Attention & design

An explainable multi-modal graph learning framework with attention-based GCN-GAT for EEG-based depression detection

An evidence-bounded PSYTECH brief on the human implications of a verified technology signal.

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.

Nou Heravi

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.

Nou Heravi

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.

Nou Heravi

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.

Nou Heravi

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.

Nou Heravi

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.

Nou Heravi

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.

Nou Heravi

When AI drafts the hard parts, judgment goes quiet

Delegation to models can free expertise — or erode the practice that made expertise possible. Rehearsal is how competence stays alive.

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.

Attention is not a UX metric — it is public health

If attention is the substrate of learning and self-control, design that harvests it is not only a taste. It is an exposure. The size of the effect is still argued; the frame is not empty.

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.

Nou Heravi

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.

Nou Heravi