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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Psychologist Roy Baumeister ran a large study on what separates a happy life from a meaningful one, and the divide is sharper than you'd expect: happiness comes from getting what you want, but meaning comes from what you give, whether you spend your days taking or contributing
A genetic analysis of nearly 700,000 people identified 74 distinct locations in the human genome tied to anxiety, 39 of which had never been linked to the condition before
Physicist Roger Penrose has spent decades arguing that consciousness isn't something the brain produces, but that explaining it will require physics we haven't yet discovered
Psychologist Erich Fromm argued there are two ways to live, and the difference decides everything — not having more, but being more, whether you cling to what you own or grow into what you are
Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that peace turns on one distinction, and it isn't optimism — it's the dichotomy of control, learning to want only what is already yours to give
Pooling 10 UK studies of 1,252 people, researchers found that exercising outdoors in nature tended to lift mood and self-esteem — with the biggest self-esteem gains from just five minutes, and settings with water outperforming green-only ones
The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name
Japan's pachinko parlors, at their 1994 peak, generated more revenue every year than the country's entire automobile export industry — and roughly 80 percent of them are owned by ethnic Koreans, whose grandparents were brought to Japan as workers during the colonial occupation of Korea
In 1971, a struggling nightclub drummer named Daisuke Inoue built the first karaoke machine in his home city of Kobe using a tape recorder, a coin box, and an amplifier — and by not bothering to patent his invention because he thought he had merely combined other people's parts, he lost roughly 100 million dollars a year in royalties
When Sony released a robotic dog called AIBO in Tokyo in May of 1999, the first batch of 3,000 units sold out online in 20 minutes — and today, more than 800 of those same AIBOs have been given traditional Buddhist funerals at a 450-year-old temple in Chiba Prefecture, where a priest chants sutras for the peaceful transition of their souls
