Attention is all we have

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...

Cognitive Bias Lab | Learn to Make Better Decisions

Explore cognitive biases with interactive tests, simulations, and real-world examples. Free platform to sharpen decision-making and critical thinking — no sign-up needed.

To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future | Quanta Magazine

A controversial theory suggests that perception, motor control, memory and other brain functions all depend on comparisons between ongoing actual experiences and the brain’s modeled expectations.

The lump of cognition fallacy

The extended mind as the advance of civilization

Thinking Fast, Slow, Artificially: AI and Your Brain

AI can boost your decisions — or quietly undermine them. Wharton researchers introduce a new theory of cognition that every leader needs to understand.

The Irrational Decision

How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”

Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use.

Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives.

Discover this 1986 paper in Psychological Review by Kahneman, Daniel; and, Miller, Dale T. focusing on: Attribution; Emotional Responses; Social Norms; Judgment; Models Abstract: Presents a theory of norms and normality and applies the theory to phenomena of emotional responses, social judgment, and conversations about causes. Norms are assumed to be constructed ad hoc by recruiting specific representations. Category norms are derived by recruiting exemplars. Specific objects or events generate their own norms by retrieval of similar experiences stored in memory or by construction of counterfactual alternatives. The normality of a stimulus is evaluated by comparing it with the norms that it evokes after the fact, rather than to precomputed expectations. Norm theory is applied in analyses of the enhanced emotional response to events that have abnormal causes, of the generation of predictions and inferences from observations of behavior, and of the role of norms in causal questions and answers. (3 p ref) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Useful Mental Model: Normal Distribution - Scott H Young

Some ideas are so powerful once you know them, you start to see them everywhere. Normal distributions are one of these ideas. Let's understand it!

The Cognitive Debt of Digging Through Preprints

Your Brain on MIT Media Lab

‘AI gravity’ is pulling you toward dependency. Here’s how to push back | MIT Sloan

AI systems hold the promise of competitive advantage, but they can usher in cognitive decline among workers, says MIT Sloan School of Management’s Eric So. Learn how to protect cognitive capital.

‘AI gravity’ is pulling you toward dependency. Here’s how to push back | MIT Sloan

AI systems hold the promise of competitive advantage, but they can usher in cognitive decline among workers, says MIT Sloan School of Management’s Eric So. Learn how to protect cognitive capital.

Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies - Cosmik Labs

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.