That's one of the rabbit holes I went down for Edition #59 of Curiosity Saved The Cat, which went out this Sunday
His name was John Lubbock, and in 1871, he decided that workers and the financial system needed structured days on which banks could legally close (but not for the reason you might expect, as he had an interesting hobby he wanted to pursue).
That's one of the rabbit holes I went down for Edition #58 of Curiosity Saved The Cat, which went out this Sunday
Red makes you hungry, blue kills your appetite, and orange feels like a snack. None of that is accidental: it's color psychology applied deliberately, and food brands have been doing it for decades. But the more interesting part is that this conversation between your brain and color is happening everywhere, all the time, whether you're looking at a logo or just reaching for a mug in the morning.
That's one of the things that stuck with me while putting together Edition #57 of Curiosity Saved The Cat, which went out this Sunday
A study involving 1,800 participants across 9 experiments found the same pattern: we consistently underestimate how much we'll enjoy talking to someone, which might explain why we spend so much energy trying to skip past small talk rather than actually having it.
Uncertainty was the theme of this Sunday's edition of Curiosity Saved The Cat, and it turned out to be a bigger rabbit hole than expected
Ambiguity is metabolically expensive, apparently. The nervous system would always rather know, even badly, than not know at all. Which explains a lot about why we rush toward conclusions, perform confidence we don't feel, and reach for distractions the moment something stays unresolved for too long.
That's one of the rabbit holes I went down for edition #55, Is the Sun Deciding How You Feel?, which went out this Sunday
Rjukan sits so deep in a valley that it receives no direct sunlight for six months a year. In 2013, it installed three giant computer-controlled mirrors on the mountainside to redirect sunlight onto the town square. Considering that sunlight sets our serotonin levels, regulates our sleep, shapes how we make decisions, and even registers as a physical sensation in our joints before a storm arrives, we can easily say that Rjukan had a solution-oriented mindset.
That's one of the things I went down a rabbit hole on for Edition #53, which went out this Sunday, to celebrate last week's World Poetry Day
Diana Ferrus was studying in the Netherlands when she wrote a poem about Sarah Baartman, a South African woman whose remains had been held in Paris for nearly two centuries. The poem became so powerful it was eventually incorporated into French law and helped bring Baartman home.
This week, I went down a rabbit hole that started with World Sleep Day (yes, it's a thing) and ended somewhere between Swiss sleep retreats and a word game that mimics the brain's natural drift into unconsciousness.
A few things I didn't expect to find:
Hotels now have sleep doctors and overnight brain monitoring programmes, and a smart mattress company just hit a $1.5 billion valuation. Sleep has quietly become a luxury category.
Stanford Medicine researchers found that it's not just how long you sleep, but when. Your bedtime timing may matter more for your mental health than the number of hours.
A Canadian academic developed a technique called cognitive shuffling, which went viral on social media. The idea is to mimic hypnagogia, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, to trick your brain into switching off. Sleep specialists are paying attention.
It doesn't need to be profound. Could be a question you Googled at 2 am, something a stranger said that stuck with you, or a topic you keep meaning to explore but haven't yet.
In my case, last week I found myself thinking about walking (a lot). It's my favorite hobby, but at some point, I realized I'd never actually looked into the science and psychology behind it. So I started wandering the internet for resources, and before I knew it, a whole newsletter edition had written itself.
