One of 8 fields we read

Psychology & Behavioral Science

81 discoveries published so far

August 11, 2026 Loneliness and isolation turn out to be two different threats to the brain Researchers Jo Mhairi Hale, Angelo Lorenti, and Solveig Cunningham pulled 137,653 observations from 30,421 adults aged 50 to 94 in the long-running Health and Retirement Study, tracking cognitive function through memory and processing tests from 2004 to 2018.
August 10, 2026 The brain keeps the accent of a language you don't remember speaking Researchers at McGill University scanned the brains of 36 adults who were adopted from China as infants, exposed to Mandarin for their first months of life, then raised entirely in French with no memory of ever having heard the tonal language.
August 9, 2026 Green tea's most active compound may protect the aging, overweight brain Obesity shrinks the hippocampus, the brain's memory hub, partly because it jams a cellular cleanup process called autophagy.
August 8, 2026 A kitchen herb quiets anxiety and depression alongside standard medication Researchers at Fasa and Shiraz Universities of Medical Sciences in Iran ran a randomized, placebo-controlled trial on 60 adults diagnosed with major depression and co-occurring anxiety, all already taking the antidepressant sertraline.
August 7, 2026 Believing singlehood can help you grow makes people happier, whether or not they ever find a partner Psychologists have mostly studied "self-expansion," the drive to grow by picking up new perspectives and skills, through the lens of romantic relationships.
August 6, 2026 The "super movers" whose fast walk hints at a resilient brain Researchers led by Joe Verghese at Stony Brook combined three large aging studies, including one following nearly 4,000 adults over 80 across the US, England, Europe, China, and Mexico, and identified "super movers": the roughly 7 percent of older adults whose walking speed is at least 1.5 standard deviations above the average for their age and sex.
August 5, 2026 Thirty minutes a day, out loud, by hand, brought real memory gains George Mason University researcher Emily Ihara led a 12-week trial of a routine called StrongerMemory: 10 minutes of reading aloud, 10 minutes of handwriting, and 10 minutes of simple math problems, every day.
August 4, 2026 An eight-week mindfulness program that rewires how the brain talks to itself Diane Joss, who studies trauma at Harvard Medical School's Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, ran an eight-week mindful self-compassion program with 24 adults, most carrying more than one diagnosis, mainly anxiety and depression.
August 3, 2026 A psychedelic therapy puts veterans' PTSD into remission, and a brain scan shows why it lasts In the first U.S.
August 2, 2026 Psilocybin users who also drink report fewer depressive symptoms Drawing on the 2024 National Survey Investigating Hallucinogenic Trends, a nationally representative dataset, researchers found that adults who use psilocybin alongside alcohol report fewer depressive symptoms than adults who drink but don't use psilocybin.
July 31, 2026 Psychedelics may work by quieting the brain's inner narrator, not exciting it Scientists have argued for years about whether psychedelics turn up or turn down the brain's "bottom-up" signals, the sensory information flowing from perception toward higher-level thought.
July 30, 2026 A bite of chili can dull a much worse kind of pain Researchers at Chongqing Normal University had 48 volunteers hold a chili-infused gelatin cube in their mouths, then hit their hands with a high-intensity heat laser.
July 29, 2026 A single dose of LSD helped the brain learn new physical skills Researchers at the University of Fribourg ran a randomized, double-blind, crossover trial with 45 healthy volunteers ages 21 to 55, giving them a single dose of LSD and then testing them the next day and over the following week.
July 28, 2026 Americans are kinder to each other than they think A new Gallup poll of more than 2,000 American adults asked people not for their general impression of the country's mood, but about their own actual week: had they witnessed kindness, received it, and would they offer it to a stranger.
July 27, 2026 A sigh isn't just a sigh, it's your brain's reset button Researchers Ralph Andrews, Michael Melnychuk and Paul Dockree ran two experiments to find out why we spontaneously sigh during boring tasks.
July 26, 2026 A single dose of LSD made healthy volunteers better at learning a new skill Forty-five healthy adults between 21 and 55 went through a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial where each received one dose of 100 micrograms of LSD and, separately, a placebo.
July 25, 2026 What makes an entire country happy, not just a person Ewa Palikot at the Polish Academy of Sciences noticed a gap in the happiness research: almost all of it asks what makes a person happy, not what makes a whole society happy, and those turn out to be different questions with different answers.
