Solo travel and remote work have become closely linked in the last decade, and a body of research on the people actually living that way, rather than the version of it shown on social media, points to a specific,...
Some people in their eighties score on memory tests as well as adults twenty to thirty years younger, a pattern researchers at Northwestern University have spent a quarter of a century trying to understand. The programme, which coined the...
There is no validated checklist of personal signs that reliably predicts who will go on to succeed after a period of feeling stuck. Anyone offering one is working from intuition, not from a body of research that has actually...
The claim that music lessons make children cognitively sharper across the board has circulated for decades, and it is one of the more thoroughly tested claims in this area of psychology. A 2017 meta-analysis by Giovanni Sala and Fernand...
The picture most of us carry of a disciplined, successful person is a picture of someone straining. Jaw set, resisting the biscuit, powering through the thing they do not feel like doing. Success, in that image, is willpower applied...
The advice to silence negative self-talk usually treats the problem as one of content: swap “I’m going to fail this pitch” for “I’ve got this,” and the anxious performance underneath should follow the words upward. A 2014 paper in...
The assumption that introverts are the ones who genuinely enjoy time alone, while everyone else merely tolerates it, is common enough to go unquestioned. A 2022 study in PLOS ONE, led by the psychologist Thuy-vy Nguyen with Richard Ryan,...
Some people can hear a change in a friend’s voice before the friend has admitted that anything is wrong.
They remember the difficult meeting, the medical appointment and the anniversary everyone else forgot. They send the message after the bad...
In 2020, 86 researchers pooled 43 separate longitudinal datasets, more than 11,000 couples in total, and handed the combined data to a machine learning model with one job: find out which of over 2,000 measured variables actually predict how...
In 2016, a team of UCLA researchers built a working replica of Instagram inside an fMRI scanner. Teenagers lay in the machine and looked at photographs, some of them their own, each stamped with a like count the researchers...
