Writer at Silicon Canals

Lachlan Brown

Co-Publisher

Lachlan Brown is a writer at Silicon Canals contributing across the Mind pillar. His background blends formal training — a Graduate Diploma in Psychological Studies from Deakin University — with a long practice of Eastern philosophy and two decades of operating businesses from scratch. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, and the discipline of clarity in technology work — where the patterns that govern building also govern living. He splits his time between Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City.

Profile on Brown Brothers Media →

Mind

A 2025 longitudinal study challenges the idea that greater discipline automatically creates happiness: across American and Asian samples, improvements in psychological well-being predicted stronger self-control months later, while greater self-control did not predict later well-being—suggesting that feeling better may make discipline easier, rather than discipline always making us feel better.

Two three-wave samples found that earlier well-being predicted later self-control, while self-control did not reliably forecast later well-being after stable personal differences were separated.

Aug 23, 2026

Mind

Psychology suggests people who habitually suppress their emotions may pay a price far beyond feeling worse in the moment — a 12-year study involving researchers at Harvard and the University of Rochester found that people who bottled up their feelings the most had a 35% higher risk of dying from any cause.

A 12-year study linked greater habitual emotional suppression with a 35% higher all-cause mortality rate, but the estimate was observational and imprecise.

Aug 22, 2026

Technology

An Espoo robotics startup just raised €6.4 million to put “physical AI” into infrastructure factories — robotic 3D printers that monitor their own production, paired with a new concrete mix being developed to become carbon-negative rather than carbon-heavy.

Hyperion Robotics' €6.4 million round will scale robotic concrete factories, while its carbon-negative printable mix remains an EU-backed development target.

Aug 22, 2026

Mind

College is still built around roommates, clubs, and thousands of potential friends, yet the share of seniors spending more than six hours a week socialising face to face fell from 74% in 1994 to 65% in 2026 — the loneliness crisis has reached the place designed to prevent it

A reported 32-year fall in seniors' face-to-face socialising is real enough to examine, but the public data show a threshold, a wording change and a recent plateau rather than a direct measure of loneliness.

Aug 22, 2026

Mind

Researchers sampled the daily lives of 2,197 people and found they spoke about 338 fewer words for every passing year from 2005 to 2019 — with the decline steepest among under-25s, who lost an estimated 451 spoken words a day per year

A pooled audio archive suggests later samples spoke fewer estimated words, but it did not follow people for 14 years or establish what caused the trend.

Aug 22, 2026

Mind

Adults who reach midlife with few close relationships aren’t necessarily cold or antisocial. Long-term research increasingly shows that childhood adversity can leave a decades-long social imprint, making trust harder and increasing the odds of loneliness, weaker support networks and fewer close connections later in life.

Longitudinal research links childhood adversity with lower social connectedness, more isolation and greater loneliness in adulthood, but risk is not destiny and a small circle is not a personality diagnosis.

Aug 21, 2026

Mind

Across 12 months and more than 2,000 adults, heavier use of social chatbots predicted greater emotional isolation later on, while feeling disconnected also pushed people toward the bots — suggesting AI companionship can become a loop in which the symptom and the attempted cure quietly reinforce each other

A 12-month study found social-chatbot use and emotional isolation predicted one another over time, but its two loneliness measures did not tell the same story.

Aug 21, 2026

Mind

People avoid giving compliments because they expect an awkward exchange, but experiments found recipients felt better and less uncomfortable than the giver predicted — and the person offering the compliment also walked away in a better mood, meaning both sides misread a kindness before it happens

Five studies found people underestimated how welcome a genuine compliment would feel, while givers themselves reported a better mood afterwards.

Aug 21, 2026

Mind

A randomized study gave 296 first-year students a supportive AI friend, a random human texting partner, or a daily journal — two weeks later, only the students messaging another person were less lonely, even though the bot had been deliberately designed using relationship science

A two-week randomised trial found a supportive AI eased negative mood, but only a human peer reduced students' broader loneliness.

Aug 21, 2026

Mind

Feeling purposeless in your 60s or 70s isn’t simply a failure of character. Researchers can measure a broad decline in purpose across later adulthood, and some of its strongest correlates are exactly the losses that accumulate with age — declining health, widowhood and the disappearance of long-held social roles.

Longitudinal research finds an average decline in later-life purpose, but health, bereavement, social roles and even the questionnaire used all complicate the story.

Aug 20, 2026

Mind

A study following more than 1,000 children for decades found that self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted better health and financial outcomes in adulthood — and the relationship remained even after researchers accounted for intelligence and childhood social class.

The Dunedin cohort linked repeated childhood self-control measures with adult health and finances, even after adjustment for IQ and social class. The result is substantial, but it is not destiny or proof of causation.

Aug 20, 2026

Mind

A late-2025 longitudinal study turned the usual self-improvement story on its head: stronger self-control did not predict greater well-being later, but people who felt better psychologically went on to show measurably stronger self-control one month and six months later.

Two three-wave studies found that higher well-being preceded stronger self-control, while self-control did not reliably forecast later well-being in the same models.

Aug 20, 2026