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
A person can nod calmly through terrible news, then find their hands shaking on the steering wheel an hour later — and the delay does not mean they were fine
Human Behaviour
In the 1990s, neuroscientist Stephen Porges proposed the polyvagal theory — the idea that an ancient nerve slams the body into stillness when fighting and fleeing are both off the table
Human Behaviour
John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who built attachment theory in the 1950s, argued that a child's need for closeness is as basic as hunger, and that the calm, undemanding child is often the one who learned asking for less kept the peace
Human Behaviour
The Dunning-Kruger effect, mapped by two Cornell psychologists in 1999, found that the least skilled people often vastly overrate their ability, while top performers tend to judge themselves more accurately
Human Behaviour
The human gut contains roughly 500 million neurons wired directly to the brain via the vagus nerve — and it registers signals before conscious thought catches up
Human Behaviour
We treat daydreaming as a lapse in focus, but neuroscientists tracking the brain's default mode network found that a wandering mind lights up the same circuits used for planning the future and solving problems left unattended
Human Behaviour
The basal ganglia, buried deep beneath the cortex, help turn a studied city map into a route you can follow on autopilot — and help keep a habit intact long after the conscious memory of forming it has faded
Human Behaviour
In a 2013 University of Minnesota experiment, people seated at a messy desk generated more inventive uses for a ping-pong ball than those at a tidy one — clutter, it turned out, nudged the mind toward the unconventional
Human Behaviour
Astronauts who have seen the whole Earth at once describe the overview effect — every war and border and argument hanging in silence — and afterwards traffic and small talk can feel strangely far away, like the world seen through glass
Human Behaviour
Astronauts returning from long stays in orbit say the smell of rain is almost too much to bear and a familiar street feels like something they are piloting rather than driving
Human Behaviour
The brain's default mode network was discovered almost by accident in the 1990s — it was the activity researchers kept seeing when subjects were supposedly doing nothing, and it burns nearly as much energy as focused thought
Human Behaviour
The Zeigarnik effect helps explain why unfinished goals can feel louder than completed ones, but modern research suggests the mind’s pull toward open loops is far more conditional than the famous story implies
Human Behaviour
A famous spotlight-effect experiment by Thomas Gilovich and colleagues found students thought twice as many people noticed an embarrassing T-shirt as actually did; the audience you rehearse for is often barely watching
Human Behaviour
I put six minutes of birdsong through my headphones during the worst week of the year and something in my chest actually loosened
Psychology