The science of having no answers
Almost everything in the universe is made of something nobody has identified. Physics treats that as a frontier and funds it. The same sentence, said about a woman's symptoms, gets her sent home. This post is about both, because they turn out to be the same sentence with different consequences.
Art & Evolution
Evolution is not sentimental. A species living at the edge of survival does not casually develop an elaborate reward response to marks on a wall. Every calorie spent grinding ochre is a calorie not spent on food, shelter or a child. So why has no human population ever been found that does not make art? Four serious answers, one of which starts somewhere you will not expect.
Mind Wanderings
You spend nearly half your waking life thinking about something other than what you are doing. Most of that is not good for you. A specific slice of it is where your best ideas come from, and the difference between the two is not luck. It is a set of conditions you can arrange, if you have the spare capacity to arrange them.
Art & Longevity
I love art so much it moves every fibre of my being. Recently I started wondering what that phenomenon in my body actually is, when I look at art I love and art I don't. Both provoke a sensation. It turns out both have been measured, and the difference between them is not one of degree. Your brain changes the category.
Stem Cells
I fasted past 72 hours once. My back hurt the whole way through, and afterwards it felt like a different back. That sent me into the stem cell literature, where the real finding turned out to be stranger than the supplement ads: your repair crew does not fade slowly. It collapses at around seventy. And in the female body, one of the hormones maintaining it withdraws two decades earlier.
Outside of Time
There is something that happens in a crisis that nobody really prepares you for. Time does not just feel different — it is different. The room slows down. The details become too clear. You notice things you have no business noticing when everything is going wrong. This is not a glitch. It is tachypsychia — a specific neurological event driven by norepinephrine — and the science of why it happens tells you more about the female stress response than almost anything else in the literature.
Hangry
You're mid-sentence, four hours since your last meal, and your brain just — stops. Not dramatically. You lose the thread. Then someone puts food in front of you and you're back, embarrassingly quickly. Here's what is actually happening in your prefrontal cortex. And here's the part that matters even more: the myth that the luteal phase makes you cognitively impaired is not supported by a 2025 meta-analysis of 102 studies and 3,943 women. The fog is real. The explanation isn't what you've been told.
The Iron-y
The reference range your doctor uses to rule out iron deficiency was built from a population where iron deficiency had become so common it looked normal. A ferritin of 14 ng/mL comes back with no flag, no follow-up, and no conversation. The evidence says the threshold should be 50. Here is what the gap between those two numbers costs.
Neuroplasticity
There is a belief I held for most of my twenties that I no longer hold: that my brain had a ceiling. That the capacity I had was the capacity I got. I know now that this is not how the brain works. Neuroplasticity does not pause for difficult years. And in the female brain, it runs on a hormonal architecture that science is only beginning to take seriously.