Graeme Brown
Verified- Editor-in-Chief, Birmingham Mail
- Audience and Content Director, Cheshire Live
- Audience and Content Director, The Sentinel (Stoke)
Birmingham
Editor of the Birmingham Mail and BirminghamLive - not using Twitter so much these days
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Articles by Graeme Brown
Learning in the age of information: how access counterfeits understanding, and how to tell knowledge from wisdom
We have quietly collapsed three things that used to be easier to tell apart: information, knowledge, and wisdom. The age of information has delivered an almost violent abundance of the first, more facts, papers, explainers and answers than any previous generation could have imagined, all a few keystrokes away. The comfortable assumption is that the other two follow along behind, that with so much information available we must by now be more knowledgeable and, eventually, wiser.
Reading before bed does help you sleep, but the surprising catch is what you read it on
Reading before bed is one of the most commonly dispensed pieces of sleep advice, and unusually for a folk remedy, it has actually been put to the test. The results are encouraging but more specific than the headlines suggest, and the most interesting finding is not that reading helps you sleep, which it modestly does, but that the object you read from can quietly reverse the benefit.
How to be a better man, according to the evidence rather than the two loudest camps
How to be a better man is one of those searches that returns two opposite answers, both of them loud. One camp hands over a traditional script: provide, stay stoic, toughen up, need no one. The other hands over a critique: unlearn your masculinity, apologise for it, dismantle it. We think both miss, and the more useful answer sits between them, grounded less in ideology than in what the evidence actually shows helps men and the people around them.
Different cultures really do teach us different ways of thinking, but the learning is earned, not automatic
There is so much that different cultures teach each of us. It is the kind of sentence that draws warm agreement and then dissolves, precisely because it is so easy to agree with that nobody has to think about it. We would like to take it more seriously than that, because the claim is true and the research behind it gives it real substance, and because the ways it can go wrong are worth naming so that it becomes an idea rather than a pleasantry.
Work-life balance matters, but not as a perfect ratio, and not as a problem you can solve alone
Keep a balance between work and home. It is advice so universally endorsed that it barely registers as advice at all, more a sort of ambient wisdom that everyone nods at and few examine. The importance of it is real and well evidenced, so this is not a case of a myth to be dismantled. But the popular framing carries two assumptions worth pulling apart: that the goal is a fixed balance, some correct ratio of hours to be struck, and that achieving it is chiefly a matter of personal discipline.
The habits blamed for keeping you poor matter less than the genre claims, and often run the other way
The genre of content that lists the cultural habits keeping you poor is a reliable traffic magnet, and it rests on two assumptions that deserve examination rather than applause. The first is that becoming wealthy is mostly a matter of personal behavior, so that shedding the wrong habits would let the money flow. The second, sharper and riskier, is that the culprit is culture, that groups stay poor because of how they think and spend.
Hardship can make you stronger, but only in moderation, and only because of what you build afterward
Learning to be strong comes from picking up the pieces of bad situations and building something entirely new. It is a stirring sentence, and it contains a real claim that can be checked rather than merely admired. Folded inside it are three assertions: that hardship builds strength, that the strength comes from the rebuilding, and that what you build must be entirely new. The research treats each of these differently.
Living to impress others quietly costs you, and the crowd you are performing for is barely watching
Spending your life trying to impress others takes time away from your values, your happiness and your meaningful experiences. As a sentiment it belongs on a fridge magnet, and it is the kind of line that is easy to agree with and just as easy to ignore. But it happens to be broadly supported by the evidence, and, more interestingly, it comes with a twist the fridge magnet leaves out. Living for the good opinion of others does carry real costs.
Giving your time and money does lift people, but only when you give it a certain way
Show more kindness and lift people up by giving more of your time and resources. As instructions go, it is sound, and the research broadly supports it: people who give tend to benefit, and so do the people they give to. But the word more hides two findings that are more useful than the slogan. Giving works in a way that is genuinely counterintuitive, and it works only under particular conditions.
