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
Japan's 'ikigai' has no single English translation, but the simple idea of having a reason to get up each morning was linked, in a 2008 study that tracked 43,000 Japanese adults for seven years, to measurably lower mortality
Psychology
The neuroscience of intense romantic obsession shows that the brain in early-stage romantic love activates the same dopamine reward circuits as cocaine and gambling, with serotonin transporter levels indistinguishable from those of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, in a finding that explains why the experience feels involuntary and typically resolves within approximately 18 months regardless of outcome
Human Behaviour
The single largest political donation in modern US history wasn't a campaign check but a self-built spending machine — America PAC absorbed $239 million aimed at one candidate
Psychology
Researchers identified a personality profile that combines high empathy with high levels of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, in a finding that has complicated the standard scientific picture of empathy as an unambiguously prosocial human trait
Psychology
The Stoic philosopher Seneca observed that what makes a person genuinely happy is not how much they have, but how little they need to be content — and the small jolt of his observation, two thousand years later, is that most modern definitions of the good life are still organized around acquiring more of exactly the things he warned would never quite settle the longing they were meant to satisfy
Human Behaviour
A Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, fish, and olive oil reduces dementia risk even in people carrying two copies of the APOE4 gene variant — which raises Alzheimer's risk 12-fold — according to a 2025 Harvard study in Nature Medicine, in the first finding that a daily food pattern can partially overcome a genetic predisposition long thought to be inescapable
Human Behaviour
The Stanford study that tracked 'follow your passion' believers found they gave up faster on hard goals — researchers in 2018 showed passion treated as fixed makes setbacks feel like proof you chose wrong
Psychology
Søren Kierkegaard suggested that the deepest form of despair is not unhappiness but the failure to become the self you were quietly meant to be — a despair so subtle that most people who carry it never notice they are carrying it — and the difficulty of late-life regret is the slow recognition that the person you have been is not quite the person you started out hoping to be
Human Behaviour
A bankruptcy can be 'annulled' rather than discharged in Australia — legally erased as if it never existed — and a $540 million debtor pulled it off in 2018
Human Behaviour
The crypto con called 'pig butchering' gets its chilling name from livestock — scammers spend months 'fattening' victims with daily good-morning texts before the slaughter
Psychology
Carl Jung observed that the things we cannot stand in other people — the small irritations that seem disproportionate, the people we find ourselves unable to forgive — are almost always reflections of the parts of ourselves we have not yet acknowledged, in a quiet psychological pattern he called the shadow, and the surprise is that doing the work of meeting it tends to soften nearly every difficult relationship a person carries
Human Behaviour
Athletes who go plant-based consistently report the same first change before any strength gain — they can train hard again the next day, and the next, and the cumulative effect over months is enormous
Human Behaviour
Venus Williams was diagnosed with Sjögren's syndrome, an autoimmune disease so exhausting she could barely get out of bed — then her sister suggested the dietary change that kept her on tour a decade longer
Human Behaviour
Rolex is owned by no billionaire or family — a single Geneva charitable foundation has held it since founder Hans Wilsdorf died childless in 1960, making the company effectively impossible to buy
Human Behaviour