Category: Psychology
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…
Confirmation Bias: how we build beliefs and defend them
This article explains confirmation bias explained simply, without academic jargon or political framing. You scroll past a headline that confirms what you already suspected. You feel a small sense of recognition. Of course. That makes sense. You keep reading. Later that day, you encounter an article arguing the opposite. You skim it. Something feels off.…
Did a philosopher predict the algorithm? Heidegger’s warning from 1954
Did a philosopher predict the Instagram/TikTok algorithm in the 1950s? Why do we treat our bodies as machines that we try to hack with supplements, diets, or medicines? Why does finding love in the modern age feel like sorting through a warehouse? Why do we treat everything around us, even humans, as commodities? These are…
Bad Bunny Grammy win. the room will never be the same.
Bad Bunny Grammy win wrote a new chapter in history on February 1, 2026, in Los Angeles. His album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, which translates to “I Should Have Taken More Photos,” became the first Spanish-language album in the history of the Grammy Awards to win Album of the Year. In 68 years of the…
The psychology of news cycle: why certain stories hit different
The psychology of news cycle is not a new field of study. But it has never mattered more than it does right now. At any given moment in 2026, a person with a smartphone has access to more information about more crises, conflicts, elections, disasters, and scandals than any human being in history has ever…
