Psychology and neuroscience
Mind & Matter covers psychology and neuroscience: what the evidence says about how brains work and why people do what they do, with limited patience for overclaimed studies.
A 1990-to-2021 survey comparison found a steep contraction in American men’s friendship networks, although a change from phone to online interviewing makes the exact magnitude less certain.
Aug 22, 2026
Shirley Strum's decades of fieldwork on olive baboons in Kenya reshaped how biologists think about primate societies, replacing a model built on male aggression with one built on long-term female relationships and something that looks, from the outside, like a favour economy.
Aug 21, 2026
A reanalysis of 87 identical-twin pairs found an average 15.1-point IQ gap among the 10 pairs with the most dissimilar schooling, but the historical comparison cannot attribute the whole difference to education.
Aug 21, 2026
A 30,421-person study separated objective social isolation from subjective loneliness and estimated that loneliness mediated only 6 percent of isolation's cognitive effect.
Aug 19, 2026
Unlike mice, human brains recruit fresh immune reinforcements from the bloodstream in middle age, upending decades of neuroscience doctrine about the brain's sealed-off defenses.
Aug 19, 2026
A 28,000-person assessment study found declines across eight emotional skills, while empathy research shows that perspective taking and personal distress carry different risks.
Aug 19, 2026
The Arctic's darkest months are supposed to crush the human spirit—unless you've learned to embrace them.
Aug 19, 2026
Across seven vignette experiments, willingness to protect strongly shaped how people rated dates and friends. The design separated the choice to help from physical ability, but it did not observe real violence or relationships.
Aug 18, 2026
In 126 undergraduates, verbal comprehension showed modest positive links with worry and rumination, but the study did not establish that intelligence causes either one.
Aug 18, 2026
A 1964 one-eye-open observation inspired the idea, but EEG work published in 1975–77 showed how dolphins alternate genuine slow-wave sleep between hemispheres.
Aug 17, 2026
Youth life evaluation fell 0.86 points across four English-speaking countries while rising in most of the world. Heavy social media use matters, but hours alone cannot explain the divergence.
Aug 17, 2026
A 2011 analysis found several creativity-test scores falling after 1990, especially among young children. A later meta-analytic reappraisal found no evidence of a generational creativity crisis.
Aug 17, 2026
Antarctica dominates meteorite collections because moving ice, mountain barriers, wind and sublimation gather widely scattered falls into small blue-ice stranding zones.
Aug 16, 2026
Practical care and intimacy can overlap. When family roles change, some people may reconsider how usefulness, closeness and mutual attention fit together.
Aug 16, 2026
