What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Human Behaviour
Googling a headache rarely settles anything — a Microsoft study found it escalates common symptoms into fear of rare diseases, and of the quarter of searchers it pushed into a doctor's appointment, most turned out not to need one
The algorithm knows your symptom is probably nothing—but it's going to convince you otherwise anyway.
A neuroscientist built a tiny car out of a plastic food container, taught rats to drive it in exchange for Froot Loops, and discovered something no one expected — the rats seemed to genuinely love driving, jumping into the car and revving the lever before they'd even set off
Studies on chronic nail biters keep pointing to the same unexpected personality trait, and it isn't anxiousness. It's perfectionism, a low tolerance for sitting still with something unfinished or imperfect
What the Soviet Union feared most about losing a single chess match in 1972 wasn't the trophy — it was the argument the loss would hand to every capitalist government watching, that the system built to prove Soviet minds were superior could still be beaten by one man with barely any institution behind him
In Botswana, conservation biologists spent years painting enormous fake eyes onto the backsides of over two thousand cattle, betting on a simple piece of predator psychology — that a lion who thinks it's been spotted usually abandons the hunt
In the late 1960s, a psychologist put twelve-month-old babies through a simple test — leave the room, come back, watch what happens — and the way each child reacted in those few seconds turned out to predict something about how they'd love people well into adulthood
After returning from orbit, astronauts sometimes release objects as if they will float; their brains have not forgotten gravity, but their movements need time to predict it again
At Midway in 1942, an American fleet that was significantly outnumbered and outgunned by the Japanese navy won anyway, because codebreakers had pieced together enough of Japan's plans before the battle even began. Intelligence, not firepower, decided one of the most consequential naval battles in the Pacific War
Psychology says the person in the friend group who never seems to need anything isn't low-maintenance, they learned in childhood that having needs was the fastest way to become inconvenient
Adults who cry more easily in their fifties and sixties aren't becoming fragile, they're finally living somewhere safe enough to feel what younger versions of them had to push through to survive
Deep in the Amazon, one community describes the world without the familiar language of clocks, calendars, or numerical time — challenging assumptions about how humans experience the passage of life.
