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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Being highly sensitive to your environment is not a weakness but an evolutionary strategy that has been documented in humans and more than 100 other species, and peer-reviewed twin research has established that in humans, approximately 47 per cent of the variation in this trait is heritable and distinct from anxiety or introversion
The Eastern Jin army was outnumbered by more than five to one at the Fei River in 383 AD, yet won in a single afternoon by triggering one moment of panic in the invading force, and the result decided which civilisation would rule China for the next two centuries
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps and lost his wife, parents, and brother to them, argued in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that human beings can endure almost any suffering as long as they can find a reason for it — and that a life without meaning is what actually breaks people
In Japan, the depth of a bow carries specific institutional meaning — a 15-degree bow is a casual greeting between colleagues, a 30-degree bow is a formal greeting to a client or customer, and a 45-degree bow is reserved for serious apology, gratitude, or the greeting of someone whose social standing significantly exceeds your own
The Toto company introduced the Washlet toilet in Japan in 1980 — a heated toilet seat with a built-in warm-water bidet, an air dryer, a deodorizer, and a control panel of buttons — and by 2026 roughly 80 percent of Japanese households have one, making Japan the only country on earth where the toilet is a piece of consumer electronics
To read a newspaper in Japan, a person needs to know three completely different writing systems used simultaneously — hiragana for native Japanese words, katakana for foreign loan-words, and kanji for concepts borrowed from Chinese roughly 1,500 years ago — plus romaji, the Latin alphabet Japanese schoolchildren learn to type their language into computers and phones
On the morning of December 26, 2004, a 10-year-old British girl named Tilly Smith was walking along Mai Khao Beach in Phuket, Thailand when she noticed the sea frothing and receding exactly as her geography teacher had taught her two weeks earlier — and her warning saved roughly 100 lives that morning
In 2014, a neuroscientist named Gregory Berns trained a group of dogs to lie completely still inside a functional MRI scanner and measured what happened in their brains when they smelled their owners — and the reward centers of the dogs' brains lit up more brightly for their owners than for any other scent, including the scent of other dogs in their own households
For almost 15 years, a retired psychology professor worked with his Border Collie Chaser for four to five hours a day — and by the time he stopped adding new toys because his house had run out of room, Chaser could correctly identify 1,022 different toys by their individual names
Stand up too fast and the stars filling your vision aren't imaginary — a brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the light-detecting cells sputter out phantom light
