Psychology
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
A woman who hadn't spoken an intelligible word in twenty years, silenced by a stroke, can form spoken sentences again — not by moving her mouth but through an experimental implant that reads the speech centres of her brain and turns her attempts to speak into a synthesised voice, almost in real time
Psychology
At 43, a stroke left French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby conscious and lucid but almost completely paralysed, able to move only his left eyelid, so he dictated an entire memoir by blinking to choose each letter as the alphabet was read aloud to him, an estimated 200,000 blinks, one letter at a time
Human Behaviour
Dermatologists have long documented that the expressions worn most often across a lifetime eventually stop leaving the face and start staying — thousands of repetitions of the same smile, frown, or squint pulling the same muscles until the skin above them slowly loses the ability to return to neutral
Human Behaviour
South Korean women are projected to become the first population in recorded human history to cross an average life expectancy of 90 years by 2030 — a threshold that researchers at the turn of this century considered impossible for any group of people to reach
Human Behaviour
The river that can't be tamed: how one stretch of water in Albania became the last wild river in Europe
Psychology
In 1967, a history teacher couldn't explain how ordinary Germans fell in behind the Nazis, so he showed his class instead, and within five days he had built a movement of two hundred students he could no longer control
Psychology
The loneliest period in a human life, according to population surveys across multiple countries, may come later than most people expect: loneliness climbs again in old age, driven more by widowhood and failing health than by age itself
Human Behaviour
In Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation study, the babies who seemed calmest when left alone had racing heart rates the whole time — their indifference was a performance, not a feeling
Human Behaviour
NASA debriefs and crew psychologists hear it often enough to treat it as normal readjustment: astronauts back from long missions describe observing their own lives rather than fully taking part in them
Psychology
Buzz Aldrin called the Moon "magnificent desolation." He spent the decades after it showing how much he meant the second word
Human Behaviour
Psychologists call it a lie of omission when everything a person says is true but the whole truth is quietly withheld — and a life built entirely from the safe true things can leave friends of ten years knowing almost nothing real
Human Behaviour
Deep in the human inner ear sit tiny organs whose only job is to tell the brain which way is down — and in orbit, with no gravity left to measure, they fall completely silent for months at a time
Human Behaviour
Researchers tested an engineered enzyme on donated skin tissue and brought its chemical aging markers down to levels typically seen in 31-year-old skin, a separate test on a 75-year-old donor's arteries cut the same damage by more than seventy percent
Human Behaviour
Arthur Aron's 1997 study generated 36 questions that escalate in intimacy, and two strangers who worked through all of them in the lab reported feeling closer than many people do with lifelong friends
Human Behaviour