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
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
Humans share roughly 60 percent of our genes with a banana — and the framing makes for good party trivia, but the more interesting fact is what it actually means: that nearly all the basic machinery for being a living thing was settled long before our lineage and the banana's parted ways, and most of what makes any of us recognizable is the small remaining percentage we don't share.
Human Behaviour
For the first time in human history, most people live under skies they cannot see — and the psychological consequence of having lost the night sky has barely begun to be measured.
Human Behaviour
A single human exhale contains roughly 25 sextillion molecules, and the air on Earth is mixed thoroughly enough that statistically, every breath you take contains at least one molecule that was exhaled by Julius Caesar, by Cleopatra, and by every human who has ever lived
Human Behaviour
There is a moment near death, documented in EEG recordings of dying patients, when the brain produces a coordinated burst of gamma wave activity more intense than anything measured in waking life — and no one knows what it is, what it's for, or what the person experiencing it perceives
Human Behaviour
Most Woman of the Year awards are handed over at a gala dinner. Sweden's 2026 winner accepted hers over a live video link from the International Space Station.
Human Behaviour