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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
The Hollywood sign was erected in 1923 as a temporary $21,000 advertisement for a hillside real estate development called Hollywoodland — meant to come down after 18 months, but the developers found it useful, the public grew attached, the city inherited it in 1944, and the most famous sign on the planet is technically the leftover billboard for a real estate project from a century ago
Since the first Japanese bullet train left Tokyo Station on October 1, 1964 — just nine days before the opening of the Tokyo Olympics — the Shinkansen has carried more than 10 billion passengers across 60 years of continuous high-speed operation, and has never had a single passenger fatality caused by derailment or collision in its entire history
Morning light exposure in the first hour after waking shapes cortisol and alertness for the hours that follow — and most people in modern built environments are not getting it
On 26 September 1991, eight people locked themselves inside a three-acre world of glass and steel in the Arizona desert — and two years later emerged gaunt, oxygen-deprived, and having discovered that the building's own walls had been slowly stealing the air
On May 11, 1997, the reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov sat down in a Manhattan office tower to play the final game of his rematch against an IBM computer called Deep Blue — and resigned in under an hour, in what may be the cleanest moment in modern history when a domain of human cognition quietly crossed over to a machine
Early emotional states become physically embedded in the architecture of the developing brain — and laughter, according to recent research, is one of the experiences doing that work
At twenty, the brain processes information faster than it ever will again. In middle age, the same brain may read other people’s emotions more accurately than it ever has. By the late sixties, its vocabulary can still be climbing. The human mind does not peak once — it rotates.
On 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Russian fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in history to leave the Earth — sealed inside a metal sphere just over two metres wide, with the spacecraft's controls locked because nobody knew what the human brain would do in weightlessness, and instructions to open a sealed envelope only if he lost his mind during the 108 minutes he spent orbiting the planet alone
Most people don't realize that men now entering their 70s are often being asked to discuss feelings they were raised to keep out of view
In the summer of 1858, a lesser-known 35-year-old naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace mailed Charles Darwin a 20-page letter from the Indonesian jungle outlining the theory of evolution by natural selection — a theory Darwin had been quietly developing for 20 years without publishing — forcing Darwin to hastily share the credit with a man he had never met