July 24, 2026 Eight weeks of salsa classes beat depression like a real treatment University of Oxford and Oxford Health NHS Trust researchers ran a randomized controlled trial with 121 young adults aged 18 to 24 who had mild to moderate depression and anxiety.
July 23, 2026 Women biologists just overtook men on Wikipedia A new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, led by biology professor David Alvarez-Ponce at the University of Nevada, Reno, found that female biology professors at top US universities are now more likely to have a Wikipedia biography than their male colleagues, a full reversal of the historical pattern.
July 22, 2026 A single dose of magic mushrooms leaves a mark on the brain for a month Researchers at UC San Francisco and Imperial College London gave 28 healthy adults, none of whom had ever tried a psychedelic, a single dose of psilocybin and tracked their brains for a month afterward.
July 21, 2026 A ten-minute conversation changes minds more than anyone expects Michael Kardas at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and his team paired up strangers in the US and UK and had them talk for ten minutes about something they disagreed on, sometimes trivial (cats versus dogs), sometimes not (whether cancel culture is good).
July 20, 2026 Talk therapy's benefits are still working years after the sessions end Depression treatment has always had a data problem: it's easy to measure how someone feels a few months after therapy, and nearly impossible to track them for years afterward without losing half the group to moves, phone changes, or new doctors.
July 19, 2026 Autism and social misunderstanding may not be about "reading people" at all A study in Nature Mental Health, led by Shannon Cahalan at the National Institute of Mental Health, found that autistic and non-autistic people use remarkably similar strategies for figuring out what someone else likes.
July 18, 2026 A dementia care village lets residents keep being themselves, right to the end The Hogeweyk, a residential facility a short train ride from Amsterdam, rebuilt itself around one idea: treat residents with severe dementia as the specific people they've always been, not as patients on a schedule.
July 17, 2026 Just standing near someone you know can sync your heartbeat to theirs Researchers led by Hanlu He at the Technical University of Denmark tracked 72 students across three multiday trips to New York City, continuously monitoring heart rates as they moved through the city in teams of two to five.
July 16, 2026 The country you're furious at might be a story you told yourself Researchers surveyed 2,400 Americans and found something almost mechanical about political division: Democrats and Republicans each believe roughly 55% of the other side's views are extreme, when the real number is closer to 30%.
July 15, 2026 A common vaccine might also protect the aging brain Researchers led by Kaley Hayes at the University of Massachusetts tracked older adults freshly discharged from skilled nursing facilities, a population already at high risk for both shingles and new-onset dementia.
July 14, 2026 A vaccine built to outrun fentanyl's shape-shifting chemists Chemist Kim Janda's lab at Scripps Research designed a vaccine candidate that trains the immune system to recognize an entire class of fentanyl-like molecules by their shared shape, rather than the exact structure of one drug, published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.
July 13, 2026 The more hot yoga you do, the less severe your depression gets Researchers led by Daniel Copeland of MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital reanalyzed a randomized trial of eighty adults with moderate to severe depression, half assigned to eight weeks of ninety-minute heated yoga classes at 105 degrees Fahrenheit, half to a waitlist.
July 12, 2026 Depression turns out to be at least two different diseases, and the brain visibly heals from it A genetics team ran three genome-wide association meta-analyses across more than 460,000 people and found major depression splits cleanly into two biological subtypes defined by opposite symptoms.
July 11, 2026 A muscle supplement may power up failing brain cells in Alzheimer's Creatine, the cheap powder gym-goers use to build muscle, works by ferrying spare energy to cells that have run their ATP reserves dry, and the brain relies on the exact same recycling system muscles do.
July 11, 2026 Individual brain cells may be why humans think the way we do A team led by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam trained artificial neural networks to mimic real human and rat pyramidal neurons, then measured how much computational complexity each cell type actually needed to be faithfully copied.
July 11, 2026 Childhood trauma memories turn out to be far more reliable than assumed Researchers pooled 49 studies spanning nearly 40,000 people who had been asked about childhood abuse or neglect at two or more points in time, an average gap of two and a half years apart, and compared their answers.
July 10, 2026 The science of belonging says the boy-crisis headlines missed the real story A reporter went to the 150-year-old Boys' Club of New York looking for material on the crisis in boys' mental health and, according to the club's communications director, "kind of gave up, because it wasn't echoing what she had thought she would find".
July 7, 2026 Your Gut Bacteria Are Aging Your Memory, and the Process Can Be Reversed Timothy Cox at the University of Pennsylvania led a team with colleagues at Stanford and the Arc Institute who wanted to pull apart two variables that always travel together: the age of an animal and the age of its gut microbiome.
