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.

Mind & Meaning

Tetris was invented in 1984 by Soviet researcher Alexey Pajitnov on a computer that could barely display images, then spread across the Eastern Bloc on copied floppy disks — becoming one of the most played video games in history before its creator earned a rouble from it

Tetris began as a way to test a computer that could barely draw. In June 1984, Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, was writing small programs to see what a new machine could do.

Jul 18, 2026

Mind & Meaning

A blind person who loses their sight before the age of five may dream mostly without visual images, drawing instead on sound, touch, smell, and emotion: a pattern that suggests how far the dreaming brain reconstructs the world it was taught

The claim arrives fully formed and easy to repeat. A person who loses their sight before about the age of five, it says, dreams without pictures at all.

Jul 18, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Eswatini’s King Mswati III remains one of the last absolute monarchs on Earth, appointing the prime minister, dissolving parliament, and keeping political parties out of elections

King Mswati III of Eswatini spent three days in late April 2026 marking 40 years on the throne.

Jul 18, 2026

Human Behaviour

The brain’s default mode network was discovered almost by accident in the 1990s — it was the activity researchers kept seeing when subjects were supposedly doing nothing, and it burns nearly as much energy as focused thought

Marcus Raichle noticed the same brain regions lighting up whenever his subjects were supposedly at rest. That accidental observation in the 1990s became the discovery of the default mode network — the system that runs your inner life and burns nearly as much fuel as focused thought.

Jul 18, 2026

Human Behaviour

The Zeigarnik effect helps explain why unfinished goals can feel louder than completed ones, but modern research suggests the mind’s pull toward open loops is far more conditional than the famous story implies

Bluma Zeigarnik's 1927 Berlin experiments showed the mind clings to unfinished tasks about twice as tightly as completed ones — the finding that explains cliffhangers, to-do lists, and why a hard-won goal rarely stays satisfying for long.

Jul 17, 2026

Human Behaviour

A famous spotlight-effect experiment by Thomas Gilovich and colleagues found students thought twice as many people noticed an embarrassing T-shirt as actually did; the audience you rehearse for is often barely watching

Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich sent students into rooms wearing embarrassing Barry Manilow T-shirts and found the wearers predicted nearly half the room would remember — only about a quarter actually did. The spotlight effect, as he named it, is remarkably consistent: people believe others notice them at roughly twice the rate anyone actually does.

Jul 17, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The ancient Greeks calculated the circumference of the Earth around 240 BCE, using nothing more than a stick, the sun, and the distance between two Egyptian cities

Some time around 240 BCE, a librarian in Alexandria worked out the size of the planet from the length of a single shadow.

Jul 17, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson: “We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.”

Watch what happens when a one-year-old takes their first wobbly steps across a living room.

Jul 17, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Saudi Arabia’s NEOM is marketed as the city of the future, but it is being built on land with a long human past — including Huwaitat communities whose displacement has become one of the project’s darkest controversies

The promotional language around NEOM keeps returning to one idea: a clean start.

Jul 17, 2026

Psychology

The handshake is said to have begun as proof of an empty hand, no weapon and no immediate threat, and for thousands of years that simple clasp has carried a message spoken greetings still cannot: I come in peace

On the front panel of a limestone throne base excavated at Nimrud in 1962, two kings are shown gripping hands to seal a pact.

Jul 17, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Yawning may be the brain’s way of cooling itself: in one experiment, people watching others yawn were far less likely to yawn when a cold pack was pressed to their forehead, but not when the pack was warm

Press a cold pack to your forehead and (at least according to one small experiment) you become much harder to make yawn.

Jul 17, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Bhutan’s king voluntarily gave up absolute power and turned his kingdom into a democracy — but many of his people begged him not to, trusting the monarchy more than the politicians who would replace it

In 2008, the ruler of a Himalayan kingdom of roughly 600,000 people did something almost no monarch has done willingly.

Jul 17, 2026

Human Behaviour

Sociologist Erving Goffman argued in 1956 that everyone runs a front stage and a back stage self, and that the strain most people feel in company is the cost of keeping the performance from slipping

In 1956, sociologist Erving Goffman argued that every social interaction is theatre — a front stage performance and a back stage self — and that the strain of company is the cost of keeping the two apart.

Jul 17, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1936, a British king gave up the throne for love, but the woman he chose, Wallis Simpson, was so unsuitable that the romance tore open the monarchy’s rules from the inside

There is a version of this story that nearly everyone knows, and it is almost entirely a love story.

Jul 17, 2026

Psychology

In April 1967, a Palo Alto history teacher named Ron Jones invented a movement called The Third Wave to answer a student’s question — and by day four, 200 teenagers were saluting him in the halls and informing on classmates who refused

In April 1967, first-year Cubberley High School teacher Ron Jones tried to answer a student's question about how ordinary Germans went along with the Nazis by staging a one-day classroom simulation. Within four days, 200 Palo Alto teenagers were saluting him in the halls.

Jul 17, 2026

Human Behaviour

The five Blue Zones share almost no genetics, no cuisine, and no religion — but every one of them walks, gardens, or farms into the ninth decade of life

The five Blue Zones — Okinawa, Sardinia, Nicoya, Ikaria, and Loma Linda — share almost no genetics, no cuisine, and no religion. What they share is daily physical labor built into ordinary life: gardens, hills, and work that never quite stops.

Jul 17, 2026