Clear, sourced explanations of how phones, feeds, notifications, search and AI affect attention, memory and learning - including where the evidence remains uncertain.
Outrage content does spread further. But the best-known figure shrank from 20% to 13% when its own authors replicated it, and out-group content predicts sharing better than anger.
Read article
Experiments that manipulated anonymity found little. Mood and the surrounding norm predicted hostile comments better than masks did.
Read article
Pre-registered experiments switched off the feed algorithm during the 2020 US election. Exposure changed a great deal; political attitudes did not.
Read article
Satnav is said to erode your sense of direction and shrink your hippocampus. The largest study found nothing, and the real effect looks like attention.
Read article
Two meta-analyses of background music report effects of opposite sign. Whether music plays before or during the task, and whether it has lyrics, explains most of the disagreement.
Read article
Spacing study sessions is one of the best-supported findings in learning research, but the popular rules about expanding intervals and fixed review ratios do not survive the evidence.
Read article
The evidence on white noise is genuinely positive, but volume changes which tasks it helps, and a substantial minority perform worse with it.
Read article
An eye-tracking study found people who watched TV with a second screen remembered the programme as well as single-screen viewers, as long as their eyes stayed on it.
Read article
Two 2025 meta-analyses and a 1,661-person Facebook experiment agree: reducing social media use brings a small, real wellbeing gain. Quitting outright brings nothing, and sometimes the opposite.
Read article
A Cochrane review of 17 trials found blue-light glasses do not reduce eye strain or improve vision. Evening screen light still affects sleep - through brightness and timing.
Read article
Confirmshaming, measured: guilt-worded decline buttons lift acceptance by about five points, but the effect stopped reaching significance once people had to pay.
Read article
The roach motel dark pattern, measured: cancelling takes more clicks than subscribing, but the strongest evidence says attention, not friction, keeps you paying.
Read article
Should you accept cookies? What 'Accept all' really consents to, and what field experiments show banner design does, and does not do, to your click.
Read article
Does speed reading work? The research shows a trade-off between speed and comprehension that no technique removes, and why being able to reread matters.
Read article
A font built to make reading harder so you remember more. Four independent labs tested it and found no memory benefit, while self-testing worked in the same students.
Read article
Across 46 studies and 4,687 people, comprehension after listening is not reliably different from comprehension after reading. Two moderators qualify it: reading wins for inference, and it wins when you control the pace.
Read article
Digital hoarding has a validated questionnaire, a workplace literature and a study of 801 students linking it to cognitive slips. It also has one experiment, no longitudinal study, no intervention trial, and three studies pointing in three directions.
Read article
Nomophobia is a score on a twenty-item questionnaire coined for a 2008 phone-insurance survey. It appears in no diagnostic manual, and the largest study found 99.2% of 2,838 people registered some degree of it.
Read article
Phantom vibration is reported by 27% to 89% of phone users depending on the study. It is not a recognised diagnosis, and the one year-long prospective cohort found it rose with being on call and halved within two weeks of the job ending.
Read article
Phubbing was coined for a dictionary marketing campaign, then became a research field. The pooled effects are real but correlational, and the one dyadic study found perceived phone use predicted a worse day while actual phone use did not.
Read article
The old finding was that every link taxes comprehension. Eye-tracking overturned it for practised adults, who now read links as emphasis, and left the cost sitting on hard words and on nine-year-olds.
Read article
Most under-30s watch with subtitles on. The strong evidence for captions is about language learners and new readers, not fluent native speakers, and the nearest relevant finding is uncomfortable.
Read article
The curiosity gap is a real feature of the mind, peaking when you half-know something. The headline industry built on it mostly loses to headlines that say what the story is.
Read article
A read receipt does not tell you why someone has not replied, it changes what you assume. The measured effect is on opening messages, not on replying.
Read article
Pagination was a stopping cue, and removing it was documented while its effects never were: no experiment compares infinite scroll with a paginated feed.
Read article
Logged browser data says the median is about eleven tabs, not fifty - and that a third are never reopened. Tabs are a memory system, and most of what you have read about them is folklore.
