Mind: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 6

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StillnessLanguage

Saudade is the presence of an absence: longing for a person, a place or a time that may be gone, far away, or may never have existed at all. Portuguese speakers often call it untranslatable.

It is not quite nostalgia, which looks backwards, nor melancholy, which has no object. Saudade points at something specific and holds the ache and the sweetness together: the pleasure of remembering is part of the feeling, not a consolation for it. The word is closely associated with Portugal's centuries of sea voyages and the people left waiting on shore, and it is a central theme of fado, Lisbon's traditional song. In Brazil, 30 January is marked as the Day of Saudade.

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StillnessLanguage

Hiraeth is a Welsh word for longing towards a home that is gone, changed, or perhaps never quite existed: homesickness with nowhere to go back to.

It carries grief, yearning and a kind of loyalty at once, and it is bound up with the history of the Welsh language itself, a tongue that survived centuries of pressure and has recovered ground more recently through revival efforts and official status. Speakers often use it about a landscape rather than a house. Related words exist elsewhere: Portuguese saudade, Galician morriña, German Sehnsucht, Romanian dor. That so many languages built a separate word for this suggests it names a common human feeling.

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WonderLanguage

Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, an Aboriginal language of Queensland, Australia, describe space by compass direction rather than left and right: the cup is north of you, an ant is on your south-east leg.

The linguist John Haviland documented this in the 1970s and 1980s, and Stephen Levinson later tested it, challenging the assumption that body-centred words like left and right are universal. In experiments, speakers could point to distant places with striking accuracy, as if keeping a constant mental note of which way they faced, a habit that starts in childhood. Similar systems exist in Tzeltal, a Mayan language of Mexico, and in Balinese. The language also gave English a famous word: in 1770 James Cook's crew recorded 'kangaroo' from Guugu Yimithirr speakers near today's Cooktown. Researchers often cite the case as evidence that the language you speak can shape everyday habits of thought, though how far that goes is still debated.

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WonderLanguage

Nicaraguan Sign Language was created by deaf children themselves. When Nicaragua opened its first schools for the deaf around 1980, pupils arrived with only home-made signs; within a few years they had built a shared language, with grammar no adult had taught them.

Before the schools, most deaf Nicaraguans lived isolated at home, using simple gestures invented with their families. Lessons focused on lip-reading and Spanish, but the children began signing to one another in the playground and on the school buses. The first pupils built a rough shared code, a kind of pidgin, meaning a simple contact language. Younger children who joined later made it more regular, adding consistent grammar their older schoolmates had not used, and each new intake made it more systematic. Linguists including Judy Kegl (later Shepard-Kegl) and Ann Senghas documented this as it happened, a rare recorded case of a language being born. It suggests children actively build grammar rather than simply absorbing a finished one.

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StillnessMind

Walking through a doorway can make it harder to remember what you were just doing, which may be why you reach the next room and forget what you came for. Researchers read it as a sign that memory stores experience in episodes, not as one continuous recording.

In experiments published by Gabriel Radvansky and colleagues in 2011, people carried objects either from one room to another or across the same distance within a single room, in virtual and real settings. Memory for the objects dropped more after a doorway, and walking back to the first room did not restore it. The explanation offered is that the mind divides experience into events, and a doorway signals that one event has ended, so its details are filed away. Later work adds caution: in a 2021 series of experiments at Bond University, McFadyen and colleagues found no doorway effect in most conditions, only more memory errors when people were also holding other information in mind. A doorway is one possible cause of forgetting, not the whole story.

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DriveMind

Spreading your review of something across several sessions over days or weeks usually fixes it in long-term memory far better than cramming the same amount into one sitting. Psychologists call this the spacing effect.

The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus first measured it in the 1880s, memorising lists of nonsense syllables and testing himself; he published the results in 1885. It has since become one of the most reliably repeated findings in psychology. Cramming leaves a feeling of fluency that fades fast; spaced practice feels harder but lasts longer, because recalling something just as it starts to slip strengthens the memory. The best gap depends on the material and how long you need to remember it. No single schedule fits every case, but reviewing a day later, then a few days later, then a week or more later is a sensible start. Flashcard apps such as Anki are built on this principle, and many medical students and language learners rely on them.

