Lots of good stuff in this week's New Scientist. Especially http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827862.300-how-weird-are-you-oddball-minds-of-the-western-world.html If you're reading this, you're probably WEIRD. Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. That makes you part of 1/8 of the world's population and so in the minority. And you have a different way of looking at the world; egocentric rather than allocentric spacial awareness; autonomous individualism rather than communal belonging; analytic reasoning rather than holistic; abstract relative morality rather than community obligation; punishment-reward rather than fairness. Where this gets interesting is that WEIRD people are frequently extreme outliers psychologically, and yet the vast majority of psychology has been done on them and draws conclusions as if they are the norm. This even ends up in things like standardised IQ tests where questions assume an analytic correct answer even when the holistic ("wrong") answer is equally correct. Thus concluding that non-WEIRD people score lower on IQ because they think differently. I've wondered some times if parts of Asia in particular were alien in the sense of being really quite radically different from western humans. It turns out that we're the aliens who think differently from the rest of humanity.