Human Behaviour
Human
The universal psychology lane. Stories about how people relate to one another, themselves, and the world — written for readers who are curious about why we behave the way we do. Sister section to Space Psychology.
Human Behaviour
The Overtoun Bridge in Scotland has seen hundreds of dogs leap from the same parapet since the 1950s, often on clear days from the right side, and one behavioural investigation pointed to the scent of mink below
Human Behaviour
The Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh burned down in 612 BC, but because its 30,000 tablets were made of clay, the fire actually baked and preserved them, and we can read Mesopotamian poetry today because someone tried to destroy it
Human Behaviour
Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy heiress in the 1940s, built 20 dollhouse-sized crime scenes with hand-stitched curtains and working light bulbs to train homicide detectives, and 18 of her tiny dioramas are still used in forensic training in Baltimore today
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
Human Behaviour
In 1938 the average American spent 47 minutes a day doing nothing — by 2026 that number had almost vanished, and researchers say that lost time was never idle, it was when the brain did its most important work
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
Human Behaviour
The science of why some people seem to age dramatically slower than others is mostly the science of one thing — cumulative sun exposure — and what looks like good genes in someone's seventies is usually fifty years of quiet sun protection that nobody, including the person, ever consciously planned
Psychology
Thought of the day by Albert Einstein: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
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
Human Behaviour
The human body replaces almost all of its cells over a roughly 7-10 year period — but the neurons in your cerebral cortex are almost certainly the same age as you are
Psychology
Michael Collins, dubbed by the press "the loneliest man in history" while orbiting the far side of the Moon for roughly forty-seven minutes at a time, gently corrected the description — he said he felt isolated, but never lonely
Human Behaviour
The human brain accounts for about two per cent of body weight and consumes about twenty per cent of the body's total energy every day — and that consumption barely changes whether you are solving differential equations or staring at a wall
Human Behaviour
Human creativity may have been forged by hardship rather than abundance — according to a new study of 146,000-year-old stone tools found in central China and dated to one of the harshest Ice Ages of early human history
Psychology
Consciousness might not be something the brain creates — it might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity than like a thought — and one of the most credentialed neuroscientists alive is now arguing that mainstream science has been wrong about it for a century
Psychology