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.

Psychology

Sister Mary, a Catholic nun who belonged to the School Sisters of Notre Dame and died at 101 with her memory and reasoning fully intact, was one of 678 nuns enrolled in a 30-year study of brain aging by the American researcher David Snowdon — and her autopsy revealed a brain riddled with the plaques and tangles of advanced Alzheimer’s disease

Sister Mary should not, by any reasonable interpretation of late-20th-century Alzheimer's neuropathology, have been able to teach seventh and eighth grades for…

Jun 28, 2026

Psychology

In 1975, an American developmental psychologist demonstrated that when a parent simply stops emotionally responding to a baby’s face for as little as three minutes — making no expression, no eye contact, no sound — the baby first becomes frantic trying to re-engage the parent and then withdraws into a hopeless silence, in one of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology

Edward Tronick — now in his eighties, Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, director of its Child Development Unit, and one of the…

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Korean alphabet, called Hangul, is the only major writing system in human history with a known inventor and a documented design rationale — created in 1443 by King Sejong of the Joseon dynasty, who designed each consonant to physically represent the position of the tongue and lips during the corresponding sound, and published a companion document explaining exactly why each letter looked the way it did

Nobody knows who invented the letter A. Nobody knows who invented the letter B, or C, or any other letter of any writing system used by any other major language on Earth.

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1953, South Korea had a per-capita income lower than that of Somalia or Haiti — and within roughly seventy years, it became the world’s tenth-largest economy and the dominant global producer of memory chips, in the fastest national economic transformation in modern history

The economic case for South Korea's hopelessness was, in 1953, structurally compelling.

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

For years, Nazi Germany had used the German boxer Max Schmeling as a public symbol of Aryan racial superiority over Black athletes — and the American Joe Louis’s defeat of Schmeling at Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, ended that argument, in front of 70,000 spectators and 100 million radio listeners worldwide, in 124 seconds

There was a moment, during the second round of a different fight in May 1981 in Las Vegas, when an old German man in his seventies sat in a hotel suite paying…

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The “Happy Birthday” song, the most frequently sung piece of music on Earth, was originally written in 1893 by two American sisters as a kindergarten classroom greeting called “Good Morning to All” — and the birthday lyrics now sung at every party on the planet were added almost twenty years later by an unknown author

If two women in 19th-century Louisville had written essentially anything else — a nursery rhyme, a folk hymn, a marching band number, a parlour song — their…

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Bubble wrap was originally invented in 1957 by an American mechanical engineer and a Swiss chemical engineer trying to design a textured plastic wallpaper for the Beat generation — failed, tried selling it as greenhouse insulation, failed again — and was saved only when IBM started using it to ship its 1401 mainframe computers

The original wallpaper concept was, by every available account from the period, a perfectly reasonable mid-century product idea.

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The most widely consumed beverage on Earth outside of water and tea originally contained cocaine — formulated in 1886 by an American Civil War veteran named John Pemberton as a patent medicine to cure his own morphine addiction, because Pemberton genuinely believed he was selling a medical tonic, not the soft drink it eventually became

The 1886 American pharmaceutical landscape into which Coca-Cola was introduced bore essentially no resemblance to the regulated drug-approval system that has…

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Eiffel Tower, now the most photographed structure on Earth, was built in 1889 as a temporary centerpiece for the Paris World’s Fair — meant to be dismantled after 20 years — and was saved from demolition in 1909 only because Gustave Eiffel himself arranged for the French military to use its iron lattice as a radio antenna for transmitting wireless signals across long distances

The Eiffel Tower's existence, in its original 1880s context, was a deeply contested proposition.

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Hollywood sign was erected in 1923 as a temporary $21,000 advertisement for a hillside real estate development called Hollywoodland — meant to come down after 18 months, but the developers found it useful, the public grew attached, the city inherited it in 1944, and the most famous sign on the planet is technically the leftover billboard for a real estate project from a century ago

Almost every tourist who flies into Los Angeles, drives up Beachwood Canyon, points a phone at the white letters on the hillside, and posts the resulting…

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Since the first Japanese bullet train left Tokyo Station on October 1, 1964 — just nine days before the opening of the Tokyo Olympics — the Shinkansen has carried more than 10 billion passengers across 60 years of continuous high-speed operation, and has never had a single passenger fatality caused by derailment or collision in its entire history

Every other country that has ever built a high-speed rail system has, sooner or later, killed people with it.

Jun 27, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On 26 September 1991, eight people locked themselves inside a three-acre world of glass and steel in the Arizona desert — and two years later emerged gaunt, oxygen-deprived, and having discovered that the building’s own walls had been slowly stealing the air

On 26 September 1991, eight people entered Biosphere 2, a sealed glass and steel structure in Oracle, Arizona, built to test whether a human-made ecosystem could keep people alive for two years.

Jun 26, 2026

Human Behaviour

On May 11, 1997, the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down in a Manhattan office tower to play the final game of his rematch against an IBM computer called Deep Blue — and resigned in under an hour, in what may be the cleanest moment in modern history when a domain of human cognition quietly crossed over to a machine

The boundary between what computers can do and what only humans can do has moved many times across the past 80 years, but it has rarely moved in a way that anyone could see happening in real time.

Jun 26, 2026

Psychology

Early emotional states become physically embedded in the architecture of the developing brain — and laughter, according to recent research, is one of the experiences doing that work

A new synthesis from early childhood neuroscience argues that shared laughter does specific, measurable work in the infant brain — though the full picture is more incremental than the headlines suggest.

Jun 25, 2026

Psychology

At twenty, the brain processes information faster than it ever will again. In middle age, the same brain may read other people’s emotions more accurately than it ever has. By the late sixties, its vocabulary can still be climbing. The human mind does not peak once — it rotates.

Hartshorne and Germine's 2015 Psychological Science paper suggests that cognitive abilities peak on different timetables, from speed in youth to vocabulary much later.

Jun 25, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Russian fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in history to leave the Earth — sealed inside a metal sphere just over two metres wide, with the spacecraft’s controls locked because nobody knew what the human brain would do in weightlessness, and instructions to open a sealed envelope only if he lost his mind during the 108 minutes he spent orbiting the planet alone

The space race that produced Vostok 1 had begun in earnest approximately three and a half years earlier, on 4 October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the…

Jun 25, 2026