Cognitive psychologyRead card

DriveMind

When a task stretches your skills without overwhelming you, you can become so absorbed that time seems to disappear. Psychologists call this flow.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist, developed the idea after interviewing painters, chess players, rock climbers and surgeons who described a strikingly similar state of total absorption. To study it beyond the interview room, he pioneered the experience sampling method: participants carried pagers that beeped at random points during the day, prompting them to note what they were doing and how absorbed they felt. He set out the full model in his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Flow is more likely when the challenge matches your skills, the goal is clear, and you can tell how you are doing. Too little challenge tends toward boredom, and too much toward anxiety.

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WonderMind

Placebo pills can ease symptoms even when patients know they are dummies. In trials for irritable bowel syndrome and chronic low back pain, people who knowingly took pills with no active drug reported feeling better; this is called open-label placebo.

Placebo effects were long thought to depend on deception: patients had to believe a pill was a real drug. Ted Kaptchuk, who directs a placebo research programme at Harvard Medical School, tested this in 2010 with 80 patients with irritable bowel syndrome. One group was told plainly that their pills contained no medicine, yet they reported more relief than a group given no pills. A 2016 trial in Portugal, on which he also worked, found similar results for chronic low back pain. Nobody is sure why: the ritual of taking a pill, the attention of clinicians and a lifetime of learned expectations may all play a part. The effect is on how symptoms feel; there is no evidence that dummy pills cure infections, tumours or other diseases.

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StillnessMind

Time in nature may help tired attention recover. Attention restoration theory holds that hours of deliberate focus wear attention down, while clouds, leaves or moving water hold it gently and give it a chance to rest.

The psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan set out the theory in their 1989 book The Experience of Nature. They distinguished 'directed attention', the effortful focus used to stay on a task and shut out distractions, from 'soft fascination', the easy interest that clouds, leaves or moving water hold without any effort. In their view directed attention is a limited resource that runs down through the day, and time in a softly fascinating place lets it recover. In a 2008 University of Michigan study, people did better on a memory test after walking through an arboretum than after walking along city streets. Other studies have found similar gains, though effect sizes and methods vary and not every result has been repeated.

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DriveMind

Benjamin Franklin once won over a political opponent by asking to borrow a rare book from him. Psychologists now use the name 'Ben Franklin effect' for cases in which doing someone a favour makes you like them more.

In the 1730s Franklin was clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and a new member made a speech opposing his reappointment. Rather than flatter the man, Franklin wrote asking to borrow a scarce book from his library. The book arrived at once, and Franklin returned it about a week later with a note of thanks. When they next met in the House, the man spoke to him with unusual warmth, and they stayed friends until the man's death. Franklin drew a maxim from it: someone who has done you one kindness will be readier to do another than someone you have obliged. In 1969 the psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy found that people who had done a researcher a favour liked him more, though later studies show the effect depends heavily on circumstances.

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StillnessHealth

Shinrin-yoku, or 'forest bathing', is the Japanese practice of spending slow, unhurried time among trees. Japan's Forestry Agency coined the term in 1982 to encourage people to visit forests for their health.

The term was coined by Tomohide Akiyama, then director-general of the Forestry Agency, at a time when Japan was urbanising fast; that year the agency held a forest recreation event in Nagano prefecture. It began as a public campaign rather than a scientific claim, but it drew researchers' attention. Some, including Qing Li at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, reported short-term changes after forest visits in mood, blood pressure and immune markers such as the activity of natural killer cells, white blood cells that attack infected cells. Li tentatively linked these to phytoncides, aromatic compounds that trees release into the air. Many of these studies are small, though, and struggle to separate the effect of trees from walking, cleaner air, quiet or simple expectation.

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StillnessHealth

People with weak social ties die earlier on average. A 2010 analysis of 148 studies found that those with stronger relationships were about 50% more likely to be alive at the end of the studies than those with weaker ones.

The 2010 meta-analysis, led by the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, pooled data on more than 300,000 people followed for an average of about seven and a half years; a meta-analysis combines many studies to reach a more reliable answer. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General, the country's leading public health official, issued an advisory on loneliness that reviewed this and later research. It concluded that social disconnection carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. These are patterns across large populations, not a prediction for any one person. The advisory also describes likely pathways: long-term stress hormones, inflammation, poorer sleep and fewer healthy habits such as exercise or seeing a doctor.

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DriveHealth

Aerobic exercise such as brisk walking, running or cycling can raise levels of BDNF, a protein that helps brain cells survive and form and strengthen connections with each other.

