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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed a small telescope at Jupiter and saw four small objects circling it — becoming the first human being in history to look at the night sky and see, with his own eyes, that the Earth was not the center of everything
The most statistically dominant career performance in any major sport on Earth was not Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, or Wayne Gretzky — it was an Australian cricketer named Don Bradman, who retired in 1948 with a career batting average that places him roughly six standard deviations above the mean of test cricket history
People who replay old conversations at night often aren't anxious or insecure — many are processing words they were never allowed to say out loud in the moment
Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen found that when older adults were asked to imagine a medical breakthrough adding decades to their lives, their preferences shifted back toward those of younger people — suggesting that the emotional calm of old age may come less from age itself than from the way a shrinking time horizon changes what people value.
MIT researchers tested participants from age 10 to 71 and found something they described as genuinely unexpected: vocabulary — the brain's accumulated store of language and meaning — peaks not in youth but in the late 60s and early 70s
The hundreds of human skeletons scattered around Roopkund Lake at 5,029 metres in the Indian Himalayas were long assumed to be the remains of a single 9th-century pilgrimage group killed by a sudden hailstorm, in an explanation that a 2019 peer-reviewed ancient DNA study has substantially overturned, by demonstrating that the skeletons came from at least three different populations and died across more than one thousand years.
A University of Toronto study found that chasing happiness can make people less happy — not because happiness is bad, but because constantly trying to force it burns through the self-control needed to do the things that actually create it.
If a bee searching for nectar might be conscious and ChatGPT almost certainly isn't, what exactly were we measuring when we decided something was aware?
When archaeologists excavating a Han Dynasty tomb near Changsha in 1971 opened the innermost of four nested coffins, they found the body of a noblewoman named Xin Zhui — who had died roughly 2,140 years ago — so perfectly preserved that her skin was still soft, her joints still moved, and her stomach still contained 138 melon seeds from her last meal, making it the best-preserved human body ever recovered from the ancient world
In 1973, a Stanford psychology professor sent eight healthy people into twelve psychiatric hospitals with instructions to feign a single hallucinatory symptom, then act normally, in an experiment that reshaped the entire field of American psychiatry and that turned out, almost fifty years later, to have been hiding something nobody had thought to look for
