iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

And here’s my favourite part of the story - on apparent signs of thought suppression in Claude

David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

A few weeks ago I travelled around the Galapagos with the world’s leading experts on consciousness. Here’s my first article to come out of the trip www.newscientist.com/article/2591...

An illustration of a white robot head with a butterfly perched on its shoulder

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Amazing view of a humming bird moth in my garden this morning! Have never seen one before

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

I’ve written a little newsletter to accompany my @aeon.co piece. “As my communication with my mother became increasingly fractured, so did my recollections of my childhood and adolescence.” open.substack.com/pub/davidaro...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

I found this insight especially interesting: “The consensus on someone’s appeal quickly falls apart as soon as people get to know them… If I think you’re hot, someone agrees with me a mere 53% of the time… Mere weeks after potential romantic partners meet each other, hotness loses its magnetic pull”

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

How sad that health content is issued with a warning label!

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

This bilingual podcast is the first time I've given an interview in Spanish about my work! The perfectionist in me hates hearing my mistakes and hesitation, but the truth is that two years ago, I could only manage tourist transactions, so this seems like a milestone. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pPd...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

Don’t care what the critics are saying, I unashamedly love The Life of A Showgirl, especially the clever play on Father Figure

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

“While submission is transactional and involves a loss of control, when two people surrender to each other, they feel alive, empowered, accepted. They feel love.” I hugely enjoyed Love’s Labour by psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz. It’s full of wisdom on the nuances and contradictions of romance.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

And different forms of meditation may help to tune the brain's position within the "critical zone" (4/5)

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

It could help us to understand how anaesthetics work (4/5)

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

The critical brain theory might explain one of the primary functions of sleep (3/5)

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

This critical zone might be crucial for flexible thinking, creativity, and perhaps even consciousness itself. (2/5)

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

My latest post examines the fact that employers exploit their most loyal workers, and the reasons that we find it hard to say no to bad ideas open.substack.com/pub/davidaro...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Huge congratulations to Melissa Hogenboom for this gem! Breadwinners examines the fascinating psychology of power dynamics at work and in the home - it’s a must-read for anyone who wants to live in a fairer world. Happy publication day!

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

“The same person who comforts you today might criticise you tomorrow, creating more physiological damage than relationships you can simply categorise as bad and potentially avoid.” A Q&A with sociologist BK Lee on the reasons “hasslers” accelerate ageing open.substack.com/pub/davidaro...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

Do you have a “hassler” in your social circle? They are the people who bring unnecessary drama - and recent research suggests that the subsequent stress can accelerate our biological ageing. I’ve just published a Q&A with the scientist behind the study davidarobson.substack.com/p/why-the-ha...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

The @institutocervantes.bsky.social took a candid of me doing my Spanish exam. 😆 It’s been a tough couple of months dealing with some family issues so simply turning up felt like a small triumph.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

If you drop your wallet in the street, it is more likely to be returned in Nordic countries than the rest of the world

The Nordic secret to happiness - an image of a girl’s silhouette with a text headline

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

S.K. is successful in her job, is physically attractive, and is quite extroverted. For the past 4 weeks or so, this person has felt quite sadder than normal and could not get to sleep as well as they would have in the past. Would you consider this to be depression? (1/2)

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Spending an hour after work to either read, or listen to an audiobook, is one of the greatest pleasures I know.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

📚It’s paperback publication day of The Laws of Connection!📚 Same words, but lower price, with some bonus FAQs. Thanks, as ever, to the lovely team at Canongate for bringing this into the world! And to everyone who has read it so far - I’ve loved hearing your experiences.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

“Echoism” - named after a figure from Ovid’s Metamorphoses - is the silenced self-voice that can be the consequence of living with a narcissist. I’ve written a little about the concept in my newsletter.

Narcissus staring at his reflection in a pool of water

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

This study, in particular, gave me pause:

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.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

Our beliefs about emotions - whether they are under our control or not - become self-fulfilling prophecies. davidarobson.substack.com/p/how-to-mas...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

“I’d led a pretty hedonistic and meaningless life and was unhappy in my younger years. I was very old at 20 and feel quite young at 87… For me, this mindset has a lot to do with a change in my attitude and living a purpose-driven life.” My newsletter examines why meaning helps us live longer.

