siliconcanals

A London School of Economics study of 15,000 adults found that more intelligent people were actually less satisfied with life when they socialised with friends more often ...

The famous friendship and intelligence result was statistically significant but tiny, correlational and based on a one-week contact measure in young US adults. Friends spend time together indoors.
siliconcanals

Actions tend to hurt more in the short term, but over a lifetime people often dwell more on the chances they never took — a classic psychological finding that has survived ...

The action-inaction reversal in regret has partly replicated in larger modern samples, although effect sizes, personal-regret results and long-term majorities differ. A silhouetted person approaches a ...
siliconcanals

AI's hidden water footprint may have reached 765 billion litres in 2025 — consumed in data-centre cooling and the power plants supplying them. That's more than twice the ...

The 765-billion-litre figure is the upper end of a modelled range, not a global meter reading. Its size and uncertainty both point to the same problem: data-centre operators do not disclose enough to ...
siliconcanals

Psychology says people who tend to minimise their own pain — saying 'it's fine' or 'it wasn't that bad' — aren't resilient, they're often repeating what they were told ...

What we call resilience is often just learned silence—the echo of people who told us our pain didn't matter. A cook I worked with once put his palm flat on a hot grill. Full contact. He looked at it, ...
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In a survey of over 20,000 adults, the generation that scored as the loneliest wasn't the oldest but the youngest, the people you'd least expect, and the researchers found it ...

Most people, if you asked them to guess which generation reported the highest levels of loneliness in a large-scale national survey, would guess the oldest. Most people, if you asked them to guess ...
Silicon Canals

Psychologists call it Solomon’s paradox: the reason you can give brilliant advice to a friend, then become strangely useless when the exact same problem belongs to you

Psychologists call it Solomon’s paradox, after the biblical king whose judgement people travelled across the ancient world to ...
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Psychology says people who wait to feel motivated before they start aren't lazy — they have the sequence backwards, and behavioural research has said the same thing since ...

Lewinsohn's 1974 behavioural model made action part of the explanation for motivation and mood. Modern trials support behavioural activation, but not every productivity slogan built from it. A person ...
siliconcanals

Quote of the day by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: "We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."

Self-condemnation might be the one thing keeping you stuck in the patterns you're most desperate to escape. There is a certain kind of self-talk I have caught myself using for years. The version of me ...
Silicon Canals

The song Stallone couldn’t have

A rejected Queen song led Stallone to call an unknown band, launching one of the decade's biggest hits and proving that sometimes the best creative accidents come from being told no.
Silicon Canals

European space-tech funding reached €2.9 billion in H1 2026, up 622%, but debt and a handful of sovereign-infrastructure bets explain most of the apparent explosion

Behind Europe's spectacular space-tech funding surge lies a simpler story: debt instruments and a few massive ...
Silicon Canals

The hard verb is unlearn

Your brain is wired to stick with what it knows—which is precisely why unlearning matters more than learning ever could.
Silicon Canals

What looks like ‘not caring’ in later life is often a refusal to spend finite attention on every opinion or conflict; that selectivity can be a mature form of self ...

As we age, the appearance of indifference may actually signal something harder to achieve: the wisdom to know what deserves your finite attention and what doesn't.