Psychology
We talk about anxiety as if it starts in the mind — but for some people, the eyes may be the first place it shows up
The first sign was never a thought. It was visual. Something in the way the room looked.
Psychology
We have normalised filling every quiet moment with something — podcasts while walking, screens while eating, sound while falling asleep — and the exhaustion most people feel isn’t from doing too much, it’s from never once letting the mind go quiet
Think about the last time you were genuinely, uncomplicatedly bored. No, I do not mean that low-level restlessness that arrives when a meeting runs long — I…
Human Behaviour
Sam Altman said he was ‘pretty wrong’ about the jobs apocalypse — and ‘roughly right’ about everything else — four days after OpenAI filed for a trillion-dollar IPO
Let's do the timeline first, because the timeline is doing a lot of work here. On May 22nd, OpenAI filed confidentially for a public listing targeting a valuation of up to one trillion dollars.
Science
Social science has a replication problem — a new massive study found that only half of published findings hold up when researchers try to repeat them and many that made it into textbooks
It didn't start with a paper. It started with a classroom. I was teaching a unit on classic social psychology — the foundational studies that most of us in the field absorbed as canonical truth.
Human Behaviour
A new meta-analysis of 27 studies just changed what I’m most afraid of about sugar — it turns out the craving isn’t the worst part
I grew up in a house where sugar was simply furniture. Pastries on the counter, cakes for no particular occasion, chocolates in bowls within arm's reach, processed sweet things tucked into drawers like they were office supplies.
Psychology
I cancelled Netflix for a month and spent the time learning Claude properly — the gap between people who use AI casually and people who actually know what it can do is bigger than I expected
I want to be clear about something before I start, because the premise of this article could easily be misread: I am not someone who stumbled across AI tools recently and was surprised they existed.
Human Behaviour
I spent years assuming my personality was fixed — then I learned what neuroplasticity actually means and realised I had been maintaining myself like a finished product instead of a living system
The adult human brain contains somewhere between 86 and 100 billion neurons. Each of those neurons can form thousands of synaptic connections.
Psychology
Sam Altman asked what problem people most hope AI will solve — and the answer that keeps coming up isn’t cancer or climate change
Mind & Meaning
Nobody talks about why public enthusiasm for space collapsed at almost exactly the same moment that two billionaires became its most visible faces
I study how people form emotional relationships with places and ideas. Which means I notice when those relationships quietly break.
Psychology
AI can now read your emotional state in a shop, adapt what it shows you in real time, and increase sales by double digits — and most shoppers have no idea this is already happening
Part of my research involves teaching machines to read emotion from faces, voices, and text.
Human Behaviour
Yes, tracking calories works for weight management — the question nobody is asking is what you’re training your nervous system to do in the process
Calorie tracking works. That part is not the controversy. As a weight management tool, the logic is sound and the evidence broadly supports it.
Human Behaviour
Bryan Johnson says you are not drinking coffee for the caffeine — you are drinking it for the gut microbes that run your brain, and the research behind that claim is harder to dismiss than it sounds
My mornings run on a specific sequence. Kettle on. Grinder out. The smell before the first pull.
Psychology
Resilience research has spent decades studying how people survive hard things — it has been much quieter about whether surviving was actually the best outcome available
Last year, I was at the International Symposium on Resilience Research in Mainz, hosted with the involvement of the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research.
Human Behaviour
The thing you have been calling a fear of heights may not be a fear of heights at all — an Artemis II astronaut explained this better than most therapists I’ve read
Bangkok, seventy-eight floors up, and I was gripping the railing of an observation deck like it owed me something.
Science
The sun is already dying — just on a timescale so vast that every civilization in history has been able to treat it as permanent. Project Hail Mary imagines it happening fast. Scientists study what happens when it happens slow — and the answers are stranger than the movie.
On my 27th birthday, I watched a film about the sun dying. Project Hail Mary does not waste time on sentiment about this.
Psychology
A new study compared AI chatbot responses to those of licensed psychologists and peer counselors — and the gap in ethical standards was significant enough to prompt a call for regulation
At some point in the last few years, using a chatbot to process something emotionally difficult stopped feeling unusual.