Concepts (page 90)

A supernormal stimulus is an artificial stimulus that exceeds anything in nature on the dimension an instinct is tuned to, and therefore captures that instinct more powerfully than the real thing…

Surfing the urge is a technique from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: when a craving arrives, observe its physical sensations with curiosity and let it pass, neither suppressing it nor obeying it…

Survivorship bias is reasoning from the cases that made it, because those are the only ones still visible. The failures left no trace, so the pattern found among the winners looks like a cause when…

Switch cost is what moving attention between tasks charges you, and the charge is not the interruption's length but the reorientation on either side of it. The evidence our notes rest on is Foerde…

System noise is unwanted variability in judgements that should ideally be identical. Not error against a known answer, but scatter among equally qualified people looking at the same case. Its best…

Taṇhā, Pali for thirst, is what the Second Noble Truth names as the origin of dukkha. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta gives it in three varieties: thirst for sensual pleasure, thirst for existence…

Dream content that refers to a task learned before sleep, studied in relation to later performance.

A techno-panic is the recurring pattern in which a new medium is blamed for a decline in the young. The lineage is long enough to be embarrassing: writing, the printing press, the radio, comics…

The finding, in three experiments, that warmer conditions created with warm beverages or comfortably warm rooms raised perceived social closeness and concrete language.

The finding that the effect of music tempo on sales can depend on whether the music is in a major or a minor key.

Temptation bundling is Katherine Milkman's technique of making something you want available only alongside something you should do, so the want supplies the motivation and the restriction supplies…

Shelley Taylor's 2000 argument that fight-or-flight is not the whole stress response: under threat, people also tend, soothing distress in themselves or a dependant, and befriend, actively building…