Around the turn of the fourth century BCE, Hippocrates wrote, “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food,” and with this same frame of mind, pondered the nature of mental illness. He believed that depression was caused by an overabundance of black bile and that insanity (hysteria) was, at least in females, due […]
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that was first described in a 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger. In it, they described the results of several studies where individuals who scored low on various measures of cognitive ability tended to overestimate their knowledge or skill in a particular domain, while those who […]
To Kiss the Banana Trunk: Using the Lessons of Ebola in the Fight Against COVID-19
In December of 2013, an 18-month-old boy fell ill in a small village in Guinea. Although it was not initially apparent, he had been infected—most likely from a bat reservoir—with Zaire ebolavirus. Within months, the outbreak had spread to the major cities of neighboring countries and in August of 2014, the WHO declared the West […]
