Ep. 273: A Deep Response to Distraction

A viral video making the rounds recently argues that the key to promoting learning is to deliver education in apps that are equally addictive as social media. Cal takes a closer look at the brain science behind this claim and argues why it is fundamentally impossible to beat attention engineered apps at their own game. We shouldn’t, however, give up hope, as our brain has a completely unrelated motivation system, built on a behavior called episodic future thinking (EFT), that we can leverage ...