Recent quotes:

The bidirectional relationship between sense of purpose in life and physical activity: a longitudinal study | SpringerLink

An increase in sense of purpose in life was associated with higher physical activity four years later, above and beyond past activity levels. Physical activity was positively associated with future levels of sense of purpose in life, controlling for prior levels of purpose in life.

The Story of a New Name Quotes by Elena Ferrante

she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.

Neuroscientists discover a brain signal that indicates whether speech has been understood -- ScienceDaily

To test if human brains actually compute the similarity between words as we listen to speech, the researchers recorded electrical brainwave signals recorded from the human scalp -- a technique known as electroencephalography or EEG -- as participants listened to a number of audiobooks. Then, by analysing their brain activity, they identified a specific brain response that reflected how similar or different a given word was from the words that preceded it in the story. Crucially, this signal disappeared completely when the subjects either could not understand the speech (because it was too noisy), or when they were just not paying attention to it. Thus, this signal represents an extremely sensitive measure of whether or not a person is truly understanding the speech they are hearing, and, as such, it has a number of potential important applications.

Conspiracy Theorists May Really Just Be Lonely - Scientific American

In one experiment, people wrote about a recent unpleasant interaction with friends, then rated their feelings of exclusion, their search for purpose in life, their belief in two conspiracies (that the government uses subliminal messages and that drug companies withhold cures), and their faith in paranormal activity in the Bermuda Triangle. The more excluded people felt, the greater their desire for meaning and the more likely they were to harbor suspicions.

Everyday Routines Make Life Feel More Meaningful - Scientific American

In the paper, 77 subjects looked at 16 photographs of trees, ordered randomly or according to the seasons. Those who saw the seasonal pattern reported that they found life more meaningful than the other subjects, as measured by a questionnaire completed shortly after the visual task. Another 229 volunteers saw triads of words for a few seconds at a time

Havel on hope and meaning

Havel discovered—in the words for which he is best remembered—that hope “is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”