Concepts (page 43)

The unfalsifiable frame is the failure in which a theory is built so that almost nothing could refute it, because a denial is absorbed as further evidence for it. Agreement confirms the theory…

The vicious circle of deprivation is John Bowlby's claim, in his 1951 report for the World Health Organization, that deprived children grow into parents unable to provide a normal home life, so that…

The von Restorff effect, also called the isolation effect, is the finding that the odd item in a list of similar items is remembered better. Hedwig von Restorff showed in 1933 that it holds even…

The white cube is Brian O'Doherty's name for the modern gallery's blank walls, controlled lighting and objects isolated on plinths, treated not as a neutral way to display art but as an ideology in…

The winner's curse is the tendency for the winning bidder to overpay when a prize's value is uncertain. Each bidder's estimate carries some error, and the highest bid tends to come from the most…

The worry-wonder reframe is Amber Rae's core move in Choose Wonder Over Worry and the spine of that book. Two inner voices are personified, Worry and Wonder, and the practice is a scripted…

The classic claim is that unfinished or interrupted tasks stay in memory more vividly than finished ones. Bluma Zeigarnik, working in Kurt Lewin's Berlin laboratory in 1927, reported that waiters…

The zero-apparatus book is a work of non-fiction that makes factual claims with no citations of any kind, no notes, no bibliography and no markers, and does not say so. It is a separate position…

Theory-induced blindness is Daniel Kahneman's term for what happens once a theory has been accepted and put to work as a tool: its flaws become extraordinarily hard to see. Not invisible, which is…

Ray Oldenburg's term, from The Great Good Place (1989), for the social anchor that is neither home, the first place, nor work, the second. Cafés, pubs, barbershops, gyms, churches, community…

Time management is pain management is Nir Eyal's reframe of distraction, set out in Indistractable in 2019: if distraction is an escape from internal discomfort, then managing time is an emotional…

Timeboxing is the practice of assigning every hour of the week to a specific intended activity, leaving no unplanned white space. The term comes from software project management, where a timebox is…