Read article
Randomised experiments show visible counts change what you sample far more than what you conclude - and the effect is modest, topic-dependent and often self-correcting.
Read article
A meta-analysis of 110 effect sizes gives a dose-response curve: near zero cost up to 1.5x, real but modest at 2x, large at 2.5x.
Read article
Duolingo has published no peer-reviewed research on streaks, and its own A/B tests put the effect at a fraction of a percent. What the independent literature actually shows.
Read article
Meta-analyses do find a paper advantage for reading comprehension. It is small, absent for narrative text, and may be a scrolling effect rather than a screen one.
Read article
The four causes of Zoom fatigue were arguments, not findings. The experiments have since been run. Here is what they confirmed and what they did not.
Read article
What the recommendation system is documented to do, what the research measures, and why the word addictive is doing more work than the evidence.
Read article
Digital amnesia is a marketing term, not a diagnosis. Here is the research on what offloading memory to devices does and does not change.
Read article
Randomised and field evidence on laptops in lectures, note-taking by hand, and the cost carried by nearby students who are not using a device.
Read article
What the research shows notifications cost in attention and recovery time, and which popular claims about them the studies do not support.
Read article
Three short studies found less daily screen time with grayscale on. Pickups did not change, and sleep and productivity results were null.
Read article
Which methods reduce phone use, by how much, and with what limitation attached. A study-by-study table rather than a list of tips.
Read article
There is no defensible universal average for phone pickups a day. The circulating figures count six different things. Two are citable, with conditions.
Read article
Checking is a habit of frequency, not duration. Here is what trials of prompts, nudges and defaults actually changed, and what they did not.
Read article
No study tests social media use, over time, against a direct measure of attention capacity. Here is what the closest evidence actually shows.
Read article
The one pillar where the primary sources are good - and where the gap between documented design and demonstrated effect is widest.
Read article
What cognitive offloading is, when it actually costs you something, and why the phone-on-the-desk claim did not survive three meta-analyses.
Read article
Boredom isn't a shortage of things to do. It's the gap between your attention and your world - and the most common response to it, switching to something else, is the thing that widens the gap.
Read article
The most famous statistic about attention spans has no traceable source, and the most cited research measures switching behaviour rather than capacity. What that changes about the problem.
Read article
Your feed seems to know the version of you that you would not admit to. It does, because it learns from what you do, not what you say. Here is what a social media algorithm actually reveals, why it is neither mind control nor neutral, and how to use the mirror.
Read article
A guide to what has actually been measured about digital distraction and focus - and to the widely repeated claims that no documented retrieval could source.
Read article
When your teen says "five more minutes" and means it, and an hour later is still scrolling, the difficulty is not discipline. It is a feed built specifically for them. Here is what is really happening, and what actually helps.
Read article
AI helps when it supports your thinking and hurts when it replaces it. Here is what the research actually shows, caveats and all, plus five rules for using AI without letting it think for you.
Read article
Most study apps just help you reorganise what you've already forgotten. This guide sorts the best study tools for students by the job you actually need - memorising, problem-solving, organising, or protecting focus - starting with what's free.
Read article
The useful question is whether a tool removes the choice in the weak moment or only reminds you to choose better. For many people, the first step is a free built-in limiter they already own.
Read article
Memory is built by attention, and the phone is very good at taking a cut of it. Switching between studying and a screen weakens learning, even when the session still feels productive.
Read article
The reason the loop repeats isn't the one you've been blaming, which means the fix isn't the one you keep failing at. It isn't weak willpower - it's the setup.
Read article
You didn't lose the time because you're undisciplined or don't care. You lost it because you switched - from the task to the tab, from the tab to the next tab, from there to a thought, and eventually back.
Read article
You almost certainly don't have a memory problem. You have a method problem - and it's one almost nobody is taught to see.
Read article
The reason you keep checking your phone has less to do with willpower than with the phone itself: it is a carefully tuned object, and almost nothing about how it behaves was set by you. The useful move is to change the defaults so the device stops fighting your attention.
Read article
Why does one alarming headline turn into twenty minutes of scrolling that resolves nothing? The evidence behind the doomscrolling loop, and how to interrupt it.
Read article