Letters archive

The interview with Jon Richfield, who has answered over 150 Last Word questions, was fascinating (9 October, p 50) . However, by assuming that he must therefore be "great at pub quizzes", the interviewer confuses facts with knowledge. Pub quizzes and game shows rely on remembering individual disconnected facts, with harder questions normally meaning more …

The result that is reported in "Sound can leap across a vacuum after all" (2 October, p 12) is interesting but not quite as astounding as you make it out to be. It is, after all, an electric field that is doing the leaping, not a sound wave per se. The inventor Guglielmo Marconi, among …

While empirical research into the benefits of wearing socks over shoes to increase traction may have hitherto been lacking (Feedback, 9 October) , the idea itself is not new. It was standard practice in British climbing circles in the 1950s for wet conditions, before the modern developments in boot-sole technology. In his book In High …

In her article on boosting your brain's performance, Helen Thomson mentions that learning to play a musical instrument can be beneficial (2 October, p 28) . Does that mean that part of the genius of great scientists such as Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and William Herschel is owed to their love of music and ability …

The first paragraph of David Robson's article on the brain's inner dialogue contains the phrase: "up to 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal" ( 4 September, p 30 ). What does this mean? Apart from the weasel words "up to" that make the statement almost completely content free, what is a "mental experience" …

• Due to an editing error, we cited Tamara Galloway's paper in Environmental Health Perspective ( DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1002367 ) as a source for the average exposure for BPA. In fact, this paper reports her team's results for endocrine changes in men exposed to the chemical (23 October, p 26). • The toxic red mud that …

We were disappointed by Mario Bunge's piece on the scientific status of psychoanalysis (2 October, p 22) . As a senior philosopher of science, he could have offered interesting arguments, but instead he founded his criticism of the discipline on factual errors. Psychoanalysis has developed greatly since Freud's time, producing substantial research and productive connections to other …