Concepts (page 78)

  • The Mad Genius Myth

    The mad genius myth is the popular belief that creativity and mental illness are linked, so that exceptional originality comes bundled with instability. The honest verdict is neither myth nor link…

  • The Manipulation Matrix

    The Manipulation Matrix is Nir Eyal's two-by-two test for whether a product is ethical to build. One axis asks whether it materially improves the user's life. The other asks whether the maker would…

  • The Medium Is the Metaphor

    The medium is the metaphor is Neil Postman's adaptation of Marshall McLuhan's phrase. It holds that the form of a medium shapes what can be said through it, so that the dominant medium of a culture…

  • The Memex

    The memex is Vannevar Bush's proposed desk sized machine for storing a person's books, records and communications, retrievable by associative indexing: linking any item to any other so that trails…

  • The Metric Black Hole

    The metric black hole is Cal Newport's name, from page seventy of Deep Work, for the region of knowledge work where the effect of any given behaviour on the bottom line cannot be measured, so nobody…

  • The Miles-Per-Gallon Illusion

    People treat fuel consumed as though it fell in a straight line as miles per gallon rises, and it does not. Fuel used per fixed distance is the reciprocal of miles per gallon, so the savings from…

  • The Mind After Midnight

    Andrew Tubbs and colleagues proposed in 2022 that being awake at night is not the same as being awake in the day. Missing sleep and sitting at the body clock's low point arrive together, so negative…

  • The Mind and Illness Boundary

    This is the reference point this publication grades every health claim against. On the near side of the line, mental states reliably change how illness is experienced and can move physiological…

  • The Misinformation Effect

    The misinformation effect is the claim that how a question is worded changes what a person remembers, not only what they say in reply. Elizabeth Loftus's car-crash wording studies are the source…

  • The Online Share of Retail

    The online share of retail is the proportion of retail sales made online. In the United States it was 17.1 per cent in the second quarter of 2026; in Great Britain internet sales were 27.3 per cent…

  • The Oprah Model

    The Oprah model is a vault label for Tim Wu's account, in The Attention Merchants in 2016, of what happens when three attention technologies that used to be separate are fused into a single person…

  • The Overjustification Effect

    Pay someone to do a thing they already enjoyed and they will do less of it once you stop paying. The external reward supplies a reason, which crowds out the reason they already had. The finding is…