HeadFacts
Short essays on the surprising mind · Vol. 1

A weekly essay · under one minute

The behavioral-science journal that lives between Robert Sapolsky and a TikTok For You page.

HeadFacts is a short-form video essay each week on one finding from psychology, neuroscience, or the behavioral sciences — pulled from a real paper, written in plain English, and read in under sixty seconds. Treats the listener as smart.

What this is

There is a particular kind of psychology finding that, when you encounter it, makes you sit slightly differently for the rest of the day. Not advice. Not life-hack. Not "five signs you're an empath." Something that changes, in a small way, how you read a room. HeadFacts is the channel for those.

Each video is a one-finding essay. One claim, one paper or program of research it comes from, and one honest framing of what the finding does and does not say. The aim is to be the thing you'd send to a friend who reads Sapolsky for fun — a level deeper than a TED summary, a level shallower than a literature review.

A theory of mind without a theory of when the theory fails isn't a theory of mind. It's a slogan. — from a working note

The shape of a HeadFacts essay

Every clip follows the same five-beat structure, which we've found gives the listener room to think between claims rather than being drowned in them.

  1. The image. A specific scene from a study, a clinic, a classroom, a moment of behavior. We start in the world.
  2. The finding. One sentence, the surprising result. No qualifiers yet.
  3. The qualifier. Population, sample size, replication state, effect size. The part most short-form videos skip.
  4. The why. The mechanism, plain-language. If the mechanism is contested, we say so.
  5. The sit. Why this changes, in a small way, the next conversation you have.

This week's essays

A selection from the running archive on TikTok. Handle will appear here once the account is live.

  1. Why agreeing with someone makes you remember them less accurately. Source-memory drift · 0:47 · based on Skagerberg & Wright (2008)
  2. The smallest experimental nudge that increased blood-donation rates by a third. Behavioral economics in the wild · 0:52 · loosely adapted from BIT field trials
  3. When the bystander effect doesn't show up — and what that says about everything else. Replication and context · 0:48 · CCTV-based naturalistic studies, 2019–2023
  4. Why your face becomes the face of whoever you're listening to. Motor mimicry · 0:44 · Hatfield, Cacioppo & Rapson, foundational and follow-up

What we don't do

HeadFacts isn't a self-help channel. It doesn't tell you how to "rewire your brain" or what your sleep schedule should be. It doesn't sell a course. It doesn't have an opinion on your morning routine. The behavioral sciences are far more interesting when you stop asking them for life advice and start asking them what's actually happening in the room.