Experience is not the only source of knowledge, and on its own it is a surprisingly unreliable one
The line the only source of knowledge is experience travels the internet in Albert Einstein’s name, which is the first thing worth correcting. The Albert Einstein Archives do not recognise it as his, and the sentiment traces back much further, to the empiricism of John Locke, who argued that the mind draws all its materials of reason and knowledge, in one word, from experience.
Integrity does grow in families, but not the way strong family principles suggests
The phrase definite signs that your integrity is rooted in strong family principles carries two confident claims folded into a single flattering sentence. The first is that integrity can be read off a checklist of definite signs. The second is that integrity, when a person has it, grows out of strong family principles.
The people who never speak badly of others have a strength worth naming, and a blind spot worth watching
There is a particular kind of person we tend to admire without quite examining why: the one who never speaks badly about anyone, even after being treated cruelly. It reads as a rare and enviable grace. We follow the psychology of this rather than practise it clinically, and the honest reading is more interesting than the halo. Some of what looks like saintliness is a genuine and adaptive strength, worth naming precisely. Some of it is more ambiguous than the compliment suggests.
People raised by very demanding and critical parents tend to carry two traits into adulthood above all, perfectionism and a harsh inner voice, though the research is clear these are tendencies rather than sentences
The idea that a demanding, critical childhood leaves a recognisable mark on the adult is one of those claims that is broadly true and easy to overstate. Certain patterns do show up more often in people raised by parents who were hard to please, and the research supports some of them fairly clearly. But they are tendencies rather than certainties, they are not universal to everyone from such a home, and describing a common pattern is not the same as diagnosing an individual.
Being smart does not protect you from bias, and can quietly make it worse
The phrase bad habits of very intelligent people promises gossip and usually delivers flattery, a list of quirks that quietly reassure the reader they are one of the clever ones. The more interesting version of the question is harder on everyone, including the smart. It asks whether high intelligence comes with characteristic ways of thinking badly, and here the research is genuinely useful, because it points to traps that intelligence does not prevent and in some cases actively sharpens.
There is an old saying that bad men attract good women, and the psychology of first impressions explains why it looks true even though the research quietly rewrites it
The saying that bad men attract good women is a folk observation, not a finding, and it is worth examining rather than repeating. It is also worth degendering at the outset, because nothing in the research that bears on it is specific to men drawing in women. The same dynamics run across genders and orientations, and good and bad are blunt summaries of complicated people. We are writers who follow this work rather than psychologists, and what follows is a reading of it.
There is no phrase a woman only says if she loves you, but the research on how couples talk points to something more reliable than a decoder list: patterns of assurance, openness and delight at your good news
The genre of content that promises to decode a partner from a fixed list of phrases is durable, and, read literally, wrong. No sentence is spoken only by people who are in love, and none of them guarantees it. The same words can be sincere, habitual, or performed. The phrase is also usually aimed at women, as though love spoke a female dialect, which the evidence does not support.
There is usually more than one way to look at any situation, and the psychology of naive realism explains why your first reading feels like plain fact even when it is only one of several
The advice to accept that there is usually more than one way to look at a situation sounds like something from a fridge magnet. It is also, as it happens, one of the better-supported ideas in social and cognitive psychology, and the research explains both why the single-view habit is so strong and why loosening it tends to pay off. We are writers who follow this work, not psychologists, so what follows is a reading of the research rather than a set of instructions.
The things a person with high standards will never tolerate in a relationship, read through the research rather than the meme, come down to two failures far more serious than any status checklist
The phrase usually arrives gendered and a little combative: the things a woman with high standards will never tolerate. It is worth pausing on two words inside it, high and standards, because when the research is actually consulted, the standards that turn out to matter have almost nothing to do with the status-and-appearance checklist the phrase tends to imply, and almost everything to do with how a person is treated. They are also not, on the evidence, a woman’s standards in particular.
