Tag: 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…
Are night owls more sadistic? a new study says yes and the reason is fascinating
Are night owls more sadistic? It sounds like the kind of question designed to generate outrage clicks. It is also, as of December 2025, a question with a genuine scientific answer. The answer is yes. Measurably. Across two separate studies, using two different populations and two different methods. People who naturally prefer staying up late…
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…
Kama is not what you think: desire as a sacred goal
Kama is the most misunderstood word in all of Hindu philosophy. Say it to most people and they think of one thing. The Kama Sutra. Dimly lit book covers. A manual for sexual acrobatics that someone’s aunt had hidden on a shelf. That is not what Kama means. It never was. Kama is the third…
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…
Why costa rica has no army and what 77 years without one actually looks like
The question of why Costa Rica has no army is worth asking this week more than most. The world is currently spending $2.4 trillion a year on defence. That is the highest figure ever recorded in human history, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Governments across Europe and Asia are revising their military…
What is Moksha: why liberation is the aim nobody talks about
Moksha is the fourth and final aim of Purushartha, and it is the one modern life has the least language for. Dharma, we understand, at least conceptually. Do the right thing. Live with integrity. Artha we understand extremely well. Earn, build, accumulate. Kama we understand in our bones. Want, pursue, enjoy. But Moksha, the aim…
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…
Proto-Writing stone age: the 40,000-year-old marks that rewrote history
Proto-writing Stone Age artifacts are forcing a rewrite of one of humanity’s oldest assumptions. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on February 24, 2026 analysed more than 3,000 geometric signs carved into 260 objects from cave sites in the Swabian Jura, a mountain range in southwestern Germany. The objects…
