Catmachine

As a child I was absolutely terrified by skeletons in general and skulls in particular. I am curious now as to where this fear sprang from. Of course skulls are associated with death but as a very young child death is something you are blissfully unaware of. Is the fear of the skull something built in, an instinct that evolved over time or is it something that is learned? Very young children do learn to recognise faces very early on, and smiles in particular. You would expect that a baby's instinct upon being presented with a skull would be to smile - the skull is, after all, a very simplistic representation of a smiling face. One way of testing this would be to experiment with babies and pictures of skulls but this could very well turn out to be unethical and cruel should the findings of the research be that that a fear of the old bone face is not learned but is in fact built in... It could well be built in. In prehistoric times human bones would generally only be found in...

If you will forgive this entry for being a little meta, it is always nice when someone comments on a blog entry. On the whole I mean this unreservedly. Whether positive or negative, having taken the time to write something underneath means that they've read it, a fact which is much more satisfying than endless hours spent poring over Google Analytics. Generally the comments fall into three camps. First are the Me Toos . These are people that generally agree with (or very occasionally feel enlightened by) the content of the entry so much so that they feel moved to express this, often citing incidents from their own experience which match or mirror those being discussed in the main entry. Then there are the No Buts . These people disagree with some or all of the points covered and furthermore have the facts the prove it - their experience is very different from that depicted in the blog, and they can say why. Finally there are the Nit Pickers . Their response is not as broad...