Can the planet only be saved by moving beyond capitalism? We map the strongest case its supporters make, from degrowth to the doughnut, against the decoupling evidence that complicates it
The claim that the planet cannot be saved without moving beyond capitalism is one of the more consequential arguments in climate politics, and it is contested by serious people on more than one side. It is worth setting out plainly, because the slogans on both ends tend to obscure where the real disagreement sits. What follows is not a verdict but a map: the strongest version of the beyond-capitalism case, and the objections that complicate it.
The idea that life is a chess game where every move matters is a bracing corrective to fatalism, but chess is a revealingly bad model because it has no luck at all, and a truer, kinder metaphor is poker: your decisions count, yet you do not control the ca
Life is a chess game where every move matters is the kind of line that feels bracing and wise, a rebuke to fatalism and an assertion that you are the author of your fate rather than a leaf on the wind. It contains a real truth, and it is far better than its opposite, the belief that nothing you do makes any difference.
Most claims that your annoying habit is a secret sign of genius are comforting nonsense, but a couple genuinely hold up: fluent swearing tracks with strong verbal ability, and idle doodling can improve how much you remember, though neither is a readout of
The internet loves a particular kind of story: the one where your most irritating habit turns out to be a secret marker of genius. Messy desk? Sign of a brilliant mind. Stay up late? Higher IQ. Swear like a sailor? Actually a sophisticate. Most of this is comforting nonsense, the psychological equivalent of a horoscope that only ever flatters you. But not all of it.
We are taught to find clarity first, then summon courage, then act, but the psychology of courage and uncertainty suggests the sequence runs the other way: you act on your values while still afraid and unsure, and the clarity assembles itself behind you
The usual advice for uncertain times is to wait for clarity and then act with courage, as though the two arrive in that order and courage is what you summon once the fog lifts. In our reading of the research, that has it almost exactly backwards. Clarity is rarely something you find before you move; it tends to follow movement. And courage, properly understood, is not a feeling you wait to have but something you do while still afraid.
The famous claim that standing like a superhero floods you with hormones was debunked, even by its own author, but a smaller and sturdier truth survived: adjusting your posture really can lift how confident you feel in the moment, without changing who you
The idea that you can change how you feel by changing how you sit or stand is one of the most appealing claims in popular psychology, and also one of the most misunderstood. It became famous, then it became a cautionary tale about science that overreached, and somewhere in the wreckage a smaller and more honest truth survived.
Migration generates more heat than light, but the evidence is clearer than the shouting suggests: migrants found most of America's billion-dollar companies, pay in more tax than they cost, and quietly prop up the finances of ageing societies
Few subjects generate more heat and less light than migration, and any honest look at what migrants bring has to begin by admitting that the debate is genuinely contested and the effects are genuinely mixed. But contested is not the same as unknown.
Lists of rare traits that make people fall in love promise something exotic, but the research points to two ordinary-sounding capacities that are genuinely uncommon in practice, and both are less about being impressive than about how you make another pers
Search for rare personality traits that make people fall in love and you get lists of quirks: a mysterious aloofness, an unusual laugh, a particular brand of confidence. The research on what actually draws people into deep attachment points somewhere much less exotic and far more useful. Two fairly ordinary-sounding capacities do a great deal of the work, and they are rare not because they are strange but because, in practice, very few people are any good at them. Neither is about being impressive.
The people who leave you flattened are draining you in three specific, measurable ways, and the science of why holds an uncomfortable surprise: in most cases you are quietly supplying half the energy the dynamic runs on
Almost everyone can name someone who leaves them flattened. You hang up the phone, or walk out of the coffee, and you feel like you have run a small race you did not enter. The internet has a tidy label for these people, the energy vampire, and it is a satisfying phrase precisely because it puts all the blame on them and none on you.
