Episodes

31 to watch. Each page carries the research notes the video was written from, including the limits.

• Did you know? A bowerbird rebuilt its illusion in three days

  14 October 2026

  Male great bowerbirds place the smallest objects nearest the female’s viewing position and larger ones further away, creating forced perspective; when researchers reversed the size gradient the males restored it within about three days, and males producing the strongest illusions mated most - though why the illusion helps is unresolved.

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• Did you know? Alligators balance sticks in bird nesting season

  13 October 2026

  Mugger crocodiles and American alligators were observed resting with sticks balanced on their snouts, predominantly during the weeks when wading birds were gathering nest material, which is hard to explain as debris landing at random - though no bird was ever observed being caught this way, and most of the watching was done at captive sites.

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• Did you know? A fish scraped a mark it could only see in a mirror

  12 October 2026

  Cleaner wrasse given a visible mark under the skin spent time at a mirror positioned to show it, then scraped that spot on the substrate - doing neither with an invisible mark or without a mirror. Whether that is self-recognition, a parasite-removal reflex aimed at an apparent neighbour, or a response to a mark they could feel as well as see, is unresolved and argued in print.

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• Did you know? Ravens chose a tool for a job 17 hours away

  10 October 2026

  Ravens chose a tool or a bartering token for use up to 17 hours later, performing as well as apes and better than chimpanzees at bartering, and whether that reflects planning for the future or well-trained association is still argued in print.

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• Did you know? Cheetahs accepted skin grafts from strangers, all 14

  9 October 2026

  Fourteen reciprocal skin grafts between unrelated cheetahs were all accepted, while domestic cat skin grafted onto the same animals was rejected normally - showing the immune systems worked and the cheetahs were simply too genetically alike to tell each other’s tissue apart, though later methods found more diversity than the 1985 techniques could see.

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• Did you know? Dolphins answered their own whistle, voice stripped out

  8 October 2026

  Wild bottlenose dolphins off Scotland were played synthetic copies of their own signature whistles, stripped of voice characteristics so only the contour remained, and the group called that whistle back in 8 of 12 trials - significantly more than for whistles belonging to familiar or unfamiliar animals.

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• Eight Octopuses Learned to Tell Two Strangers Apart

  7 October 2026

  Eight giant Pacific octopuses at the Seattle Aquarium met two unfamiliar people over two weeks, one who always fed them and one who always prodded them with a bristly stick, and came to respond differently to the two - in body pattern, arm movement and funnel direction, with a breathing difference in the four largest animals only.

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• Sheep picked their handler out of a photo in ~72% of trials

  6 October 2026

  Eight sheep learned to pick particular human faces out of pairs of photographs, still managed it above chance when the faces were tilted to an unseen angle - dropping from roughly 79 to 67 per cent, a fall similar in size to the one people show - and chose their own handler’s photograph in about 72 per cent of trials without being trained to. A published response argued the sample and stimuli were too small to support the comparison with human ability.

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• Vampire bats feed who fed them, more than their kin

  5 October 2026

  Twenty vampire bats were individually fasted on 48 days across two years, and when they shared blood, the amount a bat had previously received from a given partner predicted what it gave back to that partner better than genetic relatedness did - about 8.5 times better, by the paper’s own comparison.

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• Wild Birds That Answer a Specific Human Call

  4 October 2026

  Greater honeyguides in northern Mozambique were played three sounds on real honey-hunting trips, and the traditional Yao “brrr-hm” call doubled the chance of being guided, from 33 to 66 per cent, and raised the chance of being shown a bees’ nest from 16 to 54 per cent, against arbitrary human words and another bird’s call - a wild, untrained animal responding to a specific signal from people.

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• Goldfish three-second memory: no study ever found it

  3 October 2026

  No study has ever found a three-second memory in goldfish; the number has no source. Eight goldfish given a lever that released food for only one hour a day learned to press it around that hour, and in a related experiment on a different species, rainbowfish that learned to escape a model trawl still escaped quickly when shown it eleven months later.

