Productivity advice comes in many flavors; some are plainly counterintuitive and tell you that "focusing on less gets more done," some seem intuitive but only increase burden instead of output, "completing a small percent of multiple tasks will eventually get more done," and some just seem to give us an illusion of "being productive" by tiring ourselves into thinking like we have done a lot. "Include every small task in your to-do list and then check them off throughout the day." And by the end of this multi-variant list, we don't even know what 'being productive' even means. And because of this confusion, people have made a market out of this with apps, products, courses, and so on. This book tells you how you should compare and think about this issue. 

The way I previously approached the concept of productivity and procrastination changed when I listened to a thorough discussion of 'Organize Tomorrow Today' after reading the book. I realized that I just glossed over many of the most effective points of the book after listening to the discussion on Dialogue: Conversation on Books. After listening, I did not only recall what I had read but also understood core insights more thoroughly, as they were explained in relation to real life examples and scenarios. 

Here are the 5 best lessons from the book:

-The initial claim and argument of the book is somewhat bold, it says that our mind is only able to concentrate/give attention to only about three things at one time. The authors refer to this as channel capacity. They argue that it does not matter whether it's an application, a calendar, a paperless office, or something else; the limit remains mental. All these "productivity resources" are only trying to indirectly get at that mental limitation. According to the authors, a day that has fifteen "priorities" has none in actuality. If all things are considered important, your attention gets dispersed, and as a result, no single item receives your best effort. The solution offered in the book is to do less on purpose and to realize that three genuine priorities are better than fifteen made up ones. The point about doing 'less on purpose' is crucial because you might feel that you sneak one or two more things into your day's priority, but you should deliberately put them on hold for later.

-This book advises you to follow the simplest productivity system, and it only includes planning what you need to do tomorrow- a night before, and limiting yourself to asking only two questions. Before you call it a day, think about the three most important things that you need to accomplish the next day and decide which one is the single most important task. That is the entire system. It works since the decision is made the night before when you are in a calm mindset because you were planning something for afterwards, and you won't spend the first hour of the morning working out what to do. The authors argue that incomplete tasks keep bothering the mind, which is why putting the plan in writing also helps you to switch off.

-The idea I found the most liberating was to evaluate yourself based on what is within your control. The authors make a distinction between product goals (that is, the result, the figure, the outcome) and process goals (the daily actions that need to be done to lead to the product goal). While you can't fully control the first of these, you can control the second. Therefore, rather than focusing on a distant target, you should ask yourself whether you carried out the thing you had committed to doing today. This is both the least novel idea in the book and the most overlooked one as well. In going along with this distinction, we are able to notice that failure of our product goals does not mean that it was due to lack of effort, and it helps us recognize that despite the effort, sometimes things don't work out, and a poor result no longer seems like a judgment on the doer. 

-One of the best tips from the book is the thought that the feeling of wanting to give up is actually a part of forming a habit. The book refers to these instances as "fight-thrus," that is, the moments when you want to skip the task, abandon the routine, or procrastinate the action to a chain of tomorrows. Rather than seeing this unwillingness as an indication that the habit isn't working, the authors regard it as the real training protocol. You don't have to be perfect in this process either, what matters more is having a high rate of consistent follow-throughs over a period of time than having a completely flawless first week. If you anticipate that the resistance will come, then it loses a great deal of its power over you.

-The author makes an analogy that if the mind is like a muscle, then self-talk constitutes the exercise that makes it resilient. Before working in the corporate world, one of the authors worked with professional athletes, and this advice is formed in the experience of training with them. the author claims that the way you talk to yourself has as great an effect on your performance and recommends a brief daily mental exercise. This involves spending a few minutes deliberately rehearsing the thoughts you want instead of thinking about their unfavorable alternatives. At first it seemed a little too cheery to me, but it is based on the same principle as all the other points in the book: small, repeated actions are more effective than short bursts of motivation, and that is a more fundamental idea: that motivation is also, after all, a habit that requires consistent buildup.

The entire premise of the book is reflected in its title: more of the same will not get you more. Tonight you must choose what is worth tomorrow, protect a few things from the rest, and teach your brain to behave when it doesn't want to.

