About Circle of Insight

Circle of Insight is a set of written notes about psychology and human behaviour. Each entry takes one topic that is widely discussed outside the field and sets out what the research literature on it actually says, where the evidence is firm, and where the popular summary has run ahead of it.

What these notes are

They are descriptive and general. The subjects covered here, memory, attention, sleep, habit, emotion, stress, social relationships and the methods used to study all of them, are treated as research topics with a history and an argument attached. The interest is in how claims are established and how they get distorted in transmission.

What these notes are not

They are not clinical, diagnostic or personal guidance, and nothing here is written as advice for an individual situation. Where a subject touches on health, the notes stay with the shape of the evidence and stop there.

How they are written

Entries are written from general reference works, university teaching material and open-access research literature, and they are deliberately cautious about numbers. Where a figure is widely quoted but rests on a single study or a wide distribution, the note says so rather than repeating it. Where an argument in the field is unresolved, the note leaves it unresolved.

Entries are published under the site name and are filed by date and by subject. The archive lists everything by month; the topics index lists the same entries grouped by subject.