Psychology
Psychology
Psychology stories — what makes people tick, what childhood patterns shape adulthood, how high-functioning minds navigate the world. Part of our Mind & Meaning editorial section.
Psychology
The reason your mind wanders has nothing to do with discipline or willpower, and a study of 68 experiments found that the longer any task goes on, people increasingly think about something else regardless of how hard they try
Psychology
Between the mid-teens and the mid-twenties, the human brain records an unusually rich collection of memories—not because it works better than before or after, but because life is packed with firsts that rarely happen again.
Psychology
The 'Mozart effect' began as a fifteen-minute bump on one spatial-reasoning test taken by 36 college students, then grew into a national belief that classical music makes babies smarter
Psychology
Being highly sensitive to your environment is not a weakness but an evolutionary strategy that has been documented in humans and more than 100 other species, and peer-reviewed twin research has established that in humans, approximately 47 per cent of the variation in this trait is heritable and distinct from anxiety or introversion
Psychology
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps and lost his wife, parents, and brother to them, argued in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning that human beings can endure almost any suffering as long as they can find a reason for it — and that a life without meaning is what actually breaks people
Psychology
Psychologist Roy Baumeister ran a large study on what separates a happy life from a meaningful one, and the divide is sharper than you'd expect: happiness comes from getting what you want, but meaning comes from what you give, whether you spend your days taking or contributing
Psychology
Researchers compared 5,556 people across 10 nations and found that parents tended to report a little more meaning and purpose in life — though their day-to-day happiness looked virtually the same as non-parents
Psychology
Most people don't realize Maslow revised his famous hierarchy of needs, and the top was not self-actualisation but self-transcendence, the pull beyond the self entirely
Psychology
When a human and a dog gaze into each other's eyes, both of them release oxytocin — the same hormone released between a human mother and her infant during nursing — and Japanese researchers reported in 2015 that this cross-species chemical feedback loop appears to be unique to dogs and their humans and does not occur in wolves
Psychology
Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter in late 2010 that his own children had not used the iPad, and that he limited technology at home, even as the tablet he had unveiled in San Francisco months earlier was on its way to selling hundreds of millions
Psychology
In a Japanese preschool, the shoes line up by themselves, the snack bowls sit on a low shelf a four-year-old can reach, and a child walks in already knowing what to do because the room, and not the adult, has quietly done the teaching
Psychology
Neuroimaging research on jazz improvisation suggests creative flow may have less to do with inspiration and more to do with learned expertise meeting the willingness to release control
Psychology
A Yale study found that how you think about getting older may add 7.5 years to your life, more than exercise and more than not smoking
Psychology
Researchers stopped people to ask for directions, swapped in a different man while a door passed between them — and fewer than half noticed the person they were talking to had changed
Psychology