Admiring a great athlete's skill is one thing, but treating them as a hero of general virtue and moral authority is a different move entirely, and the research on how our minds work suggests it rests on a well-documented error
Every culture has its sporting heroes, and the impulse to look up to them runs deep. It becomes a problem at a specific point, though, and it is worth locating that point precisely. Not when we admire what an athlete does, but when we elevate who we imagine they are: when a person who is extraordinary at one narrow, physical thing gets treated as extraordinary in general, a source of moral guidance and a template for how to live.
Living or working with someone who is always finding fault is genuinely draining, and the reason it stings is specific: their criticism attacks who you are rather than what you did, and it usually reflects a standard of theirs that no one could meet
Everyone knows the person who can always find the flaw. The relative who spots the one thing wrong with the meal, the colleague who greets every idea with what is wrong with it, the partner whose feedback never quite runs out. Chronically critical people are genuinely hard to be around, and it helps to understand two things the research makes clear: why their criticism lands so much harder than ordinary feedback, and what is usually driving it.
Beware of people who use you sounds like advice for the paranoid, but there is a real personality pattern behind it, and the research on givers and takers offers something better than suspicion: a way to stay generous while spotting the ones who only take
Beware of people who use you for their own ends reads like the motto of someone who has been burned once too often and now trusts nobody. Held as a general policy, suspicion is a poor way to live and, as it turns out, a self-defeating one.
The case for regular travel is usually made in the language of bucket lists, but the evidence points to something more everyday: the mind and mood benefit from novelty and difference, and it is the frequency, not the grandeur, that does the work
The advantages of travel are usually sold in the language of the extraordinary: the trip of a lifetime, the bucket list, the two weeks that change everything. But the research on why travel is good for us points somewhere quieter and, for most people, more useful. It suggests the benefits come less from the scale of a journey than from its two active ingredients, novelty and difference, and that regular, ordinary travel delivers both of them better than one grand expedition ever could.
The visionary is imagined as a prophet with rare inner sight, but the research points to something more learnable and less romantic: foresight is a trainable habit, big ideas are mostly recombinations of what already exists, and being right is partly luck
The word visionary carries an almost mystical charge. We picture someone who simply sees what the rest of us cannot, a prophet with rare inner sight, born with a gift most people lack. It makes vision feel like a lottery of temperament, something you either won at birth or did not. The research on how people actually anticipate the future and generate original ideas tells a less romantic, and far more useful, story.
Jealousy feels like it is guarding the relationship, but the research suggests it is largely futile: it fires mostly in response to your own insecurity rather than a real threat, and the controlling behavior it triggers tends to create the very loss it fe
Jealousy has a defender’s logic. It feels like it is guarding something precious, sounding the alarm the moment a relationship comes under threat. And it has deep roots: evolutionary psychologists view it as an evolved mate-guarding response, a mechanism for detecting and deterring rivals. Yet the closer you look at how jealousy actually operates, the more its central claim, that it protects the relationship, falls apart.
Bone health is the part of your body almost nobody thinks about until something breaks, but the science on why it matters and what actually protects it is unusually clear, and the biggest levers are within reach at any age
Bone is the part of your health almost nobody thinks about until something breaks, which is precisely the problem. It is invisible, it declines silently, and by the time it announces itself, with a wrist that snaps on a minor fall or a hip that suddenly gives way, much of the damage is already done. Concentrating on bone health early is one of the higher-return, lower-effort things a person can do for their future self. The science on why it matters, and on what actually works, is unusually clear.
The claim that self-approval beats popularity sounds like a fridge magnet, but the research on where self-worth comes from is unusually pointed: staking it on other people's approval predicts worse wellbeing over time, while valuing self-acceptance predic
Self-approval beats popularity reads like a motivational slogan, the kind of line that is easy to nod at and then ignore. The psychology behind it is more specific, and more useful, than the phrasing suggests. The point is not that popularity is bad, or that you ought to stop caring what anyone thinks. It is that where you base your sense of worth, inside yourself or in other people’s approval, turns out to predict how you feel and function over time.
