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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
For nearly five decades, psychologist Francine Patterson taught a western lowland gorilla named Koko a modified sign language — and Koko reportedly learned more than 1,000 signs, understood 2,000 spoken words, and mourned when her kitten was killed by a car
The Golden Triangle — the remote borderland where Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand meet — once produced more than half the world's heroin, not through cartels or kingpins but through a patchwork of ethnic armies that found opium more reliable than any government
Brain scans found that mothers looking at their own dogs activated some of the same attachment networks as when they looked at their own children — evidence that the bond between humans and pets is biologically real
In 2017, New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River after a 140-year Māori campaign — recognizing it not as property, but as an ancestor with the rights of a legal person
In 1980, China's economy was about the size of the Netherlands'. By 2010 it had overtaken Japan. By 2023 it was producing roughly eighteen per cent of everything the world makes — all within a single human lifetime
Thought of the day from the father of American psychology, William James: "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook"
Pooling 71 studies of nearly 100,000 people, researchers found heavier short-video use was linked to poorer attention, weaker impulse control and more stress — a pattern that held across youths and adults
Since the 1950s, dogs have leapt from the same spot on Scotland's Overtoun Bridge so consistently — almost always from the right parapet, almost always on clear days — that one behavioural investigation eventually traced it to the scent of mink living in the rocks below
We tend to think loneliness is about having no one around, but the Harvard Study of Adult Development points to something more precise: it is not the absence of people but the absence of people who actually know you — a distinction that can leave someone surrounded and completely alone
In the Viking Age town of Birka, Sweden, a warrior buried with two horses, a sword, an axe, arrows, two shields, and a full set of game pieces was assumed for nearly 140 years to be a man — DNA confirmed in 2017 that the warrior was a woman
