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.
Practicing brain-training games sharpens your skill at those exact games, but scientists find little proof the mental gains extend to reasoning or intelligence more broadly.
Aug 11, 2026
Solo dining reservations have climbed sharply since 2021. Read alongside the research on emotional labor and chosen solitude, the trend looks less like withdrawal and more like a quiet form of recovery.
Aug 11, 2026
In a wartime letter to a bedridden poet, Weil captured something we've nearly lost: the radical power of actually listening to another person.
Aug 11, 2026
Research on occupational identity suggests that retirement can change how people describe themselves, although the experience and meaning differ from person to person.
Aug 9, 2026
Most people know the pattern in themselves before they know the words for it. The email that would have taken five minutes at nine in the morning takes twenty at four in the afternoon.
Aug 9, 2026
For most of the twentieth century, medical students opened their neuroanatomy textbooks to the same sentence, phrased a hundred different ways: the adult human brain does not make new neurons.
Aug 8, 2026
