Masud Husain in The Guardian:
We all know people with very different levels of motivation. Some will go the extra mile in any endeavour. Others just can’t be bothered to put the effort in. We might think of them as lazy – happiest on the sofa, rather than planning their latest project. What’s behind this variation? Most of us would probably attribute it to a mixture of temperament, circumstances, upbringing or even values.
But research in neuroscience and in patients with brain disorders is challenging these assumptions by revealing the brain mechanisms that underlie motivation. When these systems become dysfunctional, people who were once highly motivated can become pathologically apathetic. Whereas previously they might have been curious, highly engaged and productive – at work, in their social lives and in their creative thinking – they can suddenly seem like the opposite.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
From restoring movement and speech in people with paralysis to fighting depression, 
Several years ago, I stopped going to therapy. I no longer trusted myself to tell the story of my life in a way that felt forward-moving. I harbored a suspicion that the therapist held some knowledge of me that she would one day reveal — like whether I should switch careers or move — but she never did.
In a 2013 paper in Social Science & Medicine, researchers studied debt’s impact on general health outcomes—the first study of its kind, they noted. Earlier scholarship traced the impacts of socioeconomic status on health and the impact of debt on mental health, but before this study, no one had drawn a clear, thick arrow between debt and a body. Because of Americans’ rapid accumulation of debt since the 1980s—including medical, credit card, student loan, payday, and mortgage debt—more people are experiencing indebtedness than ever before, and it’s hurting them. It’s hurting us. The study, which focused on young adults between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-two with personal debt, found that debt is “a significant predictor of health outcomes.”
As a 
Fascism is roaring back in the twenty-first century and, in a sickening twist, it is rhetorically claiming that mass censorship, high-tech surveillance and extra-judicial detention are necessary to protect the victims of twentieth-century fascism. Until, of course, even that flimsy façade is dropped in favour of a purer white nationalism with no need for Jewish cover. That evolution is already well underway, with unreconstructed antisemites on the far right – such as Nick Fuentes, helpfully amplified by Tucker Carlson – seizing upon widespread revulsion at Israel’s carnage, and the suppression of voices opposing it, to open the floodgates of Jew hatred, updating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Jeffrey Epstein era.
You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds, and the hummingbird wing whirring a hundred times faster than your eye can blink, and your eye that took 500 million years from trilobite to telescope, and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder 
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s exhibition “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting,” on view through January 18, 2026, begins dramatically. As I ascended the stairs to the show, I saw two monumental heads rise on the wall ahead of me. One head tips back, the other forward. The portrait is of two young women, cheek to cheek. Their heads seem at first to share a body—but no, one rests her chin on the other’s hunched-up shoulder. The left head looks down through narrowed eyes. The right, almost cherubic, looks off to the side, eyes and mouth open. Their faces are marred with red spots; a piece of flesh beneath an eye appears missing, exposing a smattering of scarlet over crude primer. The painting, Hyphen (1999), is twelve feet by nine feet. I approached it and shuddered.
In a YouTube video posted by NASA, kids sit cross-legged in neat rows in a gymnasium at Sunita L. Williams Elementary School in Needham, Massachusetts. You can see them wave their little hands at the camera, which beams the image roughly 250 miles above Earth to the International Space Station. They were talking in December with none other than Sunita Williams, the school’s namesake and an astronaut living on the space station. She should have been home already. A series of technical failures extended an eight-day mission to nine months, leading some news organizations and politicians to play up tension and place blame.
The new film “Hamnet” features two bright young actors, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, playing Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (née Anne) Hathaway. “Hamnet” arrives already widely lauded — it won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival and has been sending millennial cinephiles into critical paroxysms. “Not to be hyperbolic but this movie contains the actual meaning of life,” 
Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. “With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person’s character,” writes Nicholas Basbanes in A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. “When out of control and indulged to excess, it lets loose a fury of bizarre behavior.” The sort of figure mocked in the engraving “The Bibliomaniac” from Sebastian Brandt’s 1497 satirical allegory The Ship of Fools, a work that Erasmus knew well, where he may have recognized himself in the woodcut. I certainly do, seeing a reflection of my own bookish pursuits from half-a-millennia ago in Brandt’s ridiculous figure in monastic robes and scholarly cap and eyeglasses, sitting behind a desk and shelf piled with books, the figure fanning them as if he’s their servant rather than they his possessions.
There was a revealing moment recently when Sam Altman appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Carlson pressed Altman on the moral foundations of ChatGPT. He made the case that the technology has a kind of baseline religious or spiritual component to it, since we assume it’s more powerful than humans and we look to it for guidance. Altman replied that to him there’s nothing spiritual about it. “So if it’s nothing more than a machine and just the product of its inputs,” says Carlson. “Then the two obvious questions are: what are the inputs? What’s the moral framework that’s been put into the technology?”