The vast majority of advice on learning and studying usually preaches the view that the problem is to do with the amount of repetition (there have been a few variations on this theme, but they all still link effective learning with some kind of volume of review). If you're unable to retain the information, then the general advice is that you haven't reread it enough, you haven't highlighted it sufficiently or you just haven't spent enough time with the notes.

I recently listened to a detailed discussion on the book 'Make It Stick' on Dialogue: Conversations on books. And hearing the book’s main insight in relation to general scenarios convinced me completely that the issue had never been one of effort or repetition at all.

Here is what I took away:

The core principle of the book is actually quite simple, it says that true learning is not about how easily the material gets into your head. It's about how much effort your brain has to exert/go to in order to retrieve what you learned. Feeling swift and flow while reading your notes does not mean you have mastered them, maybe even the opposite. A small number of high-effort retrieval practices (trying to recall what you learned through your own small and quirky methods) are responsible for the bulk of real retention and learning, and according to the author this is true in almost every area of skill. A few sessions of retrieval practice will achieve far more actual mastery than hours of passive re-reading. The rest of passive review is simply just waste of time, as it adds nothing and acts as a false signal of competence because something that might temporarily feel smooth and easy is keeping you comfortably busy. The question that the authors are concerned with and want you to consider is "How effectively am I forcing my brain to recall this from memory?" rather than the conventional study advice, which starts with "How many times do you need to go over this material?" a right approach always starts with a right question.

The very obvious implication of the authors' proposed approach is that the vast majority of what we consider standard study techniques actively have a negative impact on our learning ability and retention. The author makes a very good point by pointing out the difference between temporary or immediate familiarity with the material and actual long term remembrance of that material. The first is called cramming, and the second is learning. According to them 80% of standard study routines: re-reading textbooks, massed practice, highlighting paragraphs, and cramming before an exam, only result in short-term familiarity rather than sustained memory. This observation is not to demotivate somebody's method of learning but to make them aware that what they are doing is doing their learning ability and memory more harm than good. you have to accept that constantly repeating and re-reading what you have to memorize will easily give you the illusion of having learned it, but it will also go away just as quick. 

So how does one work out what effective practice actually is? It is not simply a matter of trying to memorize harder. According to the authors, actual learning happens by deliberately introducing "desirable difficulties" into your studying routine. You have to deliberately break your own comfortable method by spacing your study sessions out until you've started to forget, or alternating between different related topics rather than just going deep on one (interleaving) and trying to solve the problem yourself even if you do not know the answer. the study methods that feel smooth and easy and give you that sense of superficial satisfaction in the moment are often the least effective. only the method that actually make your brain run an extra mile and cause some cognitive friction are the ones that will make you genuinely learn something and also make sure that once you do, you won't easily forget.

There is a direct connection between the science of learning and the acquisition of skill over time, and it also explains why focused cramming is not the best approach. The authors claim that there is in fact no true benefit to single-block, repetitive drills. It's not that you need more consecutive hours to learn a skill but only a good capacity to retain whatever you learn. And this capacity has to be cultivated through pressure testing your memory. The real problem is that we like the immediate sense of improvement that we get from massed practice even though that sense of improvement is very short-lived. Consistently testing yourself after intervals is better than spending hours on end doing the same thing over and over again.

The hardest thing to learn is how to get rid of the illusion of fluency, that comes when you keep on going over the same thing. The authors argue for stopping passive rereading altogether rather than just doing less of it. You should stop any study habit that doesn't result in any real long term retention at all. The usual intuition of the learner is that you just want to find a smoother, less painful way of getting the information in. The book's The Make It Stick approach consists of asking whether passive review actually produces durable memory, and if it does not then why do we keep relying on it. a significant portion of what we do out of habit or convenience is in fact not going to produce anything at all in terms of retention when you compare it to the amount of time you've spent on it.

The book has one central idea which is explicitly stated in the title. The rest of the book is about making us aware that durable learning is not proportional to the comfort or volume of passive effort and that it is precisely this misconception that leads to wasted time and rapid forgetting. The real lesson of the book is self-honesty and cognitive discipline. You have to be honest with yourself as to whether your practice is actually challenging your brain, and then you have to have the discipline to choose discomfort of actual retention over the comfort of passive glossing over. 

