Category: Psychology
Solitude psychology: what being alone actually does to the brain
Solitude psychology is one of the most misunderstood fields in modern mental health research. We have spent decades studying loneliness, its harms, its causes, its epidemic spread through wealthy societies with more screens and fewer third places. Loneliness research is abundant, urgent, and well-funded. The research on solitude, on chosen aloneness, on the specific and…
The Sniper by Liam O’Flaherty: the last line that changes everything
The Sniper by Liam O’Flaherty is not a long story. You can read it in eight minutes. Maybe ten if you pause at the ending, which you will. Most people do. You were probably fourteen or fifteen when you first met it. A classroom. A textbook. A teacher asking about themes and literary devices. You…
Tagore’s The Postmaster: a story about being left behind
The Postmaster by Rabindranath Tagore is twelve pages long. Twelve pages. Written in 1891. And yet here you are, years after Class 9, still thinking about Ratan standing in a doorway. Still thinking about a lamp being lit in the dark. Still thinking about a girl who refused the money. That is not an accident.…
Why the 90s Feel More Real Than Yesterday
What were you like in the 90s? The question is everywhere right now. On social media. In comment sections. In the particular glow that comes over someone’s face when a certain song starts playing. But here is what nobody asking the question has told you. The reason the 90s feel the way they feel has…
The drug that works like magic mushrooms but keeps you in the room
Psilocybin without hallucinations has been the goal of psychedelic medicine for most of the last decade. This week, for the first time, something that looks credibly like an answer arrived. On March 7, researchers published a study in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry describing a chemically modified version of psilocin, the active compound your body…
Does personality predict support for war? a new study has a disturbing answer
Does personality predict support for war? The question sounds abstract until the week it is published, which happened to be the same week missiles hit Tehran and three American soldiers came home in coffins. A study by researchers Alexander Yendell and David Herbert, published in the journal Politics and Governance, surveyed over a thousand people…
Moral Fatigue: why good people stop caring online
Moral fatigue is not apathy. That distinction matters. The person who has stopped retweeting every crisis, stopped signing every petition, stopped feeling the same spike of outrage at the fifteenth injustice of the week that they felt at the first, is not a bad person who has stopped caring. They are a normal person whose…
Pretend play apes: the study that changed what it means to be human
Pretend play apes. That sentence would have been scientifically controversial five years ago. It is now the conclusion of a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science in February 2026. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of St Andrews set up a tea party with empty cups, an empty pitcher, and a bonobo…
Adult ADHD : are we disordered, or just paying attention to the wrong things?
Adult ADHD has become one of the defining medical conversations of the 2020s. A 2024 meta-analysis in The Lancet Psychiatry puts the global figure at 366.3 million adults. In the US alone, 15.5 million have been diagnosed, roughly half of them in adulthood rather than childhood. Online searches for ADHD grew by 270 percent across…
Why does nostalgia feel bittersweet? the science behind the ache
Why does nostalgia feel bittersweet? Because you are experiencing two things at once. The pleasure of remembering something good. And the ache of knowing it is gone. Both hit at the same time. That is not a glitch. That is the whole point. Nostalgia is experienced several times a week by most adults. It is…
