Concepts (page 4)

Boredom is the discomfort of wanting to be engaged and not finding anything to engage with. It is often confused with finding your own thoughts unpleasant, and the best-known experiment on time…

Borrowed certainty is the failure in which a book takes on the authority of research through register alone, while naming no researcher and supplying no apparatus that would let a reader find one…

Box breathing is a paced-breathing convention with a memorable shape: breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold, each for an equal count. It is taught in military and first-responder training as a way to…

Brand mythology is persuasion that skips the argument. Instead of a reason to buy, the audience is given a character to feel something about: no claim, no comparison, just a persona attached to the…

Brooding is the moody half of rumination: sitting with a bad feeling and measuring yourself against a standard you did not meet. It sounds like "why do I always react this way" and "why can I never…

Buyer moderation is the tendency of heavy buyers in one period to buy less in the next, and of light buyers and non-buyers to buy more, with no real change in how anyone feels about the brand. Most…

Capgras delusion is the belief that a familiar person, most often a spouse or a parent, has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor. Recognition is intact. What is missing is the feeling that…

Noticing a baby's signal, reading it correctly, and responding promptly and appropriately. It is the best-evidenced cause of attachment security, it is what intervention programmes actually train…

Case report evidence is evidence from a single patient, or a handful, described in detail. Case reports are how medicine first notices new things, and they sit at the bottom of every clinical…

Chair flying is eyes-closed multisensory rehearsal of an entire flight, in which any manoeuvre botched in the mind is repeated until it is completed correctly before the pilot moves on. It is a…

Character Strengths and Virtues is the taxonomy Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman published in 2004 as positive psychology's deliberate counterpart to the diagnostic manuals: instead of…

Choice architecture is Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's term, from Nudge in 2008, for the arrangement of a set of options: the order of a menu, the default on a form, the box already ticked at…