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• Elephants failed the mirror test until the mirror grew

  2 October 2026

  Elephants were scored as failing the mirror test until a 2006 study gave three Asian elephants a mirror large enough and close enough to use properly; all three behaved as though investigating themselves, and one of them, Happy, touched a mark on her own head that she could only have seen in the reflection, while ignoring an identically applied invisible control mark.

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• Eagle Eyesight Is About 2.4x Yours, Not 8x — Here’s Why

  1 October 2026

  A wedge-tailed eagle trained to pick fine stripes out of a grey field resolved them at about twice the fineness a person can, roughly 2.4 times by the paper’s figure, which is the sharpest vision reliably measured in any animal and well short of the four-to-eight-times claim that circulates.

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• Wolves Howl Most for Their Closest Packmate, Not Stress

  30 September 2026

  When a wolf was walked away from its pack, the wolves left behind howled in proportion to how close they were to that particular animal and how high its rank was, not in proportion to their measured stress hormones, which suggests howling is a socially directed signal rather than a pure distress reflex.

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• Your cat’s 65% secure attachment — one of two answers

  29 September 2026

  The study behind “science proves your cat is attached to you” found secure attachment in about 65 per cent of cats, the same share as human infants. A more tightly controlled study four years earlier found no secure attachment at all, and a 2025 paper argues the test was never the right tool for a solitary hunter. The number you saw is real. It is also one of two answers.

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• Toxoplasma’s ’fatal attraction’ looks cruder than reported

  28 September 2026

  A parasite really does change infected rodents’ behaviour in a way that helps it reach a cat - but the famous part, that it selectively deletes the fear of cats, did not survive the follow-up. It makes them generally less anxious, which is messier and less clever. And the version about humans, the one that made it into every headline, does not show up in the best study anyone has run.

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• Tsavo Lions: the death toll was likely 4x too high

  27 September 2026

  The Tsavo lions killed perhaps 35 people, not the 135 of the legend, and only one of them did most of it. They were not desperate: their teeth show soft feeding, not the bone-cracking of starvation. And the broken tooth that may have started it held the hair of everything they ate, which was sequenced in 2024.

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• The last wild horse may not be wild — 9 animals saved it

  26 September 2026

  The animal sold as the last truly wild horse may be the escaped livestock of a culture that vanished five thousand years ago - and specialists are still fighting about it. What did survive from the same work is that horse domestication did not start where everyone said it did. Meanwhile every Przewalski’s horse on earth descends from nine animals that made it through the 1940s.

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• Bees Flown 250m Off Course Still Flew the Dance’s Vector

  25 September 2026

  Von Frisch decoded the honeybee waggle dance and won a Nobel for it, while a rival spent decades arguing the bees were just following a smell. In 2005 researchers put radar transponders on recruits, displaced them 250 metres, and watched them fly the exact wrong-but-correct vector the dance had specified. Both men turned out to have half of it.

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• Horses remember the angry photo — with the left eye

  24 September 2026

  Show a horse a photograph of an angry stranger, and hours later, when that stranger walks in with a neutral face, the horse looks at them with the eye it uses for threats - and only at them. The study behind the headline before it was picked apart for a real statistical error: proving a result in one condition and failing to prove it in another is not proof the two differ.

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• The lemming death march was staged: pushed off a riverbank

  23 September 2026

  The lemming death-march is a scene from a 1958 Disney documentary that won an Oscar, filmed hundreds of miles from the sea with animals bought and trucked in, herded on a turntable to look like a horde and then pushed off a riverbank. Real lemmings do disperse when crowded, and some drown crossing water. None of them line up to die.

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• Guide dogs carry the Labrador hunger gene 4x as often

  22 September 2026

  Labradors really do have a genetic reason to be hungry — a deletion in POMC that damages part of the signal telling them they are full, worth about 1.9 kg per copy. The twist is where it is concentrated: assistance dogs carry it at nearly four times the rate of pets, because people breeding for trainability were unknowingly selecting for appetite. Those dogs are not overweight. Same gene, different routine.

