TL;DR Verdict: debunked. The idea that self-control burns blood sugar has failed almost every serious attempt to reproduce it, including one run by the man whose own earlier work supported it. The founding studies waited about ten minutes after the sugary drink, to give the glucose time to work. Then other labs got the same…

TL;DR Verdict: the mechanism is wrong, the experience is real. In February 2026, 39 scientists from eleven countries signed one paper agreeing that Polyvagal Theory’s specific explanation for why your body sometimes shuts down doesn’t hold up. That doesn’t mean the shutdown itself is imaginary — it means the wiring diagram used to explain it…

TL;DR Verdict: overstated, not fake. Growth mindset works a little, not a lot. Picture a class of 100 kids ranked from lowest to highest score. Give the kid sitting exactly in the middle a growth-mindset pep talk — just the belief, no extra tutoring — and on average, across every study ever run, that kid…

TL;DR It doesn’t. Twenty-three labs tried to catch willpower running dry the way the original study claimed. Across 2,141 people, they found nothing — d=0.04, a number so close to zero it might as well be zero. The “muscle” idea comes from one lab study about radishes and cookies. It was never grounded in biology…

TL;DR The VARK questionnaire was built from its authors’ own observations, and they wrote in the original 1992 paper that testing it for validity and reliability was “unnecessary and inappropriate”. Roughly 89% of educators across 18 countries believe that matching teaching to a student’s style improves learning. The evidence for that specific claim has never…