BDNF stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It is made in the brain and elsewhere in the body, and it supports the survival of nerve cells and the growth and strengthening of the connections between them, part of the brain's capacity to change that scientists call plasticity. A 2015 meta-analysis by Kristen Szuhany and colleagues, pooling 29 studies with about 1,100 participants, found that a single session of exercise raised BDNF in the blood by a moderate amount, and that regular exercise made that rise larger. Regular activity is also linked with modest gains on some memory and planning tests, but how large they are, and how much BDNF drives them, varies between studies. BDNF is one plausible link between exercise and a healthier brain, not the whole explanation.

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WonderHealth

Teenagers' body clocks really do run later. During adolescence the times people naturally fall asleep and wake up shift later, peaking around the age of 20, then drift earlier through adulthood. This personal timing, called chronotype, is shaped by both genes and age.

The age pattern comes from a 2004 survey of about 25,000 people in Central Europe led by the chronobiologist Till Roenneberg, which found that people are at their latest around 20; the researchers suggested this turning point could mark the biological end of adolescence. Chronotype is often measured with the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire, devised by James Horne and Olov Östberg in 1976. Genes matter too: a 2016 study of 128,266 people led by Samuel Jones found 16 genetic regions linked to being a morning person, some near known body-clock genes, and a 2019 study of nearly 700,000 people raised the count to 351. Light, school and work hours also shape sleep, which is why school-start-time research treats early timetables as a biological as well as a social issue.

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DriveLiterature

The American writer John Kennedy Toole died in 1969 before his comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces was published. His mother, Thelma Toole, spent years seeking a reader for the manuscript; it was eventually published in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.

Toole wrote the novel in the early 1960s, and an editor at Simon & Schuster worked on it with him for about two years before turning it down. After years of depression he died by suicide in 1969, aged thirty-one. His mother, Thelma, then took up the manuscript and pressed it on publishers for years. In 1976 she persuaded the novelist Walker Percy, then teaching in New Orleans, to read it; Percy later wrote that he began hoping it would be bad enough to put down, and could not. Louisiana State University Press published it in 1980 with his foreword. A bronze statue of its hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, now stands on Canal Street in New Orleans. It is one of the few novels to win the Pulitzer after its author's death.

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DriveMind

Harvard researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer read nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 professionals. People's best working days were those on which they made progress on meaningful work, even a small step; setbacks marked their worst days.

The 238 diarists worked in 26 project teams at seven companies, and each evening answered questions about their day and described one event that stood out. Progress was the event that most often lifted their mood, motivation and view of their work, which the researchers call 'inner work life'. When Amabile and Kramer later asked 669 managers to rank five things that motivate staff, most put support for progress last, below recognition and incentives. They published the findings in The Progress Principle in 2011. The diaries show a strong pattern, not a controlled experiment, so they cannot prove that progress alone makes a good day.

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DriveMind

The popular claim that a habit takes 21 days to form has no research behind it. In a well-known London study, a new daily behaviour took 66 days on average to become automatic, and anywhere from 18 to 254 days depending on the person and the habit.

The 21-day idea seems to go back to the plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz, who wrote in his 1960 book Psycho-Cybernetics that patients took at least about three weeks to get used to a new face. In the 2010 study, Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London asked 96 volunteers to pick one daily habit, such as eating a piece of fruit with lunch or running before dinner, and to rate each day how automatic it felt. Over twelve weeks the feeling rose quickly at first and then levelled off; the longest times were projected beyond the study's end. Missing a single day did not derail the process. The lesson is how much people vary, not a new '66-day rule'.

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DriveMind

A well-tested treatment for depression, called behavioural activation, helps people return step by step to meaningful or rewarding activities, instead of waiting for motivation or mood to improve first.

Depression often sets up a loop: low mood leads people to do less, and doing less cuts them off from the small rewards that used to lift their mood, which psychologists call reinforcement. Behavioural activation breaks the loop from the action side. With a therapist, people note what they have stopped doing, schedule small, manageable activities, then record how they actually felt. The approach grew from Peter Lewinsohn's work in the 1970s and was sharpened by Neil Jacobson's team in the 1990s. In a large UK trial published in 2016, behavioural activation delivered by junior mental health workers worked as well as cognitive behavioural therapy delivered by experienced therapists, at lower cost. It is a structured treatment, not a general rule that motivation always follows action.