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• Betty the crow’s wire hook: maybe not invention after all

  21 September 2026

  A crow bending a wire into a hook was for years the best evidence an animal could invent a tool on the spot — until researchers went to New Caledonia, watched wild crows make their own tools, and found that ten of eighteen of them bend the shaft as a matter of course. Betty was wild-caught. She may have arrived already knowing the move, and the only genuinely new thing in the room was the wire.

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• Chaser knew 1,022 words. The grammar part is the soft edge

  16 September 2026

  A retired psychology professor spent three years teaching his border collie the individual names of 1,022 objects, and she could pick any one of them out of a pile — the largest vocabulary ever measured in an animal, and it holds up. The claim that she also understood sentence structure is the shaky one: the objects sat in predictable rooms, and her trainer was watching from across the room.

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• 18 detection dog teams searched empty rooms — 200+ alerts

  15 September 2026

  Eighteen trained detection dog teams searched rooms that contained no drugs and no explosives, and alerted over two hundred times — most often exactly where their handlers had been told, falsely, that something was hidden. The dogs were reading the humans, which is Clever Hans with a working animal and higher stakes.

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• He set out to prove apes build sentences. Then the tapes.

  14 September 2026

  Chimpanzees taught sign language really did learn hundreds of signs and use them to name and request — but the headline claim, that they were building sentences, collapsed when the researcher trying to prove it watched his own videotapes and found the apes were mostly echoing whatever their teacher had just signed.

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• Tolman’s rats: the latent learning story textbooks trim

  13 September 2026

  Rats that ran a maze for ten days with no reward looked like they had learned nothing, then performed almost perfectly the day after food appeared — which Tolman read as learning that had been happening invisibly all along. The textbook version has this defeating behaviourism; in fact rival explanations existed, the argument ended in a stalemate, and the experiment the phrase “cognitive map” comes from failed to replicate.

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• Alex the Parrot’s Last Words Weren’t a Goodbye

  12 September 2026

  Alex the grey parrot learned about a hundred labels and, under controls built specifically to rule out the Clever Hans effect, could answer questions about colour, shape and number — and the last words so often quoted as his farewell were what he said to Pepperberg every single night.

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• Skinner’s superstitious pigeons: what the 1971 rerun saw

  12 September 2026

  Eight pigeons fed on a timer regardless of what they did developed odd repeated movements, which Skinner explained as accidental reinforcement and compared to human superstition — but a careful replication found the behaviour converged across birds and tracked the interval, looking more like a food-anticipation sequence the species already had than a ritual built out of coincidence.

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• Alpha wolf: the biologist who spent 20 years taking it back

  11 September 2026

  The alpha wolf was described in unrelated captive wolves crammed into a zoo enclosure in 1947; wild packs turned out to be families led by the parents, with no rank to fight for, and the biologist whose book made the term famous argued against it for decades and could not get that book out of print until 2022.

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• 13 experts found no trick. The horse still couldn’t count

  11 September 2026

  A horse that appeared to do arithmetic was reading involuntary changes in the questioner’s body and stopping when they relaxed — 89 per cent right when he could see the person asking, 6 per cent when he could not — and the investigation that worked this out is why double-blind procedure is standard.

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Archive

19 earlier episodes on psychology and behavioural science. The videos are no longer public; the research notes stay here.

• The Hawthorne data nobody looked at for eighty years

  21 September 2026

  The study that taught everyone people work harder when watched was, for eighty years, described by people who had not seen its data. When two economists finally found the original records, the famous pattern — output rising after every change, even the ones that made the room darker — was not in them. Something small survives. The story does not.

• 274 Social Science Claims Retested: Survivors Shrank

  11 September 2026

  When 274 published social science claims were retested with well-powered, pre-approved replications, about 55 per cent came out significant in the same direction and about half the papers held up — and the effects that did survive were, at the median, less than half the size first reported.

