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
Laughter activates many of the same brain reward circuits as food and sex, and a 2025 study finds it measurably lowers cortisol and may restructure how the developing brain builds resilience to stress
Psychology
More than 60% of the water in a wood frog's body can freeze solid each winter: its heart stops, it stops breathing, and for more than 7 months it can lie essentially a frogsicle, before it thaws out in spring and simply hops away
Psychology
We talk about anxiety as if it starts in the mind — but for some people, the eyes may be the first place it shows up
Psychology
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see."
Psychology
The rock formations in the Scottish Highlands and western Newfoundland match each other almost exactly — because the two were part of the same mountain range hundreds of millions of years ago, before the Atlantic Ocean opened and split them across what is now an entire ocean
Psychology
Light takes about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth, but the energy carried in that sunlight was generated in the sun's core tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago — bouncing through the sun's interior for that entire time before finally escaping its surface and making the 8-minute trip across space
Psychology
We have normalised filling every quiet moment with something — podcasts while walking, screens while eating, sound while falling asleep — and the exhaustion most people feel isn't from doing too much, it's from never once letting the mind go quiet
Psychology
Brain scans of new fathers show measurable changes — which might explain why so many dads describe the first year of parenthood as feeling like learning to be a different person
Psychology
Psilocybin research is no longer just for hard-to-treat cases — a new trial targeted recurrent depression in people who had not failed standard treatment, and the results are promising
Psychology
In a Beijing laboratory, 25 volunteers spent a week learning to fly with feathered virtual-reality wings — flapping to stay aloft, swerving through rings, swatting falling balls — and by the end, their brains were processing images of wings the same way they process images of real human limbs
Psychology
Thought of the day by Albert Einstein: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
Psychology
In 1955, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a satirical essay about government bureaucracy. Seventy years later, the law that came from it may be more relevant than ever.
Psychology
In the 1980s, an Italian student invented the Pomodoro Technique — the popular timed focus method. He named it after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer sitting on his desk
Psychology
I cancelled Netflix for a month and spent the time learning Claude properly — the gap between people who use AI casually and people who actually know what it can do is bigger than I expected
Psychology