Health

Psychology

Resources for learning how the mind and its disorders work.

Learning resources

Bullet Psych (Website) — a psychiatry curriculum by board-certified psychiatrist Marcus Hunt, written to be read in order from Day #1, covering mood, anxiety, psychosis, child psych, and more, with review quizzes.

Alfred Adler (Article) — the Austrian founder of Individual Psychology (1870–1937) and “the first of the great dissenters from orthodox psychoanalysis,” who left Freud’s circle in 1911 over the primacy of sexual drives. He coined the inferiority complex, made social interest and birth order central, and replaced the analytic couch with two chairs so patient and therapist sat as equals.

156 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena (Website) — vision researcher Michael Bach’s collection, maintained since 1997: 156 interactive illusions, each with an explanation of the visual mechanism behind it. His framing — perceptual illusions “aren’t tricks; they reveal shortcuts which the brain uses” — sorted into motion, luminance, colour, geometry, size constancy, Gestalt effects, faces, and a few auditory ones.

Newel of Knowledge (Channel) — long-form videos on social skills, motivation, and mental health, 205 of them for 694K subscribers, with titles like “why you feel exhausted all the time” and “how to read people so accurately they lowkey think u can mind read”.
EverythingProfessor (Channel) — 80 animated videos for 590K subscribers, almost all of them the same shape: pick a category of human experience and enumerate it. “Every Type of Depression Explained in 16 Minutes”, “Every Complex Mental Disorder Explained”, “Every Feeling You Can’t Name & Why You Have Them”, “Every Human Instinct Explained”. Mostly mind and body, 12 to 20 minutes each, laid out as stick-figure grids.

Analogy as the Core of Cognition (Paper) — Douglas Hofstadter arguing that every concept is “a tightly packaged bundle of analogies,” opening on why babies don’t remember and why each year passes faster than the last, and answering both with chunking.