A study by Marmite has found that Monday morning blues is something that is common among all of us. Most of us, according to the survey, will take a few hours before we can even manage a smile - on average, people will smile for the first time at 11.16am, a few hours into their work day.

It is believed that the reason for the Monday morning blues goes back to our earliest times. Humans are used to living in tribes, accordingly people feel disjointed on Monday morning as they are dropped into a social environment they have not been in for a while. People need time to catch up and socialise with friends before they are productive in the workplace. There needs to be a period of easing into work. Apparently those starting the week with all guns firing are more likely to burn out quickly.

Fortunately Marmite has been able to suggest a few remedies for solving the Monday morning depressions, including watching TV, online shopping, and eating chocolate. Funnily, not Marmite itself then? Well, I suppose some people will love it and others will hate it …

Chance is not as great a factor as one may think in the game of paper, scissors, stone. People apparently draw at a higher rate than would be expected by sheer probability.

When volunteers were blindfolded the results - as would be expected - tended towards 33.3%. However, when the turn of being blindfolded was changed, the chance of a draw increased to 36.3%. Participants, competing for a cash prize, couldn’t help but imitate their opponents, who would do the same in turn, leading to a higher draw rate.

Imitation is hard-wired into brains; from birth our parents imitate their children’s smiles or anguish. Just think of situations where yawning has ‘infected’ everyone in the room, and you’re on the same lines.

Interestingly, imitative actions, being hard-wired into human beings, are more established and are therefore more likely to respond faster than controlled ones. Perhaps this is how people like Derren Brown work.

This is more evidence for the power of the subconscious, ego or super-ego - perhaps our free will is overridden, at least initially, by inherent evolutionary responses?

University Challenge has always been used to showcase the brightest people in the country doing what they do best – knowing stuff — but does this really count as an intelligence test?

Some academics contest this view. Adrian Furnham has studied the link between knowledge and intelligence and has found that there is ‘fluid’ intelligence and ‘crystallised’ intelligence. Fluid knowledge, he argues, is about problem-solving and analysis, for example completing a Rubix cube or a Sudoku puzzle. Crystallised intelligence is what is tested on University Challenge and is usually acquired through education and extensive research.

Howard Gardner has argued that there are different sectors of intelligence which refer to different types of human activities. Gardner highlights that a person will have varying levels of intelligence in areas such as logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, and even intrapersonal. Psychometric tests designed to evaluate aspects of these areas for potential employees don’t go the full way of testing them comprehensively.

An interesting study from Lund University, Sweden, has found that a special part of the brain becomes active when the volunteer tried intentionally to forget something. Scientists can even pin-point the moment when the memory is ‘forgotten’, and claim that longterm suppression of a memory is a sure-fire way of permanently erasing it.

Psychology researcher Gerd Thomes Waldhauser suggests that techniques could be developed to help those suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Certainly, repressed feelings often manifest themselves in physiological reactions.

What is less clear is how does one try and actively forget something. If you try and not think about something, well, sure enough you’ve gone and thought about it! Mindless paradoxes aside, the volunteers were trained to forget neutral information. The study shows that we can deliberately forget things.

I can think of some things I have forgotten, well, actually….