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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
At the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, a thousand metres down, lies a lake so lethal its discoverers named it the Jacuzzi of Despair — a pool of brine so dense it will not mix with the sea around it, its floor lined with the pickled remains of nearly everything that swims into it.
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: "Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time."
The human mind has no single prime age. Raw processing speed appears to peak around 18 or 19, while short-term memory improves until about 25 and remains relatively stable for another decade. The ability to recognise other people’s emotions peaks much later, in the 40s or 50s, while vocabulary—a measure of accumulated knowledge—can keep improving into the late 60s or early 70s.
A mother can carry a living piece of her child for the rest of her life, and not as a metaphor. During pregnancy some of the baby's cells cross into her body and lodge in her organs, even her brain, and male DNA has been found in a woman's brain as late as the age of 94
On a hospital ward where half the rooms were bright and half were dim, patients recovering from depression who landed on the sunny side went home about two and a half days sooner — nobody had prescribed anything, and the researchers thought some had been getting light therapy without realising it
Around 2018 humanity crossed a line it had never once crossed in all its history: for the first time ever, people over 65 came to outnumber children under five, and the gap has widened every year since
Psychopathy may be two different things, not one: in 115 ordinary adults, one type's attention locked hard onto the images that unsettle most people, while the other barely flinched at them
The more money, time, or effort we've poured into something failing, the harder it gets to quit, even when walking away is plainly the smart move: we throw good resources after bad just to justify what we spent
For most of us the Hale-Bopp comet was a once-in-a-lifetime sight in the spring of 1997, but for thirty-nine people it was a departure time, and what happened next shocked the world.
When researchers had a parent hold a blank, still face toward their baby, most infants unravelled within minutes — reaching, fussing, then giving up and turning away — and the protest ran hotter when the still face belonged to the mother than to a stranger
