"When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it."

I currently have 'psychology' on the brain, as opposed to the other thing that Sigmund Freud talked a lot about.

I was taken to see Derren Brown the other week, and he was as always, pretty impressive. I know that a lot of his tricks, his 'Mentalism' is down to his knowledge and awareness of people's behaviour in certain situations, and as this sort of thing fascinates me, I thought that I would delve a little deeper.

This led me to Quirkology by Richard Wiseman, which I have started reading, and I'm finding it fascinating, it's full of oddball psychological experiments analysing human behaviour.

So there I was, watching Michael Jackson dancing with his head on fire whilst filming a commercial for Pepsi and I was reminded about the murder of Kitty Genovese because it took such a long time for people to rush to his aid, and the 3rd degree burns that he suffered triggered the drug addiction that ultimately claimed his life.

Kitty was stabbed to death outside her apartment block in New York in 1964. Nearly 40 people either saw the incident out of their window or heard her screams for help. The attacker even went away and came back ten minutes later. It was over half an hour before any of them called for help as (it is assumed), they thought that somebody else would do it.

This socio-psychological behaviour, is known as "Diffusion of Responsibility", or "The Bystander Effect" and has led to many studies which have successfully replicated it... If other people are around to help, you are less likely to respond first, or will wait until you have been given specific instructions.

Makes you wonder, if that accident hadn't happened to Jacko, or if people had reacted quicker and therefore he hadn't needed the pain killing drugs in the first place, what else he could have gone onto achieve...

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it, after all, in the immortal words of Freud, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar..."

No, wait, what does that mean?!