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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 largest genetic study of anxiety symptom severity to date has found the condition is not only heritable but shows significant genetic overlap with heart disease, gut disorders, and migraine, in findings researchers describe as an important step forward in understanding anxiety's biological roots
A 1971 experiment flew four atomic clocks around the world on commercial airliners — first heading east, then heading west — and when the clocks were brought home and compared with stationary clocks at the U.S. Naval Observatory, they were measurably out of sync, in the first direct demonstration that time itself moves at slightly different rates depending on how fast you are traveling, exactly as Einstein had predicted half a century earlier
In 1986, two psychologists gave a name to the lives we may never live — 'possible selves,' the versions of us we hope, expect, or fear to become — and argued these imagined futures quietly pull our present choices
Researchers found dog owners tended to live longer — and the link was strongest for the people you might least expect: those living alone.
At eighteen, the human brain processes information faster than it ever will again. At sixty-seven, the same brain has acquired a vocabulary that will not begin to decline for another decade. The peer-reviewed evidence from a 48,537-person study has overturned the popular assumption that the human mind has a single peak.
Thought of the day from writer Virginia Woolf: "No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."
For years the rule seemed settled — money stops buying happiness past $75,000 a year — but one study of 1.7 million daily mood reports from 33,391 Americans found no such ceiling, only a steady climb
A Yale researcher measured how people felt about growing old, and what she found was surprising: those with a positive view of aging lived more than 7 years longer — a gap traced back to attitudes they'd recorded as much as 23 years earlier
Many of us see status-seeking as a shallow modern preoccupation, but research suggests the need to feel valued runs deeper than we think
The longest piece of music ever composed is being performed right now in a church in Germany — a piece designed to last 639 years, played on a special organ that holds each note for months or years at a time — and the performance, which began in 2001, is not expected to end until the year 2640
