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
Evidence of ancient life has just been found buried inside an asteroid crater — and the discovery suggests the warm lakes created by major impacts may have been some of the original cradles of life on Earth
Psychology
Consciousness might not be something the brain creates — it might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, more like gravity than like a thought — and one of the most credentialed neuroscientists alive is now arguing that mainstream science has been wrong about it for a century
Psychology
Almost half of women in their 60s and 70s in Japan now prefer getting personal advice from AI rather than another human — the only age group in the survey to make that choice — and the country's elderly isolation crisis is the unstated context
Psychology
There is a moment, in most adults' lives, when intuition turns out to have been right about something important, and another moment, often in the same lives, when intuition turns out to have been catastrophically wrong, and the neuroscience that has begun to explain the difference is one of the more useful things the cognitive sciences have done in the last two decades.
Psychology
Sam Altman asked what problem people most hope AI will solve — and the answer that keeps coming up isn't cancer or climate change
Psychology
NASA's Curiosity rover has found organic molecules on Mars that may be billions of years old — and the scientists studying them are being careful about what they say next
Psychology
People who are genuinely kind but feel virtually alone in the world have usually figured out something most adults haven't admitted yet — that being warm to everyone is not the same as being known by anyone, and the small daily difference between the two adds up across decades
Psychology
Radioactive iron from an ancient stellar explosion has been found in 80,000-year-old Antarctic ice, confirming that the Solar System is passing through the remnant debris of a supernova
Psychology
People who are truly pleasant and kind but have no close friends often spent decades being the one everyone called during a crisis — and somewhere along the way noticed almost none of those calls had reversed direction
Psychology
Quote by Robin Williams: "Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always."
Psychology
Cognitive scientists have a name for the experience of suddenly realizing you've been reading a book for several minutes without absorbing any of the words — "mind-wandering" — and recent research suggests humans spend roughly 47 percent of waking life in some version of this state, which means the default condition of consciousness is mostly somewhere other than the present
Psychology
Most of the matter in the universe has never been observed directly, and the existence of "dark matter" is essentially a placeholder name for the gap between what we can see and what the math requires — a placeholder we've been using confidently for about ninety years
Psychology
AI can now read your emotional state in a shop, adapt what it shows you in real time, and increase sales by double digits — and most shoppers have no idea this is already happening
Psychology
Submarine crews and astronauts experience the same set of psychological pressures and have evolved opposite ways of handling them, and the difference reveals something about how isolation actually works.
Psychology