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Mind
The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work.
Mind
A three-year randomised trial of the much-hyped MIND 'brain diet' found it did no better than a sensible control diet, and omega-3 pills show no cognitive benefit in healthy people: the evidence for brain foods is real, slow, and badly oversold
The wellness industry's favorite brain-boosting foods largely fail rigorous testing, revealing a gap between viral nutrition advice and what science actually shows.
More in Mind
Strangers who watched sixty seconds of silent footage guessed people's income and social class better than chance: the dining habits we read as 'poor' are learned codes, judged fast and often wrongly
The generation that came of age with answering machines, handwritten letters, and phone books isn't nostalgic for slower technology, they remember when being unreachable for a few hours was considered normal instead of a small emergency other people had to manage around
The Dunning-Kruger effect isn't what everyone thinks it is: the original 1999 study found bottom-quartile performers overestimated their standing by about 50 percentile points, not that confident people are stupid
Psychology says if you forget people's names shortly after meeting them, it's not because you weren't paying attention — you were paying attention to their face, and the brain has never learned how to hold a name and a face in the same hand
The people who remember every song lyric from their teenage years but can't remember what they did last Tuesday aren't losing their memory, they're revealing which decade of their life their brain decided was worth encoding in the highest resolution
Psychology says people who clean up after themselves at restaurants tend to notice labor everywhere else, too — the tired look on a cashier's face, the long line no one else seems to register — because their radar for other people's effort never really turns off
A Gallup survey of more than 19,000 US workers found Gen Z employees who work fully remote report feeling lonely on a given day nearly three times as often as baby boomers, despite being the generation assumed to be most comfortable working through a screen
People who keep the thermostat lower than they'd actually like aren't always frugal or tough, they may have grown up in houses where comfort felt earned and never quite believed they were allowed to set the dial where their body wanted it
People who go quiet during group photos aren't always camera-shy: for some, being told to look happy for a picture asks them to perform a feeling faster than it can honestly arrive, and they'd rather not lie in an image that outlives the day
A 2023 Dutch study validating the "quiet ego" scale found that humility splits into two separate traits, one linked to stronger relationships and the other to being taken advantage of at work
The best evidence on AI and productivity does not agree with itself: Harvard and BCG found consultants using GPT-4 finished skilled tasks 25 per cent faster, while a separate trial found experienced coders using AI tools were 19 per cent slower, and did not notice