• Robbers Cave failed once: the boys spotted the setup

  10 September 2026

  The most-cited demonstration that competition turns groups against each other worked on the second attempt. The first attempt failed because the boys already knew each other, saw what the adults were doing, and sided with each other against them — and the published design quietly made sure that could not happen again.

• The broken glass that wasn’t there: how memory rebuilds

  9 September 2026

  Under the right conditions a person can be given a detailed, sincerely held memory of something that never happened — which says something about how memory is built, and much less than it is often used to say about whether to believe someone.

• Power posing: the author who stopped believing her own study

  8 September 2026

  The most watched psychology talk in the world rests on a paper whose first author has since written, in public, that she does not believe the result — while the milder version of the claim, that it changes how you feel, is still standing.

• 23 labs retested willpower. The effect came out near zero

  7 September 2026

  An idea that shaped how a generation was told to manage their willpower was tested by twenty-three laboratories at once, and the effect came out at roughly nothing.

• Learned Helplessness: Its Authors’ Own 2016 Correction

  6 September 2026

  One of the most influential ideas in psychology was published, taught for half a century, and then corrected by the people who discovered it — and the correction inverts what the phrase means.

• Asch’s line experiment: the 75% doesn’t mean what you think

  4 September 2026

  The study is usually produced as proof that people are sheep. Its own numbers show most answers were independent, a quarter of people never once went along, and one other person telling the truth was enough to bring the rest back.

• Austria: 99.98% consent. Germany: 12%. Same question.

  3 September 2026

  The default is one of the strongest levers in behavioural science and it moves consent by enormous margins. It moves actual donations far less, and the country held up as the proof is really evidence for staffing and process.

• The copper over his ears: the study that rewrote psychiatry

  3 September 2026

  A study that helped rewrite psychiatric diagnosis appears to rest on evidence that largely cannot be found, including a case record that contradicts its own author — and the change it triggered was probably right anyway.

• Phineas Gage: the recovery half nobody teaches

  2 September 2026

  The injury and the survival are exactly as remarkable as they sound. The permanent ruin is not — the best-documented part of his later life is a skilled job held down for years, and that is the half of the story nobody tells.

• Pavlov’s Bell: The Detail The Retelling Invented

  2 September 2026

  The science is sound and the dogs are real. The bell is a detail the retelling invented, and it is the only part most people can remember.

• Milgram’s fourth prod: the order people refused most

  2 September 2026

  People can be led a very long way by someone who seems to have legitimate authority, but the famous number describes one arrangement out of two dozen, with a script the experimenter did not keep to — and the plainer the order became, the more people refused.

• The Dunning-Kruger chart isn’t in the Dunning-Kruger paper

  2 September 2026

  The study is real, the effect is contested, and the chart everyone shares was never part of it.

• The 38 witnesses story was mostly wrong. The effect isn’t.

  2 September 2026

  The founding story was largely journalism rather than fact, the effect it inspired is genuine in the laboratory, and in real public emergencies a crowd makes help more likely rather than less.

• Stanford’s Prison Guards Were Coached to Be Cruel

  2 September 2026

  The most famous demonstration of situational power was a piece of theatre with its direction partly written in advance, and the careful replication produced the opposite result.

• Why unfinished tasks stick — but less reliably than told

  1 September 2026

  Unfinished tasks do tend to stay more accessible in memory, but the effect is more conditional than its popular framing suggests.

• The Decoy Effect: the option nobody picks still counts

  1 September 2026

  Adding a third option that nobody picks can change which of the other two people do pick, which standard models of rational choice say should not happen. The effect is real and well replicated in the laboratory, but it is context-sensitive rather than a universal lever, and the famous magazine-subscription figures come from a classroom demonstration rather than a controlled study.

• The marshmallow test partly measures trust, not willpower

  1 September 2026

  Children do differ in how long they wait, and the waiting itself is real. What the wait reflects is circumstance and learned expectation as much as self-control, and the popular claim that the test predicts a child’s future is far stronger than the evidence supports.