Well-being

The therapy that treats depression by chasing joy instead of chasing away sadness

A new counterintuitive approach is changing what recovery looks like.

Humans are hardwired to avoid pain. You pull your hand from a hot pan before your brain even registers it's hot. It makes sense, then, that most depression treatment follows the same logic: find the source of the suffering and reduce it. And that approach has helped a lot of people. But there's a version of depression that doesn't really feel like pain. It feels like nothing at all. And we're not really wired to react to nothing.

That hollow feeling even has a name: anhedonia. It affects up to 90% of people with severe depression. Mark Wales covers a new clinical approach called Positive Affect Treatment (PAT), which flips the usual script. Researchers at Southern Methodist University stopped asking "how do we reduce the bad?" and started asking "how do we rebuild the good?" Their 15-session program targets the brain's reward system directly, retraining attention toward joy rather than away from sadness. Participants didn't just report feeling less depressed. They reported feeling interested in life again.

Participants didn't just report feeling less depressed. They reported feeling interested in life again. Joy might be less a personality trait and more a skill the brain can relearn.

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Health

You probably think you know what you don't know

Your brain has been running a quiet confidence scam on you.

What do you think the chances are that you could properly draw a bike from memory? Or a penny? Maybe not so fast there. Research shows that most people who try to sketch a bicycle put the chain around both wheels, which, as cognitive scientist Tommy Blanchard explains, would make turning physically impossible. The penny thing is even more humbling. Who’s on it? Which way are they facing? You sure?

But this isn't really about drawing. It's about metaknowledge: your awareness of what you actually know versus what you only think you know. And the gaps run deeper than party tricks with a pencil. There's a reason your brilliant explanation didn't land with your coworker, your kid, or anyone who didn't already know what you know. Experts are often the worst teachers for a very specific reason, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Previous Results

Yesterday, we explored the tenuous connection between knowing and doing. Or, perhaps the lack thereof.

Speaking of tenuous, the article led me to ask… What's the most teenager thing a teenager can say? 50% of you have the same loathing for a flippant “I know!” as I do!

• "I know!" Said no matter what you tell them or how little they know. (50.0%)

• "Good." Apparently, a complete answer to any question. (10.5%)

• "I literally just did that." They did not. (13.2%)

• "What?" Said flippantly after an exhaustive explanation. (26.3%)

Science

Your brain has two navigation systems and they argue about everything

The science of getting where you're going.

Ever found yourself in the school drop-off line on a Saturday, when you were supposed to be getting donuts? That's not spaciness. You've got two navigation systems in your brain, and you accidentally used the one that sensed the time of day and the general direction and just did its thing out of habit.

Paulina Maxim, a researcher studying memory and navigation, has been mapping exactly how that happens. One system runs on habit, fast and automatic, triggered by familiar landmarks without conscious input. The other runs on specific memories, slower but capable of updating. When they conflict, your brain has to work significantly harder to sort out which one wins.

That friction is the whole mechanism. The same glitch that lands you in an empty school parking lot is also what lets you learn a new city and reroute when things change. The donuts were never the problem.

On May 13, 1888, Princess Isabel of Brazil picked up a pen and changed the lives of nearly 700,000 people with 18 words. Her father, Emperor Pedro II, was in Europe for health reasons, leaving Isabel as regent. In his absence, she signed the Lei Áurea, the "Golden Law," which abolished slavery in Brazil completely and unconditionally. No loopholes. No gradual phase-outs. No compensation to former enslavers. Just two short articles and a stroke of the pen.

Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, and that timing matters. Of the estimated 10 million Africans brought to the New World in chains, roughly 40 percent were brought to Brazil. The country had been built on that labor for over three centuries. When the news spread, crowds flooded the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The princess was celebrated as "A Redentora," the Redemptress, and received a Golden Rose from Pope Leo XIII.

The victory came with costs. The plantation owners who had relied on enslaved labor turned on the monarchy almost immediately, and Brazil became a republic the very next year. Princess Isabel spent her final decades in exile in France. She reportedly never regretted any of it, and years later still counted the signing of the Golden Law as the most important thing she had ever done.

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