In Cold Blood

I remember reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote in one sitting. I was old enough to babysit my little sisters and imaginative enough to frighten myself to pieces but too young to understand the psychological principles that applied.

David Aaronovitch has written a great article in today's Times - 'Violence in search of a cause: what a famous book tells us about terrorism'.

What makes us tick is still being worked out by psychologists and self help book authors. But the differences between "terrorists" and so-called "freedom fighters" is as clear as the difference between Mohammed Atta and Michael Collins.

Dr. Sanity uses the metaphor of 'brain as piano' in her great blog post 'Listening to music and tuning pianos'.

"There are some things that medication cannot fix. Some pianos that cannot be tuned--maybe because there is a crack in the baseboard; or the materials used in construction were warped; or even that those same materials were irreversibly changed by exposure to malignant environmental factors."

"Any piano repairman will also tell you that some pianos start out as lemons (just as some cars) and cannot produce the same sounds as their peers. Some are so broken that even after repair they are not much more than junk."

"It is possible we will never adequately be able to explain fully every aspect of human brain function--expecially what leads to good or evil--by resorting only to an appreciation of the chemicals and the electrical circuits."