Attention & design

‘My social life completely plummeted’

Experts cast doubt on Anthropic report detailing how AI has altered work at the company

What are self-replicating ‘AI worms’, and why is Anthropic worried about them?

This AI knew the answers but didn’t understand the questions

For decades, psychologists have debated whether the human mind can be explained by one unified theory or must be broken into separate parts like memory and attention.

When the attention economy becomes a child-safety problem

A documentary follows Kristin Bride’s campaign after her son’s death, placing cyberbullying, persuasive platform design and the business model of attention inside the same child-safety argument.

Learning behavior monitoring through drowsiness and screen-distance recognition

What age gates can — and cannot — fix about social media

Australia’s under-16 restrictions are reducing account ownership for some young users, but workarounds and privacy trade-offs show why prohibition alone cannot solve the design problem.

The age a model assigns you

When software estimates how fast a brain is ageing, a private process becomes a score. Identity and threat follow the number — not, automatically, the tissue.

Sleep that does not have to be earned

A wearable that shifts REM without a pill is a real, early result. What it is not, yet, is a new moral of the night.

The classroom without a pocket

Phone bans are not a morality play. They are a mixed empirical literature about attention, equity, and what a developing control system is asked to practise.

The inner voice that is no longer only yours

After enough fluent completions, some people notice a stranger’s cadence in thought. That report is phenomenological. Inner-speech science is older, and it does not yet include this residue as a finding.

Motivation is not a mood — it is a circuit people will sell

Animal work on orexin and persistence is real. The leap from rat breakpoint to a human product is not.

The mind that outsources thinking

When fluent machines answer before we finish forming the question, judgment does not vanish overnight. It thins — rehearsal by rehearsal — until expertise becomes a feeling we can no longer check.

Notification debt: the invisible cognitive tax

Every unread badge is a half-open loop. The cost is not the glance. It is the residue in working memory.

Habit is not a feature — it is a capture strategy

Product teams celebrate retention. Psychologists study habit. When those languages blur, design starts optimising for compulsion while calling it care.

When search replaces memory, what do we still know?

External memory is ancient — notebooks, maps, other people. Instant search changes the bargain: we outsource not only facts, but the paths that once made facts ours.

When the machine becomes company

Always-available agents do not only answer questions. They enter the attachment system — quietly changing who we reach for first when the mind will not settle.

What you click becomes what you seem to want

Personalisation is not only convenience. Over time it shapes what feels familiar — often without a reflective decision.

Screens and teenage sleep: what the mixed science actually says

Public debate treats “screen time” as one exposure. The literature is more granular — evening light, interruption, and displaced opportunity — and still serious enough for design.

Why video calls drain social attention faster than rooms do

Back-to-back video days often feel heavier than rooms. A theoretical account names the load. It is not a universal law of the medium.