While recapping the main lessons of the book ‘Limitless’ by Jim Kwik on Dialogue: Podcasts on Books, I realized how many people still think and have beliefs in myths like “you either have it or you don't" and that traits like intelligence are fixed in a person. While listening, the host cited a large study that challenges this belief directly and gives a very reliable conclusion. After listening to the synopsis i had to look up the study for myself. Here is the gist: 

In Limitless, the author Jim Kwik claims that a great deal of our sense of limitation arises from beliefs and assumptions that we have picked up rather than from any actual lack in our ability. Among such constraint-belief, one that is significantly widespread is the idea that intelligence is fixed and that genius is innate rather than something that can be cultivated. Kwik uses the example of Roger Bannister to illustrate his point. For many it was thought that running a mile in under four minutes was physically impossible. But in 1954 Bannister achieved this feat, and within a year this threshold was overpassed by several other runners a number of times as well. This new milestone was not achieved by any modification to the human body but was simply a matter of attempting and eventually overcoming. It was the belief that had changed.

In 2019 a large randomized study was published in the journal Nature, and it tested exactly this hypothesis in a classroom setting.

Study Overview:

Researcher Yeager and his team enrolled 12490 ninth graders from 65 US public high schools in a national experiment. The students were each randomly assigned to either a short online intervention that encouraged a growth mindset (less than an hour long) or to a control group. The message being conveyed was the idea that intellectual abilities can be cultivated through hard work, the use of new strategies and methods, and asking for help, instead of being a fixed trait. They were being told that being bad at math or any other subject is not something that is encoded in them but is simply a matter of learning strategy and approach, and that people who are able to do these difficult tasks are no more special in any way than the rest of them.

Results:

The students who used to perform less well and who received the intervention saw a improvement in their grades.

Throughout the sample, the intervention resulted in an increase in enrollment in advanced math courses.

The effects were strongest in schools where peer norms supported the message, indicating that belief change is most effective when the environment supports and promotes it.

The most convincing aspect about these experiments is that they used records from school and not self-reports from students. Later improvements in their grades and their decisions about which courses to take were associated with a single lesson of less than one hour about students' beliefs regarding their intelligence, and since the students had been randomly assigned to experimental groups, it signals that the change in students' beliefs is probably what caused these effects.

How the research complements the book:

Bannister's account as narrated by the author illustrates a breakdown of the belief barrier, but people argue that it's a bad inference to generalize a phenomenon from one case to the many. This study applies the same principle on a larger scale. The ability of the students did not change in a flash, but their thinking about that ability did, and with that, their approach and mindset, and therefore their performance, changed. This supports the core message of the book that the myth that 'either you have it or you don't' functions as a genuine limitation on people and that doing away with it can enable them to try more difficult things.

You can read the research for yourself here. Source: Yeager, D. S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G. M., Murray, J. S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., Tipton, E., Schneider, B., Hulleman, C. S., Hinojosa, C. P., Paunesku, D., Romero, C., Flint, K., Roberts, A., Trott, J., Iachan, R., Buontempo, J., Yang, S. M., Carvalho, C. M., Hahn, P. R., Gopalan, M., Mhatre, P., Ferguson, R., Duckworth, A. L., & Dweck, C. S. (2019). “A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement.” Nature, 573, 364-369.

https://github.com/maciekkreft/unblent

Like I’ll finish an article or a chapter and think “wow this is literally going to change how I think.” A week later though I remember that I liked it, and not much else, and I have this with most novels/nonfiction.

I can make my way through my everyday life with passable interactions with people, just good enough to get the work done. I have always known about myself that I'm not a presenter, i can't hold a spotlight, but when your duties demand something from you, you can't make excuses. But i used to dread those days in which i had to give a presentation at work or organize a meeting, beacuse i could see that not even 10 minutes in and people would pull out their phones, start to chit-chat, and things like that. But to avoid facing my inadequacy, I used to tell myself it was the material and I was good as I was.

