How to reclaim your attention from the distraction economy | Psyche Videos

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.

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...

It's getting harder to focus every day

I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write this. If I didn’t force myself to focus I would easily get distracted by something after few minutes. Even when I’m doing things that I’ve been waiting to do it, I still feel the urge to do something else. I don’t know how and when this happened. During the last few years I was always studying, working, and doing open source. And actually got stuff done. Doing all of those at the same time requires paying attention to what I wanted to do and ignore the noise.

Overcoming information overload with circular attention economies - Cosmik Labs

Mobile phone short video use negatively impacts attention functions: an EEG study

The pervasive nature of short-form video platforms has seamlessly integrated into daily routines, yet it is important to recognize their potential adverse effects on both physical and mental health. Prior research has identified a detrimental impact of excessive short-form video consumption on attentional behavior, but the underlying neural mechanisms remain unexplored. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the effect of short-form video use on attentional functions, measured through the Attention Network Test (ANT). A total of 48 participants, consisting of 35 females and 13 males, with a mean age of 21.8 years, were recruited. The Mobile Phone Short Video Addiction Tendency Questionnaire (MPSVATQ) and self-control scale (SCS) were conducted to assess the short video usage behavior and self-control ability. Electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded during the completion of the ANT task. The correlation analysis showed a significant negative relationship between MPSVATQ and theta power index reflecting the executive control in the prefrontal region (r = -0.395, p = 0.007), this result was not observed by using theta power index of the resting-state EEG data. Furthermore, a significant negative correlation was identified between MPSVATQ and SCS outcomes (r = -0.320, p = 0.026). These results suggest that an increased tendency towards mobile phone short video addiction could negatively impact self-control and diminish executive control within the realm of attentional functions. This study sheds light on the adverse consequences stemming from short video consumption and underscores the importance of developing interventions to mitigate short video addiction.

An attention economic perspective on the future of the information age

In this paper, we apply an attention economic perspective to explain current and predict future trends in our society. We first describe the rise of the attention economy, and we highlight one important mechanism of this economy: a spiral of attention scarcity. Second, we show that an attention economic perspective provides glimpses of a potential future. In particular, we predict an information environment that increasingly targets citizens with attention-grabbing content, form, and technology; a continuing trend toward excessive media consumption levels; and a continuing trend toward inattentive uses of information. We also predict increasing problems of public misinformation and misconceptions; an increased prevalence of certain mental and physical health issues; and an increased reliance on technology to perform mental tasks. At the end of this paper, we show why and how despite these predictions, alternative futures are conceivable. These alternatives largely depend on the behavior of various social actors. We discuss resistance to the attention economy by consumers and producers, a laissez-faire policy toward the attention economy, a policy of taxing attention-seeking efforts, and the promotion of public values in regulatory policies toward the internet.

Don't Get Distracted

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

Chris Hayes on the attention economy

A conversation about how attention was commodified, why it's so easy to steal, where industry is looking for new supplies, and whether democracy can survive this.

The attention market—and what is wrong with it

Attention is described as a “scarce commodity” that is traded in “a marketplace.” This, it is further claimed, contributes to a “widespread sense of attentional crisis.” But is there really an attention market, and if so, what, if anything, is wrong with it? We defend the claim that there are markets in attention. We provide an account of such attention markets and use that account to address what is morally wrong with them. Our account draws on knowledge of how attention works and what roles it plays in the mind. The attention market trades in an ability to influence our attention – somewhat (though not exactly) like the labor market trades in an ability to influence how we use our capacity for work. Specifically, the commodity it trades in is attentional landscaping potential, viz. the ability to systematically influence patterns of attention by changes to the sensory environment individuals are exposed to. Attention markets thus, we argue, commodify influence over a human capacity that plays a central role in shaping individual experience, agency, and belief formation. This feature of attention markets makes them ethically problematic. As markets in access to external influence, attention markets pose a special threat to individual autonomy and escape the classical liberal defense of free markets. Those who value autonomy should worry about the attention markets that exist today.

Accelerating dynamics of collective attention

With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can appear accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering multiple decades, we find increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of how cultural items receive collective attention. Is this the inevitable conclusion of the way information is disseminated and consumed? Our findings support this hypothesis. Using a simple mathematical model of topics competing for finite collective attention, we are able to explain the empirical data remarkably well. Our modeling suggests that the accelerating ups and downs of popular content are driven by increasing production and consumption of content, resulting in a more rapid exhaustion of limited attention resources. In the interplay with competition for novelty, this causes growing turnover rates and individual topics receiving shorter intervals of collective attention.

🚨 We're very happy to introduce TRIBE v2: a foundation model of the human brain's responses to sight, sound, and language. Leveraging 1,000+ hours of fMRI across 720 subjects, it generalizes… | Stéphane d'Ascoli | 16 comments

🚨 We're very happy to introduce TRIBE v2: a foundation model of the human brain's responses to sight, sound, and language. Leveraging 1,000+ hours of fMRI across 720 subjects, it generalizes zero-shot to new stimuli, tasks and people, finetunes efficiently, and enables in-silico experiments. ❓How does it work? Stemming from our v1, which won the Algonauts 2025 challenge, TRIBE v2 combines video, audio, and language embeddings to predict brain activity for any brain, then adapts to each individual. Key results: 📊 High-quality predictions — TRIBE v2 predicts brain activity across cortical and subcortical regions, significantly better than standard linear models, with a log-linear scaling law and no plateau in sight. 🎯 Zero-shot generalization — Without retraining, the predictions of TRIBE v2 are more correlated with group-averaged brain responses than almost any individual fMRI scan! A short finetuning step vastly improves over linear models trained, from scratch, on each individual. 🧪 In-silico experiments — Can we do useful experiments with TRIBE v2? Yes: classic vision and language paradigms replicate in-silico. It zero-shot recovers the FFA, PPA, EBA, VWFA, Broca's lateralization, and syntactic responses in STG — all without training on these artificial tasks. 🔍 Interpretability & multimodality — ICA on the weights rediscovers known functional networks (auditory, language, motion, default mode, visual) from naturalistic data alone. Ablating modalities further maps how vision, audition, and language integrate, with the largest gains at the temporo-parietal-occipital junction. 🧠 This effort is a step toward a foundation model of the human brain. Much remains to be understood, but we hope this opens a path for neuroscience, AI, and medical research alike. All code, weights, and a live demo are open — find it useful or mistaken in some conditions? Let us know, new test cases can only help improving this effort. 📄 Paper: https://lnkd.in/e7cbunJp 💻 Code: https://lnkd.in/ebwBVuJp ▶️ Demo: https://lnkd.in/eEUVxP4S 🤗 Model: https://lnkd.in/e2T8nPJP Joint work with Jérémy RAPIN, Yohann Benchetrit, Teon Brooks, Katie Begany, Joséphine Raugel, Hubert Banville and Jean-Rémi King. 🙏 Special thanks to Elisa Cascardi, Diego Marcos, Dominic Giardini, AI at Meta, and the open-source and neuroscience communities (in particular Lune Bellec and Bertrand Thirion for the amazing Courtois NeuroMod and IBC datasets) | 16 comments on LinkedIn

Exploring the Frontier of Feeds - The Open Garden

Reorienting distribution and monetization in the attention economy.