Attention: who decides where yours goes
How attention works, what research says about it, and what feeds, notifications and chatbots do to it.
A course for people who find it harder and harder to finish a long text or stay with a hard problem. You will sort out what is established about attention, which numbers turned out to be myths and how a feed is built, and set up your phone and your working day around your own goals. This is not a medical course: if trouble with attention gets in the way of your life, see a professional.
So far there is only this table of contents. Lessons appear one at a time, and we promise no dates. Feed of new lessons (Atom)
17 lessons, 4 parts
Part 1 How attention works
First, what is known about attention itself, and what is merely repeated about it.
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Attention as selection
The brain lets only a small part of what it sees and hears into awareness, and that is not a fault but how it works.
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The goldfish myth
Where the famous eight seconds came from, and why nobody has found a study behind the number.
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When your mind wanders off
How researchers measure where the mind goes in the middle of a task, and what such samples can and cannot tell you.
Part 2 The cost of switching
We do not do two hard tasks at once: we switch between them, and we pay for it.
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What one switch costs
Why each move between tasks costs time, and how the small losses add up over a day.
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People who do everything at once
A well-known experiment found heavy multitaskers more easily distracted, the repeats were far less clear, and here is how to read a dispute like that.
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Where the 23 minutes came from
The figure everyone repeats about interrupted work: what stands behind it in Gloria Mark’s research, and how to get back to a task.
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The phone on the table
Does a phone distract you even when it lies silent: a headline result, the disputed repeats, and what is sensible while the question stays open.
Part 3 The attention economy
Your attention is being sold, and we hold that it deserves defending as stubbornly as money: that is our stance, and the mechanisms can be checked.
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A poverty of attention
Herbert Simon’s thought that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and how it became the business model of free services.
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How a feed chooses what to show
A feed predicts what you will react to, not what you need, and everything you see in it follows from that.
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What you watch and what you would choose
How a feed tuned for reactions differs from the one you would choose yourself, and how to test that on your own.
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A feed with no bottom
How endless scrolling and unpredictable rewards work, and why the word “addiction” is disputed here.
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Four weeks off the network
What changed for people paid to spend a month off Facebook, and why the result is less simple than either side would like.
Part 4 Taking it back
What you can really do with your phone, your working day and your conversations with a machine, and where habits stop being the answer.
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Notification hygiene
Which alerts to switch off and how, and why a week without them is worth testing on yourself rather than taking on trust.
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Deep work without the legends
Cal Newport’s book as a popularizer’s argument, not a study, and how to build a day with long unbroken stretches.
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What a chatbot does to attention
The instant answer and the temptation to ask instead of think: what you can notice already, and why there is little data so far.
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When it is not about habits
How ordinary distraction differs from a disorder, why a diagnosis does not come from short videos, and when to see a professional.
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A look ahead: who will read the feed for you
If agents start filtering your mail and news, who ends up holding your attention, and what to check now.