The advantages of slow travel are not mainly about virtue: the evidence shows ground transport emits a small fraction of what flying does, and that relaxed, anticipated trips are the ones most likely to leave you happier afterward
Slow travel, staying longer in fewer places, favoring trains and buses over flights, and trading the checklist of sights for a bit of depth, is usually sold as a lifestyle aesthetic. But two of its main advantages are measurable rather than romantic. It emits dramatically less carbon than the fast alternative, and it tends to make the travel itself happier. Here is what the evidence actually shows, and where it stops.
The rise of solo travel is not just a marketing story: it sits on a real structural shift, the record number of people living alone, and on what the research finds solo travellers actually want, which is freedom and self-discovery more than any destinatio
Solo travel is one of the travel industry’s favourite growth stories, and it is easy to be a little cynical about a trend so heavily marketed and so thoroughly photographed. But behind the hashtags sits something more solid than a fashion. The rise is real, and it rests on two firm foundations: a genuine structural change in how people live, and a clear set of reasons the research shows solo travellers are actually chasing. Both are worth taking apart rather than waving away.
The clearest psychological benefit of working from home is what it removes: the commute, one of the least enjoyable parts of the day. A landmark workplace experiment adds a second, higher job satisfaction, though both come with real trade-offs worth namin
Working from home turned into a mass experiment almost overnight, and most of the arguments about it have centered on productivity. The psychological side is quieter and, in some ways, clearer. Home working delivers a couple of real, well-evidenced benefits to how people feel, mainly by removing something miserable and adding something people genuinely want. It also carries costs that any honest account has to include. Here is what the research actually shows, benefits first.
The usual route to becoming irreplaceable, making yourself indispensable and needed, tends to backfire: research on authenticity and on what makes people feel they matter suggests you are hardest to replace when you are valued for who you are, not for wha
The art of being irreplaceable is usually taught as a strategy: make yourself indispensable, become the only one who can do the thing, be so useful that nobody could manage without you. It is an understandable ambition, at work and in love alike. But looked at closely, that route is a trap, and the research on what actually makes a person hard to replace points almost the other way.
The workplace communication skills that separate high performers from average ones are not the flashy ones: research points less to polished presenting than to two quieter habits, actively seeking feedback, and listening at a genuinely high quality
Ask people what good workplace communication looks like and they tend to picture the confident presenter, the person who speaks well in meetings, the writer of the crisp email. Those skills genuinely help. But the research on what actually distinguishes high-performing employees points to two quieter, more two-way abilities, and both run in the opposite direction from broadcasting.
Dominating a conversation does more damage than seeming self-absorbed: research on conversational narcissism shows how constantly steering talk back to yourself starves the other person of attention, and studies of group work find that when a few voices d
Dominating a conversation almost never feels like domination from the inside. It feels like being engaged, having a lot to say, keeping the energy up. That is exactly why it is so common, and why the harm it does is mostly invisible to the person doing it. The research suggests that steering a conversation relentlessly toward yourself damages things on two levels at once, the person in front of you and any group you are part of, and that a single small adjustment fixes most of it.
The signs a person wants to distance themselves from you are far harder to read than they feel: research on mind-reading and on rejection sensitivity explains why scanning for them is unreliable, and why the scanning itself can create the very distance yo
The wish behind the phrase is to catch it early: to read, from a few small cues, that someone is quietly pulling away, so you can brace for it or head it off. It is an understandable instinct, and a mostly futile one. Reading whether another person wants distance is among the hardest things we try to do, and the research suggests that the more anxiously you scan for the signs, the worse your reading gets, and the more likely you are to bring about the very thing you dread.
Deep unhappiness is more common among women than men, and the reasons are mostly circumstantial rather than a matter of temperament: research points to unequal stresses and a habit of turning distress inward, both of which are real, common, and treatable
The phrase invites a bleak character sketch, a certain kind of woman to be spotted and diagnosed from the outside. That is the wrong lens, and a slightly unkind one. It is more accurate, and far more useful, to begin from a plain fact: across many countries, women are diagnosed with depression at roughly twice the rate of men. That does not mean women are more fragile, or unhappy by nature.
