Concepts (page 19)

This page describes what one book claims, and nothing on it is a finding. James Doty, in Mind Magic, published in 2024, defines manifestation narrowly: you choose an intention, make it vivid and…

The manufacture of consent is Walter Lippmann's phrase, from Public Opinion in 1922. It is not Edward Bernays's, whose Propaganda came six years later in 1928 and drew the opposite moral from the…

The marketing placebo effect is the finding that a price or a label changes how much a product is enjoyed, or how well it works, even though the product is unchanged. It is usually explained by…

Materialism in this literature is the importance a person attaches to worldly possessions, and specifically the belief that acquiring them is the route to status and to happiness. It is treated as…

Maternal deprivation is John Bowlby's 1951 thesis, set out in Maternal Care and Mental Health, a report commissioned by the World Health Organization. It holds that a young child needs a warm…

Meal memory is the idea that part of what stops a person eating is remembering that they have already eaten. On this account the end of a meal is not settled by the stomach alone. It is settled…

An instrument records something specific. The claim built on it is usually broader. The gap between the two is where most arguments about evidence actually live, and it is almost always missing from…

Media determinism is the position that a medium's form, independent of what it carries, shapes how a society perceives and thinks. Marshall McLuhan's compressed version is that the medium is the…

Willoughby Britton and colleagues interviewed 96 people who had completed an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy programme, using a 44-item instrument administered by an independent…

Memory consolidation is the process by which a fragile short-term memory becomes a durable long-term one, and it is not a transfer of data. Short-term memory involves temporary chemical changes at…

Mental accounting is Richard Thaler's finding that people sort money into separate mental categories and judge each transaction inside its own category rather than against everything they own. It is…

Mental health literacy is Anthony Jorm and colleagues' term, from 1997, for knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management or prevention. It is not a measure of…