Let’s say your long-term relationship totally implodes. Browsing for a new apartment, or a therapist, you hear your dog bark in the other room — and realise, with a start, that it isn’t actually your dog. Once you’re all moved out, the dog will be out of your life, too.

Stewing in self-pity, you think — and subsequently become convinced — that this dog, who you’ve fed and bathed who knows how many times, and coined several adorable nicknames for, will forget you ever existed within the year.

Let's pretend for a moment that you are a giraffe. You live on the grasslands of the African savannah. You have a neck that is 2.1m long. Every now and then, you spot a group of humans driving around on a safari taking pictures of you.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder, not a mental illness. There is no "cure" for psychopaths, and they will never be able to change. If they are in prison, psychopaths can be managed with reward-based treatment - but this is simply a means of control, rather than a cure.

It's often said that the loss of one sense improves the others. New research shows the dramatic extent to which this is true in blind people, and how their brains make new connections to boost hearing, smell, touch -- and even cognitive functions such as memory and language.

Whether you want to learn a new language, learn to cook, take up a musical instrument or just get more out of the books you read, it helps to know how your brain learns. While everyone learns slightly differently, we do have similarities in the way our brains take in new information, and knowing how this works can help us choose the most efficient strategies for learning new things.

Scientists have spotted the parts of the brain that light up when we actively hate someone. There's probably a reason why hate evolved in the first place -- and it's similar to love.

Video: Can you memorise 20 random words in a couple of minutes? Yes, you can, after watching World Memory Championship winner Alex Mullen take you through a sample memory palace.