People & Mind

In 2005, graffiti artist David Choe was hired by Sean Parker to paint murals inside Facebook's first office in Palo Alto. He was offered $60,000 in cash. He took stock options instead. When Facebook went public in 2012, his shares were worth approximately $200 million.

In 1999, a Swedish radiologist named Anna Bågenholm fell through ice while skiing in Norway and spent 80 minutes trapped under a frozen stream. Her body temperature dropped to 56.7°F — the lowest ever recorded in a surviving hypothermia patient. When rescuers pulled her out, she had no heartbeat and no breathing. Clinically dead. Doctors at Tromsø University Hospital spent 9 hours bringing her back using a cardiopulmonary bypass machine. She survived. And later became a radiologist at the very hospital that saved her life.

During an Easter egg hunt in Surrey in 2016, about 30 kids spotted two men sprinting across a field with a police helicopter circling overhead. Without being told, the children lay down in the dirt and formed a giant human arrow pointing the helicopter straight at the fleeing suspects. Both men were caught. The helicopter crew landed and handed out chocolate to every kid.

A recycling worker opened an old TV and found over $100,000—then the money was returned to the man who hid it decades earlier.

Walmart paid $65 million because it refused to let its California cashiers sit down while working.

In 1978, Richard Branson tried to impress his girlfriend by pretending to buy a Caribbean island listed at $6 million. He jokingly offered $100,000 and was thrown off the island — but a year later, with no other buyers, the desperate owner accepted just $180,000.

A group of kids learned sign language just so they could wish their deaf janitor a happy birthday.

A Burger King cook in Vancouver was fired for taking home a fish sandwich, fries, and a drink after 24 years of service. A judge ruled it was a misunderstanding and awarded her $46,000.

When Filipino gymnast Carlos Yulo won two gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics, his country went all out. He received a $550,000 fully furnished condo, $350,000 in government cash, lifetime free buffets, a lifetime supply of ramen and chicken, two café franchises, a Land Cruiser, and free flights for life. Total haul: over $2.6 million.

In 1997, a 23-year-old French con artist convinced a Texas family he was their missing teenage son — despite having brown eyes instead of blue, a heavy French accent, and being a completely different person. He lived with them for months before a private investigator uncovered the truth.

In 2013, a man named Frane Selak survived a train derailment, a plane door explosion, a bus crash, and four car wrecks. He then won the lottery, gave most of it away, and said he was finally happy.

Your brain can't distinguish between vividly imagined practice and real action. Mental rehearsal physically strengthens neural pathways.

Hearing your own name activates your brain's reward center the same way money or food does, even when you're asleep.

Muhammad has been the most popular baby boy's name in England for two years running.

During WWII, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara defied his government to save 6,000 Jewish refugees. He wrote visas by hand for 29 days straight, even throwing them from his train window as he was forced to leave.

The inventor of the Pringles can is buried in one. Fredric Baur was so proud of his creation that he requested part of his ashes be stored in a Pringles container after his death in 2008.

Some people can taste words - a rare phenomenon called lexical-gustatory synesthesia, where hearing or reading certain words triggers unique flavors in their mouths.

The inventor of the first successful electric hearing aid, Miller Reese Hutchison, also designed some of the earliest car horns—helping people be heard in two very different ways.

Some tech CEOs intentionally use the same outfit every day—like Steve Jobs’ black turtleneck—not out of laziness, but to minimize decision fatigue and boost creativity.

Research shows that verbal intelligence is positively correlated with worry and rumination. Brain scans reveal that both high intelligence and excessive worrying share similar patterns of neural activity in the brain's white matter.