[sei]

[the genius filter]

How To Recover From Brain Rot

Your brain isn't broken. It's being manipulated.

Every scroll, swipe, and tap is part of a system built to keep you watching. The For You Page isn’t random. It is a precision tool designed to feed your brain exactly what keeps you there the longest.

What feels like choice is often manipulation. The more time you spend, the more data you give, and the better the machine gets at holding your attention.

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Tristan Harris saw this from the inside. As Google’s former Design Ethicist and now co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, he exposed how persuasive design exploits our evolutionary wiring.

Infinite scroll, red notifications, autoplay. Each one crafted to hijack the mind’s reward system. He called modern platforms “the largest source of civilized brain damage,” a quiet erosion of focus and agency.

This week’s issue explores the labyrinth designed to capture your attention and how to navigate your way out.

[the spark]

Reclaiming Your Attention

At Google, Tristan Harris helped engineers test which shade of red made people click faster.

The goal wasn’t to help users. It was to keep them there. Every scroll, tap, and notification was tuned to stretch one number—time on the device.

He saw how this constant pull reshapes the mind. Each flick of the thumb trains the brain to expect reward, fragmenting focus until silence feels unbearable. The app stops being a tool and starts shaping the person using it.

Harris left to build something different. Through the Center for Humane Technology, he argues that the fix begins with awareness. Once you see how design steers behavior, you can start steering back.

But it’s not easy.

The way out requires designing friction back into our digital lives. That might mean:

• Removing app icons from your home screen.
• Scheduling 90-minute distraction-free blocks where devices stay in another room.
• Turning off all non-essential notifications to reclaim control over your attention triggers.
• Keeping your phone out of reach when you work.
• Turning off the pings, bips, and boops that bombard you all day.
• Replacing one hour of scrolling with one hour of making.

The process is alienating, arduous, and often infuriating. It’s also worth it.

Because when we lose our attention, we lose the ability to choose anything at all.

[the science]

Free your brain from the dopamine slot machine.

In 2012, Cambridge neuroscientists ran experiments on how the brain responds to unpredictable rewards. They found that dopamine neurons fire most intensely not when a reward arrives, but in anticipation of its arrival.

The team trained monkeys to expect juice after a light cue. Once the pattern became predictable, dopamine activity flattened. But when researchers randomized the timing, dopamine spiked with each uncertain moment. The brain stayed locked in anticipation, chasing the next hit.

This is the exact mechanism behind slot machines. And it's the same system powering your feed.

When you scroll, you never know what's next. A funny video. A friend's update. Something that makes you angry. Something that makes you laugh. The algorithm spaces rewards unpredictably to keep dopamine firing. Your thumb keeps moving because your brain is wired to chase that uncertainty.

This research explains why Harris calls these platforms "the largest source of civilized brain damage." The design isn't accidental. It's engineered to exploit the same neural circuitry that helps us survive. But when we allow it to be hijacked, it just keeps us scrolling.

[the takeaways]

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1) See the Distraction by Design ​
​Digital distraction is engineered, not accidental. Unpredictable rewards keep the brain chasing the next hit. Seeing this pattern turns guilt into awareness, and awareness into control.

2) Rebuild Friction​
​Infinite scroll removes natural stopping points. The fix is to add them back. Behavioral science calls this “choice architecture,” where small barriers—like keeping your phone in another room—interrupt automatic behavior and restore intention.

3) Create Instead of Consume​
​Replace one hour of scrolling with one hour of making. Predictable effort and completion give steadier dopamine than endless novelty. Creation satisfies the same system without hijacking it.

4) Train Focus Through Structure
​The brain adapts to uncertainty. Regular 90‑minute focus blocks retrain it to find reward in depth, not randomness. Predictable rhythms calm the reward loop and rebuild attention span.

5) Spend Your Attention Deliberately​
​You are what you consume. Direct your focus toward work, study, or a craft that compounds meaning instead of feeding algorithms built to keep you running in circles.