July 6, 2026 Texting a stranger actually works for loneliness. Chatting with AI does not. 296 students in their first semester at the University of British Columbia, a moment when loneliness typically spikes, were randomly assigned to one of three groups: text a randomly matched peer every day, chat daily with a highly supportive AI program, or neither.
July 3, 2026 Psilocybin, a woman in her eighties, and a rare morning of full sentences A Japanese-American woman in her eighties had spent five years losing language to Alzheimer's, one syllable at a time.
July 2, 2026 Two Ways to Catch Alzheimer's Years Early Two studies landed this week from different directions and arrived at the same place: the brain is sending signals about Alzheimer's long before memory fades, and we are finally learning to read them.
July 2, 2026 What the First Year Sets in Motion Two studies published this week put numbers on something parents have been told for years without much evidence behind it: the first year of an infant's life matters in ways that echo forward for decades.
July 1, 2026 Three Things the Brain Already Knows Three separate studies published this week addressed the same underlying question from three different angles: what does the human brain arrive with, and what does it only acquire through experience?
July 1, 2026 A Focus Switch Deep in the Brain Two independent mouse studies published this week pointed to the same underlying truth: the neural circuits for attention and social behavior are states, not permanent structures.
June 29, 2026 The brain you're not in charge of Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine recorded individual neurons in the hippocampus of patients under general anesthesia, using Neuropixels probes in a way they had never been used before.
June 29, 2026 Restoring what injury takes away Researchers from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Italy and Cleveland Clinic implanted tiny permanent magnets into the residual forearm muscles of a 34-year-old man who had lost his forearm in a traumatic accident.
June 29, 2026 The motherhood brain upgrade Ian Maze's lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that pregnancy and the postpartum period leave lasting molecular changes in the brain, driven by dopamine acting on the packaging of DNA itself, a process called histone modification.
June 28, 2026 The brain rebuilds itself, three ways Three studies landed in the same week, each showing the brain's physical architecture changing in response to something we do to it.
June 28, 2026 Dogs trust humans the same way in five very different societies An international team from Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology tested 164 dog-owner pairs in Vanuatu, Mongolia, Madagascar, Peru, and Germany.
June 28, 2026 Eight weeks of breathing changed PTSD veterans' hearts Twenty-five military veterans with PTSD and slightly elevated blood pressure were randomly assigned to practice device-guided slow breathing daily for eight weeks, or to a control condition.
June 27, 2026 Psilocybin Temporarily Restored Speech and Mobility in Advanced Alzheimer's A psychiatrist in São Paulo named Marcos Lago was treating an 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer's disease, a stage where significant functional recovery is considered essentially impossible, when he made a decision to try psilocybin.
June 27, 2026 Brains Synchronize When People Connect, and It Could Fight Loneliness A ten-year body of research by neuroscientists at NYU has confirmed something that sounds poetic but turns out to be literal: when people are genuinely engaged with each other face to face, their brainwaves physically synchronize.
June 27, 2026 A Bionic Hand That Lets the Brain Feel Again Two research teams working on completely different brain-machine interface systems, one from Sant'Anna in Pisa using micro-magnets implanted inside residual forearm muscles, and one from the Cleveland Clinic using surgical nerve-redirection, compared their data and found something unexpected: both systems produced identical perceptual maps in patients.
June 26, 2026 Three new clues about how Alzheimer's kills neurons Three separate Alzheimer's studies landed this week, each naming a different piece of a puzzle that has resisted scientists for decades.
June 26, 2026 What queer people know about safety, and what one Indian mother built from it Psychology Today's piece on queer safety offered a clear scientific frame for something many queer people know from the inside.
June 25, 2026 An ancient brainstem circuit handles attention in every vertebrate on Earth For decades, the dominant view in neuroscience was that sophisticated spatial attention, the ability to filter out distractions and lock onto what matters, was managed primarily by the prefrontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of the brain.
June 24, 2026 The parenting brain is an upgrade, not a loss For years, the jokes wrote themselves.
June 24, 2026 Five minutes on your feet, every half-hour, beats the morning gym Columbia physiologist Keith Diaz had a result so good it sounded made up.
June 24, 2026 Rwanda built something that most of philosophy said couldn't exist In 100 days in 1994, approximately 800,000 Tutsi were killed in Rwanda by Hutu militias.
June 24, 2026 Nearly half of people over 65 actually get better with time Yale's Dr.