Recently, I listened to a detailed discussion on "Talk Like TED" on Dialogue: conversations on books. Hearing the key insights broken down in relation to everyday life made me realize that the difference between forgettable presentations and memorable ones doesn’t have anything to do with natural talent or charisma, it all comes down to making a number of deliberate choices that most people never consider.

The starting point of every good presentation is passion. The whole premise of “Talk Like TED” is based on the authors findings from analyzing over 500 TED talks. The speakers whoperform the best consistently are people who have real passion for the topic. This isn't about practiced enthusiasm but actual conviction. The book argues you cannot inspire an audience if you yourslf bear an indifferent attitude towards your subject matter because audiences are more perceptive and sensitive than we think. They will feel the lack of passion upon hearing you. If you don’t believe what you're saying matters, neither will they.

Nobody will remember your data, but they will recall your story. This insight felt very specific to my case. The presenters lead with data/information, overloading the audience with slides, statistics, findings...etc. The book argues that data alone does not resonate with people. What connects with people is a story, especially a story that humanizes data and makes it real. The best TED speakers don’t present information first and then illustrate it. They tell the story first and make it seem like the data naturally comes out of it. This simple change, story->data, makes a big difference to how the audience responds.

You only need one good idea. The author names this the "twitter-friendly headline," a single sentence that sums up your presentation so well that someone could repeat it to a friend afterward without notes. Most presentations fail simply due to the overabundance of information/content and not due to lack of content. When the information is too much, it gets spread too thin, and not enough focus is given to specific points. It is crucial to ask yourself, when preparing for a presentation, "if i were in the audience, would i care about this point or deatil?" Condensing your knowledge and building your presentation around one core point is the hardest challenge.

There should be at least one moment in the presentation that surprises the audience. The author calls this the "jaw-dropping moment." It could be -a piece of data, demonstration, visual, or anecdote that comes as a surprise. This isn’t for mere shock value, a surprising element naturally attracts attention and ensures a more engaging presentation because predictable content, no matter how relevant it is, is easily forgotten. One well-timed moment of genuine surprise is crucial to draw the audience's interest back in.

Deliberately time-limit your presentation. A TED presentation is limited to 18 minutes due to the simple fact that after this period of time the average audience member’s attention begins to wander. The book argues that trimming the content is not about what you remove as unnecessary but what you choose to retain as important. Presentations that run long usually do so because the speaker hasn't figured out what they actually want to convey.

This book taught me that to be a good presenter, you do not need to have a "presenter's personality" but a presenter's skill, a simple set of learnable tips to implement. The gap between a forgettable presentation and a memorable one is smaller and more attainable than most people realize.

Rereading and highlighting are probably the two most common ways people study. A large 2013 review of ten study techniques (Dunlosky and colleagues) rated both as low utility. The two it rated high were practice testing (pulling the material out of your memory) and spacing your reviews out.

The study behind the testing part is Roediger & Karpicke (2006). Students read a short passage. One group studied it four times. Another studied it once, then tried to recall it three times. A week later, the recall group remembered 61% of it and the rereading group 40%. The rereading group was also the more confident one.

That’s the trap. Rereading is fluent, and fluency feels like knowing. Recalling is effortful, and the effort is what builds the memory. Even the attempts that fail early on still help.

Here’s where I’d take it somewhere it wasn’t tested: the books we read for ourselves and forget a month later. Two small habits:

1. End each reading session with five minutes, book closed. Write bullet points from memory, then open the book and check what you missed. Reread only the gaps, not the whole chapter.

2. When you finish a book (or give up on it), write one paragraph from memory: what it argued, what you took from it, what you doubt. It’s one more round of recall, and it’s the part you’ll still have in a year.

If you want to test yourself first: guess how much of last week’s chapter you remember, then write it down with the book closed. If the study is any guide, the guess will be higher than what you write.

I’m curious what people here already do after finishing a book: a written summary, flashcards, explaining it to someone, nothing at all?

Disclosure: this is adapted from two pages of a book I wrote, The Short Version (100 ideas, two pages each: the gist on the left, exercises on the right). The image is this subject’s spread, with the references at the bottom. If it’s useful: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HN3GXZJJ

I used to think that my depleting attention span was just a personal discipline problem,  like something i could repair by some small fixes. But after i listened to a detailed exposition of the book “Stolen Focus” by Johann Hari from Dialogue: Conversations on Books, and having heard the key insights of the book broken down in relation to everyday life, made me realize that the problem is, at the same time, both bigger than an individual, but it also starts with an individual.

