A Space Daily column

Human Element

Psychology and behaviour

Human Element covers the psychology of discovery. How astronauts hold up under pressure, why people believe what they believe, and what research on the human mind can and cannot tell us.

Human Behaviour

In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from a 7,000-page classified Defense Department history that demonstrated four successive American presidents had systematically lied about the Vietnam War — leaked by a former military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg, who had spent 18 months secretly photocopying the documents in his office at night

The Pentagon Papers, in their original form, were not designed to be a public document.

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

The person who stays calm in every crisis often isn’t fearless — many of them learned in childhood that someone had to hold it together

The composed face in a crisis is rarely the product of courage — more often it is the residue of a childhood that required a small person to do an adult's job.

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

For 24 years, the Soviet Union had used the world chess championship as proof of its intellectual superiority over the West — and the American Bobby Fischer’s defeat of Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 ended that argument, in front of the entire world, in a single match

It is difficult, at a remove of 54 years, to convey the institutional weight that the Soviet Union had attached to chess by the early 1970s.

Jun 25, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed a small telescope at Jupiter and saw four small objects circling it — becoming the first human being in history to look at the night sky and see, with his own eyes, that the Earth was not the center of everything

On the first night, 7 January 1610, Galileo recorded what he was seeing in his observation notebook with the careful, slightly bemused understatement of a researcher who knew he was looking at something interesting but did not yet know what.

Jun 25, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The most statistically dominant career performance in any major sport on Earth was not Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, or Wayne Gretzky — it was an Australian cricketer named Don Bradman, who retired in 1948 with a career batting average that places him roughly six standard deviations above the mean of test cricket history

Imagine a basketball player who averaged not 30 points per game, like Michael Jordan, but 95 — for an entire career.

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

People who replay old conversations at night often aren’t anxious or insecure — many are processing words they were never allowed to say out loud in the moment

The mind that rehearses old conversations at night is not malfunctioning — it is finishing a sentence the room would not let it complete.

Jun 25, 2026

Psychology

Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen found that when older adults were asked to imagine a medical breakthrough adding decades to their lives, their preferences shifted back toward those of younger people — suggesting that the emotional calm of old age may come less from age itself than from the way a shrinking time horizon changes what people value.

Carstensen's socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that perceived future time, not age alone, helps shape social preferences and emotional priorities in later life.

Jun 25, 2026

Mind & Meaning

MIT researchers tested participants from age 10 to 71 and found something they described as genuinely unexpected: vocabulary — the brain’s accumulated store of language and meaning — peaks not in youth but in the late 60s and early 70s

Hartshorne and Germine's 2015 Psychological Science paper suggests that cognitive abilities peak on different timetables, with vocabulary cresting much later than speed.

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

The hundreds of human skeletons scattered around Roopkund Lake at 5,029 metres in the Indian Himalayas were long assumed to be the remains of a single 9th-century pilgrimage group killed by a sudden hailstorm, in an explanation that a 2019 peer-reviewed ancient DNA study has substantially overturned, by demonstrating that the skeletons came from at least three different populations and died across more than one thousand years.

Roopkund Lake sits at 5,029 metres above sea level in the Chamoli District of Uttarakhand, India, between the peaks of Trishul and Nanda Ghunti.

Jun 25, 2026

Psychology

A University of Toronto study found that chasing happiness can make people less happy — not because happiness is bad, but because constantly trying to force it burns through the self-control needed to do the things that actually create it.

Kim and Maglio's 2025 paper suggests that trying to force happiness may consume the self-regulatory effort needed for the behaviours that support well-being.

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

If a bee searching for nectar might be conscious and ChatGPT almost certainly isn’t, what exactly were we measuring when we decided something was aware?

For most of the history of thinking about animal minds, behaviour was the only evidence on offer.

Jun 25, 2026

Mind & Meaning

When archaeologists excavating a Han Dynasty tomb near Changsha in 1971 opened the innermost of four nested coffins, they found the body of a noblewoman named Xin Zhui — who had died roughly 2,140 years ago — so perfectly preserved that her skin was still soft, her joints still moved, and her stomach still contained 138 melon seeds from her last meal, making it the best-preserved human body ever recovered from the ancient world

The Chinese hospital workers digging an air raid shelter in 1971 expected to find rock, soil, and possibly some inconveniently large tree roots.

Jun 25, 2026

Psychology

In 1973, a Stanford psychology professor sent eight healthy people into twelve psychiatric hospitals with instructions to feign a single hallucinatory symptom, then act normally, in an experiment that reshaped the entire field of American psychiatry and that turned out, almost fifty years later, to have been hiding something nobody had thought to look for

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, American psychiatry was in the middle of a public credibility crisis.

Jun 24, 2026

Human Behaviour

People born between 1945 and 1965 were taught that needing help was weakness, and most of them are still living by a rule no one would defend out loud today

A generation raised on stoicism inherited a quiet rule about asking for help, and a 1973 experiment that broke psychiatry helps explain why so many of them still won't break it.

Jun 24, 2026

Human Behaviour

The quiet competence many women carry into their 60s isn’t always confidence; it can be the residue of decades spent making sure nothing fell apart

The poise that reads as confidence in a woman entering her seventh decade is often something stranger and heavier — a nervous system trained by forty years of preventing collapse.

Jun 24, 2026

Human Behaviour

In 1975, the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick filmed mothers dropping their faces into a blank mask and found that even securely attached pairs fall out of sync roughly seventy percent of the time, and that what holds the bond together is not the match but the repair that follows the rupture

Edward Tronick's still-face research found that even securely attached mother-infant pairs are out of emotional sync most of the time — and that what predicts secure attachment is not the frequency of attuned moments, but the reliability of repair after rupture.

Jun 24, 2026