Tag: Modern Behaviour
Do people think AI is conscious? a study published today says it takes minutes
Do people think AI is conscious? Most people, if asked directly, would say no. They know they are talking to software. They understand, at least intellectually, that there is no one home behind the text on the screen. Then they have a conversation with a chatbot for a few minutes. And something shifts. A study…
Why do we rehearse arguments that never happen?
Why do we rehearse arguments that never happen? Because the brain cannot tell the difference between a problem that has been resolved and a problem that has been rehearsed to death. You have done it today, probably. A conversation in your head with someone who was not there. You said exactly the right thing. They…
Why Nothing Feels Real Anymore: the strange experience nobody talks about
Why nothing feels real anymore is not a question most people ask out loud. They sit with it. They notice it at odd moments. On a Tuesday evening doing something ordinary. In a conversation that sounds like a conversation they are having but does not quite feel like one. Looking at their own hands and…
Deep questions to ask someone to know them better (that actually work)
Deep questions to ask someone to know them better are rarer than they should be. Most conversations stay on the surface because both people let them. You talk about work. About plans. About what you watched recently. You leave knowing roughly the same amount about the other person as you did before you sat down.…
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…
Five good things that happened in march 2026 that nobody told you about
There is good news March 2026. There is actually a lot of it. The problem is where you have been looking. It is not a rhythm designed to make you feel good about the world. It is a rhythm designed to keep you watching. Alarm. Outrage. Dread. Refresh. Repeat. What gets lost in that rhythm…
Dire Wolf: the resurrection that is not quite what it seems
Dire wolf is no longer extinct. That sentence is both true and, depending on who you ask, deeply misleading. On April 7, 2025, Colossal Biosciences announced that three wolf pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi were alive and growing in a secret 2,000-acre preserve somewhere in the United States. The company called them the world’s…
Who are you when everything changes?
The psychology of identity tells us that the self is not fixed. But nobody warns you what it actually feels like when it starts to shift. It is not a breakdown. It is not a crisis in the clinical sense. It is the quiet, persistent unsettledness of a person who no longer quite recognises the…
What marketing actually is (it is not what most people think)
What marketing actually is tends to get lost very early in the conversation. The textbooks arrive first. Segmentation. Targeting. Positioning. Brand equity. Consumer behaviour models arranged into frameworks with arrows pointing in tidy directions. And somewhere between the first framework and the fifth, the person trying to understand marketing loses the thread of the thing…
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…
