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The Vessel Editorial Team

The Vessel Editorial Team produces content on psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and the questions people return to about how to live well. We publish essays, reflections, and explorations drawn from psychological research, philosophical traditions, and contemplative practices. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, research, drafting, fact-checking, editing, and review, rather than a single individual's writing. The Vessel takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.
Two decorative hourglasses standing on a bookshelf among books and objects
  • Inner Life

People tend to treat mind-wandering as a failure of intelligence, but in a 269-person replication only working memory capacity, not fluid intelligence, predicted who timed their drifting around the task’s easy stretches
Close-up of adult hands holding a smartphone over an open notebook
  • Relationships

Parents who feel their child is ‘difficult’ often reach for a screen to steady the room, and in a 2026 study of 822 caregivers that pattern held even after accounting for the child’s behaviour.
  • Inner Life

Volunteers toured an art gallery at Baycrest and then slept: a year later, sleep had preserved the order of what they saw far better than the details, a selective advantage tied to slow-wave activity
A woman's hand writing with a pen in an open notebook resting on her lap.
  • Inner Life

These students already wanted to be calmer and more outgoing, on average: the ones who wanted it more were predicted to finish the term a little further along than the average classmate
Young adult studying at a desk with textbook, notes, and calculator
  • Inner Life

Psychology says people who drift off mid-task aren’t careless, they’re budgeting: in a preregistered study of 269 adults, those with stronger working memory let attention wander and pulled it back before demand peaked.
Adult hands holding a tablet computer
  • Relationships

Psychology says parents who hand over a screen to keep the peace aren’t lazy, they’re depleted: across 822 U.S. caregivers of four to eight-year-olds, distress tracked with fewer enforced screen limits.
Visitors in a museum gallery looking at large paintings during an art tour
  • Inner Life

We tend to think a good night’s sleep improves memory across the board, but a 2025 Nature Human Behaviour study suggests it works more narrowly, protecting the sequence of events while the finer details fade.
A woman seen from behind on a city bus, holding a wrapped bouquet of sunflowers, with sunlight falling across the window.
  • Inner Life

In a five-year study of 229 adults aged fifty and over, feeling lonely tended to come before a lower mood, and the connections they actually had did not explain the pattern
A man seen from behind sits at a round table across from an interviewer, with a small voice recorder and an open notebook between them and a hand-lettered sign reading Oral History Table.
  • Inner Life

Across seven studies, on average more than half of the children identified as mistreated at the time did not report it when researchers came back and asked them years later
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