David Robson

@davidarobson.bsky.social

310 Followers 142 Following

Award-winning science writer and author of The Intelligence Trap, The Expectation Effect, and The Laws of Connection (Canongate/Pegasus). davidarobson.substack.com

The Nordic secret to happiness - an image of a girl’s silhouette with a text headline
The Laws of Connection paperback
Narcissus staring at his reflection in a pool of water
By age 45, the effects could even be seen in their biological ageing. During various follow-ups, researchers have assessed 19 markers of physical health, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, white blood cell count, lung capacity and tooth decay. As many of us know all too well, these parameters tend to shift as we get older, but for some individuals, the changes happen more rapidly – and a 2021 paper on the Dunedin study found that the speed of that decline could be linked to the participants’ emotional regulation. “The individuals with poor self-control were ageing more quickly than their peers,” says Leah Richmond-Rakerd at the University of Michigan, who worked on the paper. They even looked older, according to independent judges asked to guess their ages from photographs.
A picture of Jane Fonda protesting the Vietnam War, with the text "How finding your purpose makes you live longer."
The cover of “Inner Sense: How the new science of interoception scan transform your health”
A picture of a man in a blindfold, with “the secret sense that controls your life” written above.
If this description sounds vague, that is deliberate. Rather than asking them to “pick” or “choose” the cards, the magician asks the volunteer to “touch” them in each round. Without explicitly explaining whether the selected cards will be left or discarded, the magician can proceed however they want. If the volunteer touches the cards the magician wants, they keep them on the table; if not, they discard them. In this way, the magician can ensure that the desired card is the last one remaining. Magic is exploiting otherwise adaptive brain processes The ruse seems obvious when it is spelled out in this way. Yet Kuhn and Pailhès have found that almost all people believe that they had some control over the card they chose. “They are not aware that their decisions have no impact on the outcome,” says Kuhn. The illusion of agency appears to be so strong that it remains after an immediate repetition of the trick. Despite going through the same procedure a second time, the participants are still none the wiser about the trick’s mechanisms.
The “phantom vanish magic trick” shows that it is even possible to create the illusion of a completely non-existent object, which then disappears mid-performance. This illusion, which tests the limits of our brain’s predictive models, is the invention of Matthew Tompkins, a cognitive science researcher at Lund University in Sweden. In a video, Tompkins pantomimes taking an object out of a cup and placing it in a closed fist. He then clicks the fingers of the other hand and opens his fist to reveal a clean palm. Of the 420 participants, 136 – or about 32 per cent – reported having a visual impression of the phantom object. For some, it was a fleeting experience that was difficult to describe, but others went as far as to note its non-existent shape and colour. Their minds may have constructed some of these details after the event, or the participants may have actually “seen” them in a kind of controlled hallucination. Either way, this demonstrates the brain’s ability to fill in small gaps in its perception, which could be useful in day-to-day life to form a coherent view of reality, like adding a missing word to a sentence whose entirety you didn’t quite catch. “Magic is exploiting otherwise adaptive processes,” says Tompkins.
The Basilica Notre-Dame de Fourvière
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Three mood boosting alternatives to meditation- bibliotherapy, music medicine and… a hot bath.