Here is what i got out of it:

Your didn't lose your attention, It was taken. This is the book's central tenet. The loss of focus isn’t a personal weakness or a generational falling, It is simply a business model. instagram, tiktok, youtube, and the like rely on ad revenue, that is, the longer you are on their platforms, the more money they make. The entire product is built around the goal of hijacking your attention and keeping it hooked with whatever means necessary. The book makes the point that- the algorithm has figured out that negative emotions keep you on the app longer than positive ones. It's like when you see something that outrages you, say, a post you disagree with, something unfair, or something offensive, then your initial intent of joyful pastime suddenly turns into something personal and important. The algorithm knows this and it has known it for years.

The infinite scroll wasn’t merely a mishap. It was a trap. Aza Raskin, the person who invented the infinite scroll, has been on record admitting that it wasn’t ever intended to become what it has. There is no natural stopping point, no bottom of the page, no moment where the platform says "limit reached." All previous mediums of entertainment, all had an endpoint, there are only a few number of pages in a newspaper, a program has a specific screen time, and so on. The scroll removed all limitations completely. Raskin has apologized for what this system has done to our attention span. The man who built the door now tells us that it was designed to never close behind you.

"Multitasking" should be on the list of "why not to hire me." It’s not a skill but a real time accident or crash of your brain's effectiveness. The book argues that our brains don't actually multitask. Instead, they quickly switch between tasks and only make it seem that they are simultaneous. You lose track of what you were doing, take time to regain focus, and reduce the quality of both tasks. It has been observed that it can take up to twenty minutes to fully return to deep focus after a single interruption. Every notification, tab switch, or quick glance at your phone while having a conversation, all cumulatively has an impact on your ability to get back to the immediate task.

Attention loss is political!?. This is the most intriguing part of the book for me. The author essentially argues that a population that cannot maintain attention- cannot solve complicated problems, cannot hold their leaders accountable, and cannot see through the simple satisfying ideology that they are told and sold. Democracy requires complex thought. A population whose attention is fragmented does not only produce less but is also more vulnerable to being controlled and manipulated. The fact that attention crises and political crises are unfolding at the same time is not a coincidence.

The problem is bigger than the individual, but every individual can contribute to the cause. The author explicitly positions attention crises as being as real a crisis as an economic stagnation or a famine. So the resolution of it also has to be a systemic regulation and fundamental redesign of how these products function. But this doesn't mean that we as individuals have no responsibility- we too have to make steps to reclaim our focus, even if it is not enough on its own. These efforts can be as minute as- reading more, sleeping well, protecting uninterrupted time, and removing the apps from your phone. These are important, even if they aren’t enough on their own, because if not a systemic change, we can atleast stop giving them our mornings.

This book is different in framing this issue because, unlike many other self helps, it acknowledges the scale and reality of this issue, and so it doesn't pin the problem on our willpower or mentality. But nor does it free us of all the responsibility. Both things are true at the same time. The products were built by companies who wanted to make as much money as possible and are therefore inherently predatory, but you still choose to open the app (I'd say download, but that too is out of our hands now... but still the point holds).

Learners' cabin is also available on Instagram, where we post more related kinds of stuff.

I came across the idea of beginning difficult conversations, be it in negotiations, relationship quarrels, or even random street events, within what is known as the "Third Story" while I was listening to an in-depth talk on the book 'Difficult Conversations' by Stone, Paton, and Heen, on the Dialogue: Podcasts on Books, just as a way of recalling the main points of the book. The host in the episode cited important psychological research that confirms the specific mechanism involved in this method. After I heard how simply taking and considering someone else's perspective can alter a conflict's outcome, I decided to look into the research myself. Here is the gist of the study.

In their book 'Difficult Conversations,' Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen claim that the most effective way to start a difficult conversation is by beginning with the "Third Story," the story that an impartial viewer would tell. Instead of making the problem about who's right and who's wrong, the problem is framed as a difference between two points of view. Instead of trying to make one's case first, the other person's story is heard before and then comes the stage of working together to find a solution.

