Nobody warns you that apartment hunting in your twenties is really an audit of who…
I've been apartment hunting since April.
Mind
The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work inside the technology economy.
856 articles · Mind
The reason a chosen breakup can leave a hollow you did not choose: the good…
The decision to leave a relationship gets made in the prefrontal cortex, but the routines built around another person live in the striatum — and those circuits keep firing on cue for weeks after the person is gone.
In a classic experiment, people preferred to repeat 90 seconds of painfully cold…
There is the pain a person lives through, and then there is the pain their memory files away for later.
Most of what you do all day runs on habit, not choice — but a new study found the…
Researchers tracked 105 people six times a day for a week. About two-thirds of what they did was triggered by habit, and nearly nine in ten actions were carried out on autopilot. The surprise wasn't the size of the autopilot — it was how often the automatic thing and the intended thing turned out to be the same.
Walking through a doorway can make you forget what you came to do even when you…
The 'doorway effect' says crossing a threshold makes you forget, because the brain files experience into events and a boundary closes one off. It's a real finding, though a 2021 replication suggests it is smaller and more load-dependent than the popular version.
The hardest part of a long marriage isn’t always the arguments or the boredom…
Long marriages ask something almost no one warns you about: the quiet grief of watching your partner slowly become someone only you remember the earlier version of. The couples who survive it don't refuse to notice the change — they metabolise it out loud.
People who navigate their 40s and 50s alone often worry they’re falling behind…
There's a particular worry I keep running into from people in their forties and fifties who are on their own.
Psychology suggests we don’t reason toward truth so much as defend what we already…
In 1998, a Tufts psychologist named Raymond Nickerson published a long review article pulling together decades of scattered experiments under one heading.
Psychology suggests memory is not a recording but a story we rebuild each time: in…
Picture a memory you are sure of.
Chasing happiness can be the thing that scares it off: research suggests those who…
What follows is reading and reflection on published psychology research, not advice.
Psychology says one cruel remark can drown out many kind ones: across love, money…
Give someone five compliments and one insult in the same afternoon, and the insult is what they carry home.
Why a strong sense of self can keep changing across adulthood
We're sold a story about identity that runs like a detective film.