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 Sumerians wrote down complaints, love letters, lullabies, and arguments about the price of copper on clay tablets 4,000 years ago — and the things they were worried about are almost indistinguishable from the things people post online today
Human Behaviour
Every year, 27.7 million tons of Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic Ocean and settles on the Amazon rainforest, delivering roughly the exact amount of phosphorus the rainforest loses to runoff, which means the world's most productive forest is fertilised, year after year, by the slow erosion of the planet's largest desert thousands of miles away.
Human Behaviour
Interstellar's most-discussed scene is treated as exotic science fiction, but the family-separation problem it dramatises is one of the more actively studied subjects in long-duration mission planning.
Human Behaviour
Most people who say they want to be alone are not actually wanting solitude but a particular kind of presence around them that does not require them to perform
Human Behaviour
Technology spent 15 years removing every small resistance from your day — and a growing body of research suggests that was not as good for your brain as it was for their engagement metrics
Psychology
Cognitive scientists have a name for the experience of suddenly realizing you've been reading a book for several minutes without absorbing any of the words — "mind-wandering" — and recent research suggests humans spend roughly 47 percent of waking life in some version of this state, which means the default condition of consciousness is mostly somewhere other than the present
Human Behaviour
Indigenous Amazonian shamans identified the specific combination of two plants required to make ayahuasca active orally — a pairing that stands as what may be one of the most unlikely discoveries in the history of human botany, given there are roughly 80,000 plant species in the Amazon
Human Behaviour
Women's sense of smell is roughly 50% more sensitive than men's on average, and the gap widens during pregnancy to a degree that some evolutionary biologists think is a defence mechanism for the fetus
Human Behaviour
The clearest indicator of whether a person has aged well into their seventies is not health, wealth, or relationships. It is whether they have continued to be surprised by things.
Human Behaviour
Female brains have measurably more connections between the two hemispheres, and male brains have more connections within each hemisphere — and neuroscientists still argue about whether this explains anything or nothing at all
Human Behaviour
Australian Aboriginal songlines encode the geography of the entire continent in song — a navigation system that predates writing by tens of thousands of years and still works today for anyone who knows the song
Human Behaviour
Siberian, Amazonian, and Aboriginal Australian shamanic traditions developed independently across three continents — and all three describe the same basic cosmology of an upper world, a middle world, and a lower world reached through an axis at the centre
Psychology
Submarine crews and astronauts experience the same set of psychological pressures and have evolved opposite ways of handling them, and the difference reveals something about how isolation actually works.
Human Behaviour
Cows have best friends, get visibly stressed when separated from them, and have measurably lower heart rates when reunited — and the dairy industry has known this since at least 2011
Human Behaviour