https://phor.me/research A weekly letter about the forces shaping how people see, and what to do about them. en https://phor.me/research/ceos-and-elite-athletes https://phor.me/research/ceos-and-elite-athletes Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT The best cricket batsmen move their eyes to where the ball will bounce before it gets there. Acting before the whole picture arrives is a skill, and it gets better when every decision carries a written prediction and a date to check it. https://phor.me/research/when-longevity-protocols-backfire https://phor.me/research/when-longevity-protocols-backfire Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT You can train for a longer life and spend the rest of the day interfering with the adaptation. Research on supplements, cold water and metformin exposes a problem with the modern longevity routine: adding something healthy does not guarantee a healthier combination. https://phor.me/research/one-type-of-man https://phor.me/research/one-type-of-man Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT In 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote that one type of man is needed to plan ahead and an entirely different type to execute the work, and the reason he gave was that a man cannot stand at a machine and sit at a desk at the same time. That sentence built the wall between the athlete and the builder. The tissue never received the memo. https://phor.me/research/we-call-it-flow https://phor.me/research/we-call-it-flow Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT Ask an athlete and an artist to describe their best work and you get the same paragraph. It came easy. The decisions made themselves. They stopped watching how they looked. This is what that state is actually made of, what practice does to a task to make it possible, why the science behind it is far less settled than the language suggests, and why feeling fluent is not the same thing as being right. https://phor.me/research/why-focus-fails https://phor.me/research/why-focus-fails Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT Around the year 380, a monk in the Egyptian desert described a state that arrived at the fourth hour of the morning and lasted until the eighth. Compulsive checking, restlessness that feels like insight, the sudden certainty that somewhere else would be better. He had no phone. The research suggests focus is not something we aim but something we construct by suppressing everything else, which means distraction may be less a failure of attention than the same system solving a different problem. https://phor.me/research/the-paradox-of-movement https://phor.me/research/the-paradox-of-movement Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:00:00 GMT Why getting stronger, faster, freer, and more skilled often requires the very thing that seems to oppose it. In movement, the quality we want and the problem we want to avoid are often produced by the same mechanism. The contradiction is not an inconvenience surrounding adaptation. It is often how adaptation happens. https://phor.me/research/two-buildings https://phor.me/research/two-buildings Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT In 1908 Walter Winans won an Olympic gold medal for shooting. In 1912 he won another for sculpture. For thirty six years the Games awarded medals in art alongside sport, until an amateurism rule ended it in 1949. The separation of the athlete from the artist is administrative rather than biological, and the evidence on practice, attention and perception suggests both disciplines are working on the same system. https://phor.me/research/the-water-you-are-fighting-you-made https://phor.me/research/the-water-you-are-fighting-you-made Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT A swimmer meets far more resistance moving than the same body meets when towed through the same water, and their own limbs make the difference. Across four studies, skill in water appears as subtraction rather than added force. Less disturbance, earlier release, a quieter motor cortex. https://phor.me/research/what-problem-are-you-asking-the-body-to-solve https://phor.me/research/what-problem-are-you-asking-the-body-to-solve Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT Researchers changed the relationship between muscle activity and movement, then told some participants which muscles mattered. The cue helped while familiar coordination could still solve the problem, and helped less as the task moved beyond it. https://phor.me/research/who-chose-your-movements https://phor.me/research/who-chose-your-movements Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:00:00 GMT After more than thirty thousand repetitions, a learned decision relied less on the brain's system for deliberate control. The finding helps explain how practice becomes automatic, and why the patterns selected by cultures and institutions can become part of us before we know to question them.