June 23, 2026 Serotonin Helps the Brain Let Go of Old Beliefs SSRIs have been approved to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder for decades.
June 22, 2026 What parenting research found about fathers this Father's Day American fathers are spending more time on childcare than hunter-gatherer fathers do, according to data collected by parenting researchers.
June 22, 2026 A study of 100,000 people found we cooperate far more than we think we will The largest behavioral experiment of its kind ran with more than 100,000 people across 125 countries.
June 21, 2026 Autism Has Two Distinct Biological Subtypes, Brain Scans Show A study published in Nature Neuroscience found that people on the autism spectrum fall into two biologically distinct groups, based on brain connectivity patterns.
June 21, 2026 Modern Fathers Are Actually Talking to Their Teenagers June 21 is Father's Day, and the data released this week around it paints a portrait of fathers who have changed considerably from a generation ago.
June 19, 2026 The brain learns in two steps, and you can get the benefits of sleep without sleeping Two studies published this week revealed something about learning that had not been visible before.
June 19, 2026 A brain implant let a man with ALS read to his daughter for three years Casey Harrell has ALS and can no longer speak without assistance.
June 19, 2026 Two familiar drugs are doing far more than their labels say Two separate analyses this week found that widely available drugs are doing something significant beyond their original purpose.
June 18, 2026 The Protein Most Blamed for Alzheimer's Turns Out to Protect Neurons The protein at the center of Alzheimer's disease turns out to have a second job: it is a cellular janitor.
June 17, 2026 What Loneliness Actually Does to Your Brain A team of 24 scientists led by UC Davis tracked 175,000 older adults across 18 countries, mapping how they moved through stages of cognitive health over their lifespans.
June 17, 2026 The Brain Implant That Finally Works at Home Casey Harrell is 47, has ALS, is mostly paralyzed, and his speech is difficult to understand.
June 17, 2026 Psilocybin Finds Its Clinical Moment Three separate psilocybin threads converged this week, each from a different angle.
June 17, 2026 GLP-1 Drugs Are Changing the Mind, Not Just the Body Starting next month, GLP-1 weight loss medications, including Ozempic and Wegovy, become available to adults 65 and older through Medicare for the first time.
June 16, 2026 How Your Muscles Talk to Your Brain to Fight Depression When mice exercise, their muscles release a protein called apelin into the bloodstream.
June 16, 2026 UK Gives Its Children a Different Childhood The UK government announced Monday it will ban children under 16 from platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X, with the ban expected to take effect next spring.
June 15, 2026 Loneliness is a hunger, and the brain knows it Watch a mouse reunite with her sister after five days alone and you see something unmistakable.
June 15, 2026 A single dose, months of relief from suicidal thoughts A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that one dose of psilocybin, paired with psychological support, rapidly reduced chronic suicidal thoughts in adults with severe depression, and the relief persisted for months.
June 14, 2026 Loneliness Is a Biological Signal, Not a Personality Trait A meerkat separated from its group in the Kalahari does not simply look unhappy.
June 13, 2026 The brain science of eating disorders is pointing toward new treatments A wave of brain-imaging research is finding that anorexia nervosa alters the circuits governing reward, habit, and emotion in ways that may make eating feel genuinely aversive, even to patients who consciously want to recover.
June 12, 2026 Language is older than we thought, and stranger Two separate pieces of language research, from very different traditions, both pushed the origin of speech back further and made it stranger.
June 12, 2026 AI and the human mind: two studies worth reading together Two studies published this week landed on opposite sides of the AI question, and both were done carefully.
June 12, 2026 Your body is sending you a constant signal MIT Technology Review published a long piece on interoception, the body's internal sensory system: the signals your brain receives from your gut, heart rate, skin, and organs, about 11 million bits of information flowing in every second, with only 10 to 60 of them ever reaching conscious awareness.
June 11, 2026 What is actually driving the teen mental health crisis Two neuroscience findings and two psychology pieces converged this week on the same ground: young people's mental health is measurably slipping, and the mechanisms are more specific, and more hopeful, than the general alarm lets on.
June 6, 2026 Sleep Protects the Physical Structure of the Brain, and That Structure Can Be Shaped A University of Arizona team analyzed brain MRI scans from more than 23,000 adults who had answered sleep questionnaires up to nine years earlier, and found that three specific sleep habits predicted significantly more white matter lesions: sleeping fewer than seven hours per night, frequent daytime napping, and persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep.