How many times have you been making decision by gut feeling, which turns out to be wrong?

To be fair, our brains tend to interpret the world within the limitation of sensory perception, which is incredibly biased and doesn't make sense at all. While we think that we are given choices, we have difficulty understanding the fact that we have been coaxed to follow the wrong instinct. Well, if you don't believe me, think about the example of making decisions on what we eat and drink.

Charles Monroe Schulz has always been one of my favourite cartoonists. He told us wonderful stories about Charles Brown, whom I shall never forget.

One day, Charlie Brown lied on the bed, murmuring to himself, "Sometimes, I lie awake at night, and I ask, why me?"
Can you imagine how Charlie Brown comes up with the answer himself?
Then a voice answers, "Nothing personal… your name just happened to come up."

One can envisage ourselves engaging in these endless "why me

I believe I am the only child I know of who grew up without a television set at home.

I used to either change topics or walk away whenever my classmates exchanged words on television stories. My unnerving conclusion was that people will laugh at me when they found me tongue-tied with the language of television. I use the past tense not because I have become familiar with the television stories but because I get over the inferiority complex of growing up without television.

My love for the alphabet and reading, which endures

"Don't fill your photo with more than necessary," I told my younger sister during our recent photography trip. "Life is never rosy," I continued, "We'd better crop out the thorn and leave behind the roses that will stay etched in the picture, and our memory."

The trick with selective memory is especially germane to our work in the hospital. The medical encounter, it turns out, has been replete with less-than-exciting patients of all sorts. "Good

"Your humerus bone at the right arm has broken, at the site called greater tuberosity."

I told my friend firmly, with an authoritative tone, when he called me for help after a fall around one year ago.

Months later, I still remember the moment when I was first shown his X-ray at the emergency room waiting hall. "Going to be nonoperative treatment and short period of shoulder immobilization," I advised. "Well, at most two weeks," I continued, almost whispering to

I was amused to share The Adventures of Tom Sawyer with the son of my classmates last Sunday. The story is almost funny – except that it's not.

When we look hard enough, we can find ourselves symptomatic of what Tom Sawyer had demonstrated as a professional trickster. This condition is highly contagious, I guarantee, and not easily reversed.

It's all very well for those of us who make mistakes now and then, like what Tom Sawyer did most of the time. And it's nice

After arguing and complaining for years, I now find myself trying to quit. Or, at the very least, seeking to lower the wattage a bit.

Perhaps we all have the same memory of our battle with colleagues when we were young. The battlefield was bloody and nasty, the words loud, the air steaming with the smell of dynamite. I stood on one side of the battlefield and the doctor from emergency room on the other, each debating over trivial matters like whether one should have admitted a gentleman with very

With all due respect to the world class table tennis player Wang Nan, she had wonderful performance in women's singles table tennis Olympic game last night.

Did you say she lost her Olympic gold medal? Did she?

If you ask me, I would rather say Wang did well to win a silver. Yes, she won the silver medal with her signature smiles. She cracked a big smile, occasionally sticking out her tongue, even after losing points. The point is not that she wins or loses; her

To go into solitude and wilderness, one needs to retire as much from the ticking of the time watch as from the society. To speak truly, few of us can stay away from the society without taking off the watch. The idea as to how I can learn to appreciate the tranquillity of nature was suggested to me during my "solo" session at the Outward Bound course ten years ago. I kept remembering everything, putting a tent up, seeing the most exquisite sunset of my life alone at a deserted island

I taught my students, who were going to the operating theatre with me last week, the scrub techniques. Rituals abound in the operating theatre, I confess, with all the meticulous and universally-agreed ways of washing our hands (or "surgical scrub"). The conventional ways of surgical scrub have been performed in countless times obsessively throughout our career life and with such conviction that they must be gospel. But are they?

I still remember my clumsiness (and that of my students, too) with the elbow