Most people treat a wandering mind like a defect. They see it as a leak in their productivity bucket. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if we aren’t staring at a screen or checking off a to-do list, we are failing. But Daniel Goleman, the […]
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
Movements of the Mind: A Theory of Attention, Intention and Action
Abstract. Movements of the Mind explains what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, the book’s eponymous topic, it investigates an agent’s doing
The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it
Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter
Opinion | There’s a Good Reason You Can’t Concentrate
Just as we changed our thinking around physical fitness, we need to change our attitude toward cognitive fitness.
Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy
The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...
Dec 2020 -- Jelle Bruineberg -- Embodied cognition and the attention crisis
The Second Brain That Grows Smarter and Lives on your Computer
How a spark from Andrej Karpathy, app called Obsidian, and “The Curator”, the app I built are changing the way I think.
Smoke-away on Twitter / X
Andrej Karpathy: "What you want is the inner thought monologue of your brain... The trajectories in your brain as you're doing problem solving, if we had a billion of that, AGI is here roughly speaking." pic.twitter.com/C0kBUITPBv— Smoke-away (@SmokeAwayyy) October 18, 2024
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
The Personalized Learning Revolution
The allure of AI lies predominantly in its unmatched potential for efficiency, convenience, and accuracy. However, this unprecedented convenience brings with it a hidden yet profound threat: the subtle erosion of human capacity for critical thinking through cognitive offloading.
How to reclaim your attention from the distraction economy | Psyche Videos
Could you watch this video on full screen, 1x speed, with no distractions? Here are five steps to rebuild your attention span
The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything
Interest is everything Each time I sit down to choose a topic for this newsletter, there’s a moment when my self-important inner judge – who loves to involve himself in such mat...
When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry”
As firms increasingly incentivize employees to build and oversee complex teams of agents—for example, by measuring and rewarding token consumption as a proxy for performance—people are finding themselves pushed to their cognitive limits. Participants in a recent study described a “buzzing” feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches. The authors call this phenomenon “AI brain fry,” defined as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity. This AI-associated mental strain carries significant costs in the form of increased employee errors, decision fatigue, and intention to quit. The findings also show how AI-driven workflows can be designed to diminish burnout and point toward specific manager, team, and organizational practices to avoid mental fatigue even as AI work intensifies.
Rational Inattention: A Review
We review the recent literature on rational inattention, identify the main theoretical mechanisms, and explain how it helps us understand a variety of phenomena across fields of economics. The theory of rational inattention assumes that agents cannot process all available information, but they can choose which exact pieces of information to attend to. Several important results in economics have been built around imperfect information. Nowadays, many more forms of information than ever before are available due to new technologies, and yet we are able to digest little of it. Which form of imperfect information we possess and act upon is thus largely determined by which information we choose to pay attention to. These choices are driven by current economic conditions and imply behavior that features numerous empirically supported departures from standard models. Combining these insights about human limitations with the optimizing approach of neoclassical economics yields a new, generally applicable model.
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