The best defence most species of octopus have is to stay hidden as much as possible and do their own hunting at night. So to find one in full view in the shallows in daylight was a surprise for two Australian underwater photographers. Actually, what they saw at first was a flounder. It was only when they looked again that they saw a mediumsized octopus, with all eight of its arms folded and its two eyes staring upwards to create the illusion. An octopus has a big brain, excellent eyesight and the ability to change colour and pattern, and this one was using these assets to turn itself into a completely different creature. Many more of this species have been found since then, and there are now photographs of octopuses that could be said to be transforming into sea snakes. And while they mimic, they hunt―producing the spectacle of, say, a flounder suddenly developing an octopodian arm, sticking it down a hole and grabbing whatever's hiding there.

How much we suffer relates to how we frame the pain in our mind. When 1500m runners push themselves into extreme pain to win a race―their muscles screaming and their lungs exploding with oxygen deficit, they don't psychologically suffer much. In fact, ultramarathon runners―those people who are crazy enough to push themselves beyond the normal boundaries of human endurance, covering distances of 50-100km or more over many hours, talk about making friends with their pain. When a patient has paid for some form of passive back pain therapy and the practitioner pushes deeply into a painful part of a patient's back to mobilise it, the patient calls that good pain if he or she believes this type of deep pressure treatment will be of value, even though the practitioner is pushing right into the patient's sore tissues

When I worked for a large electronics company that manufactured laser and inkjet printers, I soon discovered why there are often three versions of many consumer goods. If the manufacturer makes only one version of its product, people who bought it might have been willing to spend more money, so the company is losing some income. If the company offers two versions, one with more features and more expensive than the other, people will compare the two models and still buy the less expensive one. But if the company introduces a third model with even more features and more expensive than the other two, sales of the second model go up; many people like the features of the most expensive model, but not the price. The middle item has more features than the least expensive one, and it is less expensive than the fanciest model. They buy the middle item, unaware that they have been manipulated by the presence of the higherpriced item.

Onscreen, climate disaster is everywhere you look, but the scope of the world's climate transformation may just as quickly eliminate the climatefiction genre― indeed eliminate any effort to tell the story of warming, which could grow too large and too obvious even for Hollywood. You can tell stories ‘about' climate change while it still seems a marginal feature of human life. But when the temperature rises by three or four more degrees, hardly anyone will be able to feel isolated from its impacts. And so as climate change expands across the horizon, it may cease to be a story. Why watch or read climate fiction about the world you can see plainly out your own window? At the moment, stories illustrating global warming can still offer an escapist pleasure, even if that pleasure often comes in the form of horror. But when we can no longer pretend that climate suffering is distant —in time or in place―we will stop pretending about it and start pretending within it.

As individuals, our ability to thrive depended on how well we navigated relationships in a group. If the group valued us, we could count on support, resources, and probably a mate. If it didn't, we might get none of these merits. It was a matter of survival, physically and genetically. Over millions of years, the pressure selected for people who are sensitive to and skilled at maximizing their standing. The result was the development of a tendency to unconsciously monitor how other people in our community perceive us. We process that information in the form of self-esteem and such related emotions as pride, shame, or insecurity. These emotions compel us to do more of what makes our community value us and less of what doesn't. And, crucially, they are meant to make that motivation feel like it is coming from within. If we realized, on a conscious level, that we were responding to social pressure, our performance might come off as grudging or cynical, making it less persuasive.

Conventional medicine has long believed that depression is caused by an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain. However, there is a major problem with this explanation. This is because the imbalance of substances in the brain is a consequence of depression, not its cause. In other words, depression causes a decrease in brain substances such as serotonin and noradrenaline, not a decrease in brain substances causes depression. In this revised cause-and-effect, the key is to reframe depression as a problem of consciousness. Our consciousness is a more fundamental entity that goes beyond the functioning of the brain. The brain is no more than an organ of consciousness. If it is not consciousness itself, then the root cause of depression is also a distortion of our state of consciousness: a consciousness that has lost its sense of self and the meaning of life. Such a disease of consciousness may manifest itself in the form of depression.

The common accounts of human nature that float around in society are generally a mixture of assumptions, tales and sometimes plain silliness. However, psychology is different. It is the branch of science that is devoted to understanding people: how and why we act as we do; why we see things as we do; and how we interact with one another. The key word here is ‘science.' Psychologists don't depend on opinions and hearsay, or the generally accepted views of society at the time, or even the considered opinions of deep thinkers. Instead, they look for evidence, to make sure that psychological ideas are firmly based, and not just derived from generally held beliefs or assumptions. In addition to this evidence-based approach, psychology deals with fundamental processes and principles that generate our rich cultural and social diversity, as well as those shared by all human beings. These are what modern psychology is all about.

Life is what physicists might call a ‘high-dimensional system,' which is their fancy way of saying that there's a lot going on. In just a single cell, the number of possible interactions between different molecules is enormous. Such a system can only hope to be stable if only a smaller number of collective ways of being may emerge. For example, it is only a limited number of tissues and body shapes that may result from the development of a human embryo. In 1942, the biologist Conrad Waddington called this drastic narrowing of outcomes canalization. The organism may switch between a small number of well-defined possible states, but can't exist in random states in between them, rather as a ball in a rough landscape must roll to the bottom of one valley or another. We'll see that this is true also of health and disease: there are many causes of illness, but their manifestations at the physiological and symptomatic levels are often strikingly similar.