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.
Psychology
In a 1962 Southern textile factory, 62 workers, nearly all women, fell ill with nausea and rashes after believing insects from a fabric shipment were biting them — no bug, no toxin, nothing was ever found, and the case became a foundational study in mass psychogenic illness
Human Behaviour
Spending months in space quietly rebuilds an astronaut's body: bones thin, the heart shrinks, fluid floods the head and can reshape the eyes, and NASA's study of twins found some of the changes still had not fully reversed months after landing
Psychology
Somewhere in America lives a woman who genuinely cannot feel fear — a rare disease quietly dissolved the part of her brain that produces it, so when researchers put a tarantula in front of her she reached for it anyway, and when they led her through a haunted house, she startled the monsters
Human Behaviour
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Dutch were among the shortest people in Europe. Today they remain among the tallest on the planet, with young men standing about 1.83 metres on average. Rising prosperity, better nutrition and improved healthcare added nearly 20 centimetres in roughly 150 years
Psychology
In 1973, eight perfectly sane people had themselves committed to psychiatric hospitals to see if the doctors could tell, and what happened next humiliated an entire profession and changed psychiatry forever.
Human Behaviour
In 1974 in Ethiopia a team dug up a skeleton that pushed the human story back millions of years: 'Lucy,' about 3.2 million years old, showed that our ancestors walked upright long before they ever grew big brains
Human Behaviour
Mauled by a grizzly and left for dead in 1823, the frontiersman Hugh Glass simply refused to die: he dragged his broken body across the wilderness for weeks, by some accounts as far as 200 miles, until he somehow reached help alive
Psychology
The Oregon high desert is slowly erasing an entire city that thousands of people built in three years, and the reason they built it is stranger than the ruins.
Human Behaviour
Before John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, he made one unusual demand: that a mathematician named Katherine Johnson check the computer's numbers by hand, saying that if she agreed they were right, he was ready to fly
Psychology
In 2021, thousands of teenagers suddenly developed the same violent tics, every medical test came back clean, and the real cause turned out to be hiding on their phones.
Human Behaviour
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time."
Human Behaviour
The human mind has no single prime age. Raw processing speed appears to peak around 18 or 19, while short-term memory improves until about 25 and remains relatively stable for another decade. The ability to recognise other people’s emotions peaks much later, in the 40s or 50s, while vocabulary—a measure of accumulated knowledge—can keep improving into the late 60s or early 70s.
Human Behaviour
Around 2018 humanity crossed a line it had never once crossed in all its history: for the first time ever, people over 65 came to outnumber children under five, and the gap has widened every year since
Psychology
For most of us the Hale-Bopp comet was a once-in-a-lifetime sight in the spring of 1997, but for thirty-nine people it was a departure time, and what happened next shocked the world.
Psychology