rarely changed hands inside the jail, instead, payments were made via bank transfer to a designated account, usually by partners or friends, and phones were needed to organise this.

Prison guards
The prison warders were desperately short-staffed. There were dozens of staff vacancies. The author said "I'd rather clean sewers than work in Wandsworth. Most of the screws...worked very hard, and faced daily violence and trauma." Former prison governor John Podmore said "New recruits must be found for £9 per hours, and then there's the training, which at 10 weeks is the shortest of any jurisdiction across the world, with entry requiring no basic minimum qualifications."

Remand prisoners
In 2017 58% of remand prisoners nationally did not go on the be sentenced to prison. The psychological impact could be devastating. Remand prisoners constituted only 13% of the total prison population in 2014, but made up 46% of suicides.

Suicides
The Ministry of Justice statistics revealed that in 2016 119 inmates killed themselves, one every three days.

Prisoner release
Prisoners being released without accommodation are just given a list of homeless shelters and £47.00.

Government involvement
Over Aitkins 30 month stay in Wandsworth there were five different Justice Secretaries. The situation has been heavily criticised by a former Chief Inspector of Prisons "One of the main causes of the failure of the prison system is the lack of dedicated, knowledgeable and experienced leadership....The chief executives...are politicians, who have no working knowledge of the Prison Service, no management experience of leading large complex organisations, and who create instability of purpose and policy with their frequent replacements."

* He disagreed with the religious philosophy of the time, which was 'Nominalism', or the concept that those who pleased God with good works would be rewarded with grace through the church. Instead Luther became convinced that salvation and righteousness were received from God on the basis of faith alone, not human effort. Rather than human attempts at good works leading to God's eventual favour, Martin came to believe that people received righteousness as a gift from God through faith, and were thus enabled to do good works.

* He questioned the pope for being so wealthy, whilst taking money from the poor laity in order to build St Peter's Basilica.

* He said that he didn't believe the pope to be infallible, neither did he believe cthat ouncils of church leaders were immune from error. He felt that the only true head of the church was Christ.

* He felt that people should be able to read the Bible for themselves. To that end he translated the New Testament into German in 1522. He went on the translate the whole of the Bible into German, with the first edition being published in 1534.

* He felt that the laity should be able to fully participate in church worship, This meant conducting the Mass in German as well as making other changes to the liturgy.

* He introduced formal hymns into services. Medieval Germany had a history of folk hymns and Luther began to borrow or re-write some of these for the congregations. He also wrote his own hymns as well.

"The back of your head is a modest ligament, not found on other apes, that instantly betrays what it is about us that allowed us to thrive as a species. It is the nuchal ligament and it has just one job: to hold the head steady when running. And running – serious, dogged, long-distance running – is the one thing we do superlatively well. We are not the speediest of creatures, as anyone who has ever chased a dog or cat or even an escaped hamster will know. The very fastest humans can run about 20 miles an hour, though only for short bursts. But put us up against an antelope or wildebeest on a hot day and allow us to trot after it, and we can run it into the ground. We perspire to keep cool, but quadrupedal mammals lose heat by respiration – by panting. If they can't stop to collect themselves, they overheat and become helpless. Most large animals can't run for more than about 15 kilometres before they drop. That our ancestors could also organize themselves into hunting parties, to harry quarry from different sides or drive prey into confined spaces, made us all the more effective.

Fossil evidence suggests that early hominins were walking by about six million years ago, but needed an additional four million years to acquire the capabilities for endurance running and, with it, persistence hunting.

Unlike the rest of the body, the palms don't sweat in response to physical exertion or heat, but only from stress. Emotional sweating is what is measured in lie-detector tests.

Before penicillin, the closest thing to a wonder drug that existed was Salvarsan, but it was effective against only a few things, principally syphilis, and had a lot of drawbacks. For a start, it was made from arsenic, so was toxic, and treatment consisted of injecting roughly a pint of solution into the patient's arm once a week for 50 weeks or more.

