This week’s optional discussion topic: Psychology knowledge and misconceptions. Like a lot of sciences, psychology seems to filter down to the broader public in crude, easily  caricatured form, causing misconceptions that linger for decades after actual research and expert knowledge has moved on. One obvious example is how reductive understandings of Freudian psychology continue to crop up in media and pop culture, leading people to assume that human behavior and personalities can be reduced to a single formative (usually traumatic) incident.

This was inspired by reading a fascinating long form piece on Phineas Gage, the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not favorite who suffered a railroad spike blasted through his skull, and suffered serious brain trauma that made him a shiftless, irritable layabout. Except that’s not what actually happened; Gage suffered some temporary derangement, but eventually recovered enough to live a more or less normal life for a decade after the incident. The Gage narrative is inaccurate and leads to widespread misunderstandings about mental illness and brain trauma, but it’s one heckuva story to tell at parties. And as Leonard Nimoy once asked, isn’t that the real truth>