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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Mind & Meaning
In July 1916, sharks killed four swimmers along the coast of New Jersey, two of them in a tidal creek miles inland from the ocean — and the panic that swept across the country during those twelve days became the foundational American fear of sharks that inspired the film Jaws
Americans in 1916 did not believe sharks attacked people. The dominant scientific consensus among the marine biologists of the American Museum of Natural History — the most authoritative ichthyological institution in the country at the…
A Hungarian biochemist named Katalin Karikó, who smuggled her family's savings inside her daughter's teddy bear to escape communist Hungary in 1985, spent the next thirty years being demoted, defunded, and rejected for her work on messenger RNA — and her ignored research became the foundation of the COVID vaccines administered to billions of people
We tend to think we form opinions by weighing all the evidence — but confirmation bias means we mostly seek out and remember what already fits the beliefs we hold
Thought of the day from philosopher Bertrand Russell: "The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
Neuroimaging research on jazz improvisation suggests creative flow may have less to do with inspiration and more to do with learned expertise meeting the willingness to release control
In 1946, a Japanese mechanic named Soichiro Honda began bolting surplus Imperial Japanese Army radio generator engines onto bicycles in post-war rationing-era Japan — and the small company he founded two years later is now the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world
A seven-member South Korean boy band named BTS has contributed close to $50 billion to South Korea's economy across the first decade of its existence, a share of the country's GDP comparable to that of a major Korean airline — and the small Korean entertainment label that signed them in 2013 nearly went bankrupt before their debut
A Yale study found that how you think about getting older may add 7.5 years to your life, more than exercise and more than not smoking
Personality tests remain among the most widely used tools in hiring and therapy despite decades of research showing limited ability to predict how a person actually behaves
The bandwagon effect: a belief doesn't have to be true to spread, it just has to look popular — and the more people who hold it, the more believable it seems to everyone watching
A nationwide study of people with chronic illness found that those who prayed daily were 48% more likely to survive over the following 6 years, after controlling for depression, social support, and health behaviors
