Theories about the mind and what motivates human behaviour had always fascinated her father. He could talk for hours and hours about psychological experiments on human beings. That was, if anyone would listen. Most people grew bored by his long explanations and didactic lectures. But she never did.

He told her about all the important human behavioural trials that had been conducted over the course of the last few hundred years, or as long as psychology had been something to study. She sat in awe as he narrated the experiments. He told her about Stanley Milgram and how, in 1971, he conducted an investigation that showed, when in the presence of an authority figure, volunteers willingly turned up a dial applying a fake electric shock to actors, even going beyond what they were told was a level of pain so great that the subject might die. It went some way to understanding why Hitler was able to become so powerful, despite the brutality of his regime.

Her father also told her about Little Albert in the 1950s: a nine-month-old baby who was taught to develop irrational fears in a laboratory environment. He was gradually manipulated into being scared to death of rats: perhaps the most controversial of all of tests.

She knew Bobo’s Doll inside out and found that experiment particularly funny: the idea that behaviour – mean or kind – is copied from adults was obvious to her. In the experiment, children were shown adults treating the doll in varying ways: from kind to pure nasty. The children copied.

One that she wished she could have taken part in was the Stanford University prison experiment in 1961. She would have loved to have been both a prisoner and a guard.

It would seem that the general public had more backbone for such inquiries back then, and she wished she’d lived through such an era where whinging and moaning about rights and conduct was less prevalent. She loved listening to her father talk of it. There were no longer experiments of the same calibre; scientists and doctors simply could no longer get away with it. She knew that her views were controversial. The majority of ordinary folk simply couldn’t stomach it.

She acknowledged that she hadn’t been raised in a standard way, or one that could be termed as normal or conformist, but that’s why she liked it. It satisfied her need to understand, and that’s why she took the pain. Pain was a mere stepping stone to salvation, and once that fine lesson was learned, then all the others fell into place. No test is ever easy, because if it was, then it wouldn’t be a test: there’d be no progression.

But her father had grown quiet, of late.