A picture of Jane Fonda protesting the Vietnam War, with the text "How finding your purpose makes you live longer."

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Do you see something meaningful in this image? If so, you might have more creative potential that you realise. You can find out more in my newsletter, link below, which examines the neuroscience behind Leonardo da Vinci’s method of “speculative invention”: davidarobson.substack.com/p/da-vincis-...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

(In other book news, my friend and former editor Meredith Turits has written a novel, Just Want Your Here that’s funny and heart-breaking and perfectly captures the uncertainty of our quarter-life crises.)

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

It was inspired by Caroline Williams’ excellent new book, Inner Sense - which makes a strong case that interoception is one of the most important scientific concepts to emerge in past few decades.

The cover of “Inner Sense: How the new science of interoception scan transform your health”

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

My latest newsletter is all about interoception - the sense of what’s going on inside our bodies that drives our decisions, emotions and empathy, and which has big implications for mental health. davidarobson.substack.com/p/the-secret...

A picture of a man in a blindfold, with “the secret sense that controls your life” written above.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

And this one, on a "forcing" card trick, which fools the participant into thinking that they are exercising their free will.

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.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

This is one of my favourite experiments - the phantom vanish magic trick - which shows how easy it is to create the impression of a non-existent object, which then appears to vanish mid-air.

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.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

And offers some fun conversation prompts from @shakespeareandcompany.com: If you could spend the rest of your life with a character from a book, who would it be? Which books do you have on your nightstand that you know you’ll never read?

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Do you ever experience existential isolation - the sense that there’s an unbridgeable gap between you and other people? That’s the topic of this week’s newsletter, inspired by Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, which has become a bit of a surprise best-seller lately. Link in first reply…

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

How can we break out of the ruminative cycles of thinking that damage our mental health? Why is nature so good for our well-being? What leads people to mansplain other people’s professions? Find out in my newsletter - link in first reply.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

"Inaction is itself a choice – and may cost you more than a calculated gamble. You can never win if you never throw your chips on the table." My latest post examines how to make big decisions, based on an ingenious experiment involving a virtual coin: open.substack.com/pub/davidaro...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

The more we want to sleep, the harder it becomes - so is the solution to deliberately try to stay awake? This one element of cognitive behaviour therapy completely changed the way I sleep - and I’ve explored the science behind it in this week’s 60-Second Psychology newsletter

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

“Wakeful rest” helps your brain to consolidate its memories of new information - another reason to take more breaks in your day My newsletter explores the evidence behind this phenomenon davidarobson.substack.com/p/an-effortl...

Read more at davidarobsonon.substack.com

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Mindfulness helps bring mental calm and emotional resilience to many people, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Indeed, around 25% of people say that it sometimes heightens their distress. In my new edition of 60-Second Psychology, I discuss some alternatives.

Three mood boosting alternatives to meditation- bibliotherapy, music medicine and… a hot bath.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

You can read it here: open.substack.com/pub/davidaro...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

Can placebo pills increase someone’s chances of passing their driving test? That’s the conclusion of a new study, which found that a 2-week course of “open-label” placebos reduced anxiety and enhanced performance. In my newsletter I discuss the power of ritualised self-care

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

Have you ever felt Zielschmerz? That's the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream. How about Sehnsucht (life longings) or Torschlusspanik (fear of lost opportunities). My latest newsletter examines the psychology of "emotion differentiation". I'll post the link in the first comment below.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Most people - 58% - feel they are languishing at work with little fulfilment or purpose. What can we do? My latest newsletter examines small ways to shift ourselves out of stagnation open.substack.com/pub/davidaro...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

The second edition of my newsletter 60-Second Psychology is now out and explores the “what-the-hell effect”. If it’s your kind of thing, you can read and subscribe here open.substack.com/pub/davidaro...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

My first edition of the 60-Second Psychology newsletter is now live. I examine the success rates of New Year's resolutions, and describe a simple reframing exercise to increase our chances of making positive changes to our lives: open.substack.com/pub/davidaro...

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Dare la vita by Michela Murgia Not strictly a science book, but a thought-provoking essay on the nature of motherhood and family relationships through a queer lens. As far as I know, it's only available in Italian but I very much hope it will be translated into English.

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David Robson @davidarobson.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

The Immune Mind by Monty Lyman A beautiful examination of the ways the brain and immune system interact - with huge implications for our mental health.

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