The (current) rate of antibiotic withdrawals – because they don't work any more or have become obsolete – is twice the rate of new introductions. The obvious consequence of this is that the arsenal of drugs we have to treat bacterial infections has been going down and there is no sign of it stopping. What makes this much worse is that a great deal of our antibiotic use is simply crazy. Almost three-quarters of the forty million antibiotic prescriptions written each year in the United States are for conditions that cannot be cured with antibiotics..... Even more appallingly, in the United States 80 per cent of antibiotics are fed to farm animals, mostly to fatten them. Fruit growers can also use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops. In consequence, most Americans consume second-hand antibiotics in their food ... without knowing it.

On some diseases penicillin now has no effect at all. In consequence, the death rate from infectious diseases has been climbing and is back to the level of about forty years ago...... As a doctor put it to me: ‘We are looking at a possibility where we can't do hip replacements or other routine procedures because the risk of infection is too high.’ The day when people die once again from the scratch of a rose thorn may not be far away.

Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost. Most people in the Western world, by the time they reach adulthood, have received between five and twenty courses of antibiotics. The effects, it is feared, may be cumulative, with each generation passing on fewer microorganisms than the one before.

Producing new drugs is expensive. All but two of the eighteen largest pharmaceutical companies in the world have given up the search for new antibiotics. People take antibiotics for only a week or two. Much better to focus on drugs like statins or antidepressants that people can take more or less indefinitely.

Funk didn't discover vitamins but merely speculated, correctly, as to their existence. But since no one could produce these strange elements, many authorities refused to accept their reality. Sir James Barr, president of the British Medical Association, dismissed them as ‘a figment of the imagination’

There is disagreement over what precisely we do need. In America, the daily recommended dose of vitamin E is 15 milligrams, but in the UK it is 3 to 4 milligrams – a very considerable difference.

Even today vitamins are an ill-defined entity. The term describes 13 chemical oddments that we need to function smoothly but are unable to manufacture for ourselves. Though we tend to think of them as closely related, they mostly have little in common apart from being useful to us.

Smell is said to account for at least 70 per cent of flavour and maybe even as much as 90 per cent.

"When you eat, most of the aroma reaches you not through your nostrils but by the back staircase of your nasal passage, what is known as the retronasal route – as opposed to the orthonasal route up your nose.

Many tests have been done to demonstrate how easily we are fooled with respect to flavour. In a blind taste test at the University of Bordeaux students in the Faculty of Oenology were given two glasses of wine, one red and one white. The wines were actually identical except that one had been made a rich red with an odourless and flavourless additive. The students without exception listed entirely different qualities for the two wines. That wasn't because they were inexperienced or naive. It was because their sight led them to have entirely different expectations, and this powerfully influenced what they sensed when they took a sip from either glass. In exactly the same way, if an orange-flavoured drink is coloured red, you cannot help but taste it as cherry.

The appendix, has no certain purpose but kills about 80,000 people around the world every year when it ruptures or grows infected..... Now the best thinking is that the appendix serves as a reservoir for gut bacteria.

It isn't just a big brain that allows us to speak, but an exquisite arrangement of anatomy. One reason chimpanzees can't talk is that they appear to lack the ability to make subtle shapes with tongue and lips to form complex sounds.

The bottom line is that we ended up with brains big enough to handle complex thoughts and vocal tracts uniquely able to articulate them."

Stuttering affects 1 per cent of adults and 4 per cent of children. For reasons unknown, 80 per cent of sufferers are male. It is more common among left-handers than right-handers, especially those who have been made to write right-handed.

For many, the stammering miraculously ceases when they sing their words, speak in a foreign language or talk to themselves. The majority of speakers recover from the condition by their teenage years and females seem to recover more easily than men .

Most other mammals never suffer strokes, and for those that do it is a rare event. But for humans, it is the second most common cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization. Why this should be is something of a mystery.

The 18th & 19th centuries were very bad....medicine sank into a kind of dark age. You could hardly imagine more misguided and counterproductive practices than those to which physicians became attached in the eighteenth century, and even much of the nineteenth.

