psychology

Thus, for those who believed pain was a form of divine justice, attempts to alleviate it were fundamentally immoral and strongly resisted. The power of such thinking became dramatically clear when debates arose in the 1840s over the morality of giving anesthesia to women during childbirth.

the increasing extravagance of noble consumption.

if everything seems to make perfect sense—train yourself to stop and repeat: It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Then go back and restate it from the beginning and in a different fashion than you did the first time around. Out loud instead of silently. In writing instead of in your head. It

Conventional indifference maps and Bernoulli’s representation of outcomes as states of wealth share a mistaken assumption: that your utility for a state of affairs depends only on that state and is not affected by your history. Correcting that mistake has been one of the achievements of behavioral economics.

choices means losing possibilities. And having so many choices increases the chance of regret.

our minds are wired to wander. Wandering is their default. Whenever our thoughts are suspended between specific, discrete, goal-directed activities, the brain reverts to a so-called baseline, “resting” state—but don’t let the word fool you, because the brain isn’t at rest at all. Instead, it experiences tonic activity in what’s now known as the

Norepinephrine is similar but different. It’s the brain’s version of adrenaline, sometimes called noradrenaline. This neurochemical produces a huge increase in energy and alertness, stimulating both hyperactivity and hypervigilance. When you’re obsessed with an idea, can’t stop working

MacDonald’s paper inspired Ward and his frequent collaborator Traci Mann to posit a more generalized model of attentional myopia.2 It showed that by selectively narrowing attention, they could change a wide variety of behaviors, like eating more or less or being more or less aggressive toward others.

Second, our implementation of TTS includes accurate word mapping enabling a form of reading sometimes referred to as immersion reading. This refers to simultaneously reading and listening to the same document. It's a kind of sensory deprivation technique enabling you to quickly ramp into a flow state which would otherwise take 15 to 20 minutes of