Thought pieces
There's a tidy story the internet likes to tell: your brain peaks in your midtwenties, and after that, it's all decline. It makes for good headlines. It's also wrong. When Hartshorne and Germine ran what's still one of the…
Your body doesn't age all at once. It ages one cell at a time — and more specifically, through a population of cells that are too damaged to divide but not damaged enough to die. These are called senescent cells. And the…
Your driver's license says one age. Your epigenome says another. And for predicting how well you're actually aging, the epigenome turns out to be the better witness. In 2013, a researcher named Steve Horvath published a paper…
The brain fog that shows up around perimenopause isn't forgetfulness. It isn't a character flaw. It's a hormone pulling a transcription factor off your DNA. Most people think of estrogen and testosterone as vaguely related to…
One number from the stroke research never gets enough attention: 88%. Roughly 88% of stroke risk is attributable to modifiable lifestyle factors. Eight in ten strokes don't have to happen. Nearly 800,000 Americans have a stroke…
You'd expect the people who live past 90 to be monks. Teetotal. Running marathons at sunrise. Eating sprouted grains and fasted egg whites. The 90+ Study, a longrunning project out of UC Irvine that has followed thousands of…
The 90+ Study asked what the oldest old had in common. It wasn't big social networks. The people living longest, with their cognition most intact, had a specific profile: a few people they could count on. Not thirty friends. Not…
The psychology research on longevity keeps pointing at something that doesn't show up in any diet. It isn't on anyone's supplement stack. It doesn't fit neatly into a biohacking podcast. Giving. A handful of findings that kept…
Adolescence isn't a hormonal storm to survive. It's the last neurogenic window your brain gets — the last time it builds new neurons at scale, prunes what's not being used, and lays down myelin on the connections that end up…
The word "biohacking" didn't exist fifteen years ago. Now it describes everything from meditation to injecting yourself with the blood of a younger person. Which suggests the word isn't doing much actual work. Pulling it apart is…
Tell someone that eight weeks of meditation can physically change the structure of their brain and you'll get one of two responses. One side will say obviously, meditation is powerful stuff. The other will say that sounds like…
Three diet approaches dominate the longevity conversation right now: intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, and ketogenic eating. They're often discussed together as if they're variations of the same idea. They aren't. They…
The brain training industry is about $6 billion a year. Most of it is not buying you what it says it's buying you. In 2016 the Federal Trade Commission charged Lumosity's parent company $50 million for deceptive advertising —…
You got your 23andMe results back. It flagged ApoE4. Now you're wondering what this actually means, how scared to be, and what — if anything — you can do about it. Short version: it's a risk factor, not a sentence. The research…
Here is one of the strangest findings in dementia research, and one of the most important: Roughly half of people over 90 who have clinical dementia do not have enough neuropathology in their brains to explain their symptoms. Let…
For most of the history of biology, inheritance was a oneway street. Genes from mom and dad combined at conception. Whatever happened to the parents during their lives — what they ate, how they moved, what stresses they survived…
Two friends sit across from each other at dinner. One has just quit a stable job to start a company. The other has been talking about quitting his unhappy job for four years and hasn't moved. The first one will jump out of an…
Christianity has Lent. Islam has Ramadan. Judaism has Yom Kippur. Buddhism has periodic fasts. Hinduism has Ekadashi. Almost every longrunning religious tradition includes some structured period of going without food. The…
Most people who hear that meditation has measurable effects on the brain assume the change is somewhere in the calming, regulating circuitry — more activity in the prefrontal cortex, better attention, that sort of thing. That's…
Walk into a Target for toothpaste; leave with toothpaste, a candle, two shirts, a planner you'll never use, and a bag of trail mix. Most adults have done this. The standard selfblame is I have no selfcontrol. The more honest…
Some of the cells in your body have stopped dividing. They aren't dead — they're still metabolically active, still consuming energy, still occupying space in your tissues. They just won't reproduce anymore, and they can't be…
You bought a $15 movie ticket. The movie is bad. You sit through it anyway. You've been at a job for five years. The first three were good. The last two have not been. You stay. You've been in a relationship for three years. The…
Two people get the same bad news at work. One of them is in the kitchen within twenty minutes, eating something they didn't plan to eat, not particularly hungry, but unable to stop. The other one forgets to eat dinner. Same…
There's a story we tell ourselves about exercise. It goes like this: we used to be huntergatherers walking twenty kilometers a day, and now we sit at desks, so we go to the gym for fortyfive minutes to make up the difference. The…
There's a piece of brain tissue about the size of a grain of rice sitting just above where your optic nerves cross. It contains roughly 20,000 neurons. It's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN, and it runs your day. When…
There's a way of talking about addiction that frames it as a moral problem. Bad choices, weak character, lack of discipline. That framing has been around a long time, and it has the unfortunate property of being almost completely…
Most of what we say about mental health uses emotional language. Sad. Anxious. Overwhelmed. Numb. Those words are accurate, and they're how most people experience the conditions they describe. But they're not where the underlying…
There's a classic experiment in behavioral economics called the ultimatum game. The setup is simple. Two players. One is given $10 and told to propose a split — anything from "you get nothing, I keep everything" to "we each get…
There's a class of decisions you make all day that economists call intertemporal choice. They're decisions where the cost and the benefit happen at different times. Eat the cookie now, deal with the consequences later. Skip the…
You've heard the airline announcement so many times you stopped registering it. Put your own oxygen mask on before assisting others. The reason is mechanical — if you pass out from hypoxia trying to help someone else with their…
There's a moment in a lot of relationships where you accuse the other person of feeling something they're not feeling. Or you assume they meant something they didn't mean. Or you respond to a comment they didn't quite make. They…
There's a particular memory most people in long relationships have. A trip somewhere. A meal that went on for too long. A night that should have been ordinary and somehow wasn't. Years later, the specifics blur but the feeling…
The phrase has been around for at least a thousand years. Some version of it shows up in Sextus Propertius's poetry from the first century BC. The full English version — "absence makes the heart grow fonder" — gained popular…
There's a particular kind of conversation that longmarried couples have. One person starts a sentence and the other one finishes it. They reference an inside joke from twenty years ago in three words. They communicate full…
The phrase "forgive and forget" has done a lot of damage. It conflates two completely different processes, sets an unreasonable bar for what counts as forgiveness, and tends to get deployed as pressure on the wronged person to…
There's a particular kind of person who burns out from helping. They've spent decades caring for parents, kids, employees, friends, communities, churches. From the outside, they look like the person everyone counts on. From the…
In 1992, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar published a paper that suggested an unusual hypothesis. Looking across primate species, he noticed that the size of the neocortex correlated with the size of the typical social…
There's a German word, Umwelt, that doesn't have a clean English translation. The closest version is something like "the perceived world." It was coined by Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 to describe the specific…
There's a story we tell about creativity that's mostly wrong. It goes like this: some people are creative, and some people aren't, and the creative ones are mysteriously gifted in ways the rest of us aren't. The creative person…