Every day, people around the world spend a collective 3.3 billion hours watching short-form videos on TikTok. And no doubt many of you reading this will have contributed to that staggering statistic… I know I certainly have. This figure isn’t a happy accident or viral luck, but the product of some of the most sophisticated, deliberately engineered user experience design in the history of technology. For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with how social media content – from st

What if the Self never actually disappears? A look at terminal lucidity, the unexplained return of memory and clarity in the final hours before death.

Recently, our local council moved the regular weekly bin collection to once every two weeks, and then introduced a weekly food waste collection. Many people were befuddled at this choice, angry at the idea of this causing their bins to overflow by the time the fortnightly collection was made. I, too, was a little confused, as the reduction of the weekly connections — and then the addition of another — seemed totally counterintuitive. And right there a failure in how we think

How often have you been excited to watch something – be that a cool new series or a film you’ve been looking forward to – only to then find yourself looking at your phone the whole time? Double-screening is something we’re probably all guilty of – I know I certainly am. It’s just become second nature to watch something on Netflix and look at the phone at the same time. We’ve become so accustomed to doing this that we don’t really think about how nuts it is. And it’s not just

Doing challenging things is essential. And there’s actually psychology-backed data to prove it. Every time you avoid doing something hard because you don't want to face the challenge, you're telling your brain that comfort means safety, and discomfort means danger. But that discomfort is essential for progression. When you avoid doing something because it’s difficult, your brain begins to see that avoidance as the default approach to tasks. This then makes it even harder to d

Social media is entirely shifting our relationships with celebrities, and as such is transforming our feelings of envy. Let me explain why. Feeling jealous of your friend is common. You see them having something you want, and you feel envious of them; it’s a simple situation. Before social media, those feelings of envy were limited to just the people around you. This, however, has been flipped on its head. Having worked in the world of social media for nearly a decade, I’ve s

What does a sleep paralysis demon have in common with an Amazonian spirit ritual and the theories of a Swiss psychiatrist? More than you might think.

Have you ever walked into a shop and seen a product that’s NOW ON SALE? When this happens, you’ll also see the Before and After price. It’s satisfying to see the Before price crossed out, with the After price below it in big, bold letters, isn’t it? And because you’ve seen how high the Before price was, it looks like an absolute steal in comparison, right? This is the Anchoring Bias at work. How It Works Our brains are associative in nature. This means we link things to other

Starting is the hardest part. When you want to start a new project, you can give yourself any number of reasons why you shouldn’t . These reasons can be a fear of trying something new, of being laughed at, because we’re too scared, because we don’t want to put effort in, or a million other things. The result is that at the end of the year, we’ve not completed what we said we were going to do, and we’re all upset and pissed off with ourselves. Yet there’s any easy way of fixin