The Psychology of Going Nowhere

A young woman boards an elevated train in 1907, reaches her stop…and simply cannot make herself leave. Her strange case of “nervousness” becomes a newspaper curiosity, but more than a century later, it feels startlingly familiar. Then, why do lost people so often make the one choice most likely to keep them lost? From the forests of Nova Scotia to the Sahara Desert, we explore the unnerving ways panic can scramble your internal compass.

The Box of Oddities: where history gets weird, the brain gets stranger, and sometimes the best thing you can do is stay put.

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