Clinical psychologyRead card

StillnessMind

Talking to yourself by your own name, or as 'you' instead of 'I', can help you stay calmer under stress. In experiments, people who did this before giving a speech felt less anxious, spoke better and brooded less afterwards.

The psychologist Ethan Kross and colleagues at the University of Michigan asked people to prepare a speech with only five minutes' notice. Some were told to talk themselves through their nerves using 'I', others using their own name or 'you'. The second group reported less anxiety and shame, judges rated their speeches higher, and afterwards they spent less time on rumination, the habit of replaying what went wrong. Kross's explanation is that addressing yourself as you would a friend creates a little distance, which makes the problem easier to see clearly. The effects are modest: a small, usable tool for handling stress, not a cure for anxiety.

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StillnessMind

Self-compassion means treating yourself kindly when you struggle or fail, without contempt but also without denying the mistake or your responsibility. Research generally links it with better psychological wellbeing and, in some studies, greater willingness to try again after failure.

The psychologist Kristin Neff, who defined the idea for research in 2003, describes three parts: kindness towards yourself instead of harsh judgement; remembering that struggling is part of being human, not a personal defect; and noticing painful feelings without ignoring them or being swept away by them. Unlike self-esteem, which depends on doing well, self-compassion is about how you treat yourself when you have not. In a 2012 study by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, students who were encouraged to take a self-compassionate view after failing a hard vocabulary test studied longer for a retest than those given a self-esteem boost. Such findings challenge the idea that harshness is needed to take responsibility.

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StillnessMind

REM sleep, the stage of sleep with the most vivid dreams, may help take the sting out of upsetting memories. A leading hypothesis holds that the brain replays them while the stress chemical noradrenaline is almost switched off, softening the emotion without erasing the memory.

Matthew Walker and Els van der Helm set out the idea in 2009 under the name 'sleep to forget, sleep to remember': sleep keeps the content of an emotional memory but softens its feeling. REM stands for rapid eye movement, because the eyes dart about under closed lids in this stage. In a 2011 test, volunteers viewed upsetting pictures twice, twelve hours apart. Those who slept in between showed less activity on the second viewing in the amygdala, the brain's alarm centre, than those who stayed awake, and rated the pictures as less intense. Other studies have found that sleep can preserve emotional reactions instead, so this remains an open question rather than settled science.

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StillnessMind

In psychology, savouring is the deliberate attention paid to a positive experience while it happens, in anticipation, or in memory. Researchers study it as one way people can make good feelings stronger and last longer.

The psychologists Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff, who described the idea in detail in their 2007 book Savoring, separate a good event from what we do with it: the event happens to us, savouring is how we attend to it. They describe strategies such as sharing the moment with someone, taking a deliberate 'mental photograph' to remember it, slowing down to notice a taste or a sound, and comparing the moment with harder times. People who savour more tend to report greater wellbeing, but cause and effect are hard to untangle: happier people may simply find it easier to savour.

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DriveHealth

Regular exercise, from brisk walking to strength training, can ease the symptoms of depression, including mild to moderate depression, large reviews of clinical trials find. It can be a useful part of treatment but is not a universal substitute for clinical care.

One of the largest reviews so far, published in the BMJ in 2024, pooled 218 trials with more than 14,000 people. Walking or jogging, yoga and strength training helped most, and harder effort brought bigger benefits, though even gentle activity helped. The effect of walking or jogging was moderate, about the size seen with cognitive behavioural therapy. Possible reasons include better sleep, lower inflammation and growth factors that help brain cells form new connections, along with plainer ones: routine, a sense of achievement, time outdoors and time with other people. The benefit does not depend on losing weight. Anyone with depression should still talk to a doctor about the right mix of treatments.

Public health researchRead card

StillnessHealth

Morning light is one of the main signals that sets the body's internal 24-hour clock, known as the circadian clock. Bright outdoor daylight is usually a far stronger signal than ordinary indoor lighting.

Special light-sensing cells in the retina, separate from the ones we use to see shapes and colours, report light levels to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a tiny area just above the point where the optic nerves cross, which acts as the body's master clock. It sets the timing of many daily rhythms, including the release of melatonin, the hormone that helps bring on sleep. Measured in lux, the unit of brightness, outdoor daylight ranges from a few thousand on a dull day to about 100,000 in full sun, while indoor lighting is often only a few hundred. Light early in the day tends to shift the clock earlier and light late in the evening shifts it later; how much depends on timing, brightness, duration and a person's existing rhythm.

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