Bleeding people was one of those aberrations. It may seem to us self-evidently foolhardy to bleed and pummel a person who is already severely ill, but such practices lasted an extraordinarily long time. Bleeding was thought to be beneficial not just for illness, but to instil calm. Frederick the Great of Germany was bled before battle just to soothe his jangled nerves. Bleeding bowls were treasured within families and passed on as heirlooms.... Why did bleeding persist for so long? The answer is that until well into the nineteenth century most doctors approached diseases not as distinct afflictions, each requiring its own treatment, but as generalized imbalances affecting the whole body. They didn't give one drug for headaches and another for, say, ringing in the ears, but rather endeavoured to bring the whole body back into a state of equilibrium by purging it of toxins through the administration of cathartics, emetics and diuretics, or by relieving the victim of a bowl or two of blood. George Washington was probably killed this way by his doctors.

Altogether humans are afflicted by some fifty types of autoimmune disease, and the numbers are rising. Take Crohn's disease... When it was recognised in 1932 it affected on person in 50,000..... Then it became one in 10,000, then one in 5,000. Today the proportion is one in 250 and still rising. Why this has happened no one can say. Daniel Lieberman suggests that the overuse of antibiotics and the consequent depletion of our microbial reserves may have made us more susceptible to all autoimmune diseases, but acknowledges that the 'causes remain elusive'.

Equally bewildering is that autoimmune diseases are grossly sexist..... Altogether, 80 per cent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don't is not at all clear.

A person who smokes cigarettes regularly (about a pack a day) is fifty times more likely than a non-smoker to get cancer.... Yet it took for ever to gain consensus that smoking caused lung cancer. It seems crazy to us today but it wasn't so crazy to people back then. The problem was that a huge proportion of people smoked – 80 per cent of all men by the late 1940s – yet only some of them developed lung cancer. And some people who didn't smoke also developed lung cancer. So it was not especially straightforward to see a direct link between smoking and cancer. When lots of people are doing something and only some of them are dying from it, it makes it hard to impute blame to a single cause.

Things have changed. Today just 18 per cent of Americans smoke and it is easy to think that we have pretty much solved the problem. But it's not quite as simple as that. Nearly one-third of people below the poverty line still smoke, and the habit continues to account for one-fifth of all deaths. It is a problem we are a long way from rectifying.

"According to one study, the number of bacteria on you actually rises after a bath or shower because they are flushed out from nooks and crannies.

The problem with antibacterial soaps is that they kill good bacteria on your skin as well as bad. The same is true of hand sanitizers

“Dragonflies are lethal hunters. Their four wings can move independently of one another, which is unusual in the insect world. Each wing is powered by several sets of muscles which adjust frequency and direction. This enables a dragonfly to fly both backwards and upside down, and to switch from hovering motionless in the air to speeding off at a maximum speed of close to 50 kilometres an hour.... But their vision also makes a significant contribution to their success. And it is perhaps hardly surprising that they have good eyesight when almost their entire head consists of eyes. In reality, each eye is made up of 30,000 small eyes, which can see both ultraviolet and polarised light as well as colours. And since the eyes are like balls, the dragonfly can see most of what is happening on all sides of its body.

Its brain is also prepped for super-sight. When we humans see a rapid sequence of images, we see them in a flowing movement, a film, if there are more than around 20 images per second. However, a dragonfly can see up to 300 separate images per second and interpret every single one of them. In other words a cinema ticket would be quite wasted on a dragonfly. Where you and I see a moving film, it would simple see a very rapid slide show – one long stream of separate snapshots or frames.

The dragonfly brain is also capable of focusing over time on one specific section of the enormous quantity of visual impressions being received. They have a kind of selective attention that is unknown among other insects.....The dragonfly brain can lock its attention on approaching prey, coordinating its speed and direction to ensure a strike...”

Perhaps it is no surprise to find that they inspired some of the people designing drone technology.