Get to the point is good advice with a catch: research shows we almost never end conversations when we mean to, usually running on too long, but the point of a conversation is not always information, and bluntness can miss it entirely
Get to the point is advice we hand freely to other people and almost never take ourselves. It is worth taking seriously, though, because it turns out to name a real and near-universal failure, and to rest on a genuine principle of good communication. It also hides a trap. The point of a conversation is not always to make one, and the times we most need to get to the point are not the only times we think we do.
Birmingham dad given months to live due to cancer becomes a grandad
A father who was told he had merely months to live following an advanced skin cancer diagnosis eleven years ago is now celebrating becoming a grandfather. Adrian Webb feared he might never reach his 50th birthday after his cancer had spread to his lungs, liver, spleen, bowel and spine. Medical professionals informed him there was minimal to no chance of complete recovery but, following his participation in clinical trials, examinations revealed he was in remission.
Across 25 experiments, people told to imagine another person's perspective became less accurate about what that person thought, not more, while people who were simply allowed to ask them got substantially better
The standard item on every list of this kind is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Read what they read, imagine their situation, try to see it from where they stand. It is the most recommended technique in the category, and it has been tested more carefully than most advice ever is. It did not do what people assume it does.
When the average income of a person's reference group doubles, their spending on visible goods falls by roughly half at the same personal income, which makes conspicuous consumption a signal about relative position rather than a reliable tell for wealth
The premise of every list of this kind is that certain habits are reliable indicators, and that a trained observer can read wealth off behaviour the way a mechanic reads an engine by ear. Two well-established pieces of research make that harder to sustain, and they fail it in different directions. One says that visible spending is not a measure of how much money a person has. The other says that the same behaviour can read as high status or low status depending on who is watching.
In 55 improvisation classes at The Second City, students told that their goal was to feel awkward held their focus longer and took more risks than students given the standard instruction, which is a different thing from learning to tolerate discomfort
Most advice about getting comfortable with discomfort is really advice about endurance. Tolerate the bad feeling, wait for it to pass, do the thing anyway. That is a reasonable description of one skill, and it is not the one a pair of experiments published in 2022 were testing. Those studies asked what happens when the discomfort stops being the obstacle and becomes the target.
The researchers who defined selfishness as a measurable trait did not anchor it to any behaviour: their definition turns on maximising your own gain at others' expense while holding beliefs that justify it, which is the part a list of behaviours cannot se
There is a durable genre of article that lists the behaviours giving away a selfish person. Interrupting. Never asking questions. Ordering first. Taking the better chair. The lists are satisfying to read because everyone can attach a face to them within about four seconds. The awkwardness is that the researchers who have spent the last decade building a measurable definition of exactly this trait did not build it out of behaviours like these, and their reasons are worth understanding.
The lists promising that certain habits prove your mind works on a deep level get one thing right and one thing wrong: there is a real, measurable trait behind deep thinking, but the flattering format is exactly what makes it feel true for nearly everyone
The genre is a familiar one and a flattering one. A short list of fairly ordinary habits, you ask why rather than accepting things at face value, you notice patterns, you need quiet time to think, is offered back to you as evidence that your mind operates on some rare and enviable deep level. Flattery of this kind is always worth a second look, because things designed to please us are rarely designed to inform us.
The most useful exercise advice after 60 is not about doing more of one thing: the official guidelines and the falls research agree that combining aerobic movement with strength and, above all, balance training is what keeps older bodies capable and uprig
Search for exercise ideas after 60 and you get a grab bag: a little walking, some stretches, maybe a photo of a smiling couple on bikes. The ideas are fine, but the useful version is organized rather than random, because the evidence points to a specific shift in what matters as we age. After 60, the winning mix is not simply more of any one thing. It adds strength and, above all, balance as first-class goals alongside aerobic fitness, mainly to protect independence and to keep people upright.
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