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
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined 'flow' in 1975 after interviewing artists who forgot to eat — he found the state appears only when attention points fully outward at a task, never at the self
Human Behaviour
Charles Darwin argued that the roots of human morality were not separate from animal life, and the surprise is what that does to civilization — manners, conscience, and restraint become not the opposite of instinct, but instinct complicated by memory, language, and the judgment of others
Human Behaviour
New HIV infections fell by 40 percent between 2010 and 2024 and the number of people requiring treatment for neglected tropical diseases dropped by 36 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Statistics 2026 report — gains now at risk as the funding that built them comes under pressure
Psychology
Research into the neuroscience of social rejection has shown that the brain regions that activate when a person is excluded, rejected, or grieving a lost relationship are the same regions that activate during physical injury, with the overlap being so substantial that a standard over-the-counter painkiller measurably reduces both kinds of pain, because the human brain has co-opted the physical pain system to register damage to social bonds
Human Behaviour
Your own voice sounds different to other people than it sounds to you, because the version you hear is reaching your inner ear partly through the bones of your skull, which amplify lower frequencies that everyone else cannot hear — and the recorded version that strikes most people as alien when they first hear it is in fact the only version of their voice anyone else has ever known
Human Behaviour
By 2050, more than half of the world's population is projected to be myopic — needing glasses or contacts to see clearly at a distance — according to a series of international vision studies, in a shift driven not by genetics but by the amount of time children now spend indoors and the relative absence of time spent focusing on the horizon during the years when the eye is still forming
Human Behaviour
Within the lifetime of children being born today, the global human population is projected to begin shrinking for the first time since the Black Death — no country on Earth currently has a fertility rate above 7 children per woman, and dozens of high-income nations have fallen below 1.5 — in a civilizational shift that demographers now expect to end the era of sustained population growth that has defined humanity for the past several thousand years
Human Behaviour
The average human brain volume has decreased by approximately 150 cubic centimetres since the late Pleistocene, equivalent to roughly the volume of a tennis ball, in a finding documented across nearly ninety years of peer-reviewed physical anthropology research, with no agreed scientific explanation for why one of the most distinctive evolutionary trends of our species has reversed
Psychology
Quote by Hannah Arendt: “Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.”e: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
Psychology
Across more than 100 countries, researchers have documented a "U-curve" of human happiness — life satisfaction reliably dips through middle age before rising again in late life — and the happiness people report in their late 60s and 70s is often greater than what they felt in their 30s, in a quiet curve almost nobody expects to be on while they are inside the dip
Human Behaviour
In May 2008, months before the global financial crisis tore through commodity markets, Nathan Tinkler cashed out $422 million — one of the best-timed bets in Australian history
Human Behaviour
Novak Djokovic blamed gluten and dairy for the recurring illness wrecking his game, cut both before his 2011 breakthrough, and later won twelve Grand Slam titles after turning 30
Human Behaviour
Lewis Hamilton won seven Formula One World Championships, and he says the best physical decision of his life was the 2017 switch he made after watching a documentary about industrial food
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