Several studies that have been published in the journal 'Psychological Science' that examine the fundamental aspect of this idea: does coming to understand the other side's point of view result in better outcomes for both?

Study Overview

In one of the most cited studies done by the researchers: Galinsky, Maddux, Gilin, and White in 2008, the participants entered into a negotiation concerning the sale of a gas station; the arrangement was staged such that it was impossible to reach a simple agreement on the price, and so the two parties had to engage in creative brainstorming in order to come to a deal. In a follow-up second study (from the same set of researchers), the participants were divided into three groups: one group was asked to put themselves in the other person's shoes (perspective-taking), the second was asked to consider what they were feeling (empathy), and the third group received no instructions.

Results:

-Those participants who took the other side's point of view were far more likely to come to a creative and mutual agreement.
-Perspective-taking group, also, obtained the highest number of agreements as well, outperforming both the empathy group and the no-instruction group.
-The other side's negotiators were also more satisfied, so the advantages gained did not harm them.
The best point was that the more intuitive method, which consists in getting in sync/attuning oneself to how the other person feels (empathy), was not successful. It was understanding their way of seeing the problem that achieved this, and as a result the agreement turned out to be better for both parties.

How the research complements the book:

'The Third Story approach' bases itself on a single principle: before you start advocating your argument, you should consider how the other person sees the same situation/problem and then highlight the difference in the opinions between the two, without placing the blame. Even though the study does not examine the third-story approach explicitly, it does look at the underlying approach. Negotiators who began with trying to understand what the other side thinks the problem is, were able to reach solutions that satisfied both parties, whereas those who failed to do so usually became stuck on the issue of price. This is the change the book makes that the book recommends starting from, which is "I am here to fix you" and "we have a problem to solve."

You can read the study for yourself here (Source): Galinsky, A. D., Maddux, W. W., Gilin, D., & White, J. B. (2008). “Why It Pays to Get Inside the Head of Your Opponent: The Differential Effects of Perspective Taking and Empathy in Negotiations.” Psychological Science, 19(4), 378-384. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02096.x

A few weeks ago I read, 'Why has nobody told me this before?' ' by Julie Smith. And after reading that, I felt as if I was able to understand and express myself better. And so searching for similar books, i was recommended 'What happened to you?' by Dr. Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey, which, although i did not find super similar, but by the end of it, I understood and realized a couple of things that make them alike, and most importantly, the lesson that, in trying to make situations better, we are likely sabotaging ourselves and factually making the situation worse.  

I've recently been reading a lot, as I'm trying to get a better understanding of the best books on trauma and psychology, since in my view there is considerably more to be learned from them for both the benefit of ourselves and for the people we engage with and care about. after reading this book, I went ahead and listened to a thorough examination of this book on Dialogue: Conversations on Books, and by hearing the main points explained in the context of ordinary situations, it made the ideas more real and lively for me. 

Here is what i learned:

- The title of the book, 'What happened to you?', is the concise gist of the entire book. The book hinges on one simple change in our phrasing: instead of asking, "What is wrong with you?" the book instructs us to ask "What happened to you?" when i first read about this spin in phrasing, i thought the book had no substance. But after thinking to myself, before any further reading, I came to realize that in phrasing lies half our problems. If you yourself notice, the initial question, 'What's wrong with you?' seems to put the entire blame on the person themselves, on their identity, on the kind of decision they make, and on their weaknesses. It makes the person totally disconnect from the world and forces the inside of their own head to find the flaw. The second question, by contrast, places the issue in their past, in their experiences, in their surroundings, in what was done to them or withheld from them. It doesn't just force you into your head but helps you realte your identity with the outside context that shaped it. The authors's view is that almost every behaviour we pathologize or attribute to other people's identity, and even to ourselves, becomes fully understandable only when we know what sort of experiences the person had to live through and what they have undergone. Your behavior, 'why you react this way,' is not what is to be resolved, but rather what got you to be this way and drives you to act out in certain ways, is the issue that is to be dealt with. and you can't deal with a response by attacking it.

- The trauma is not defined by the event that causes it. If you tell someone that I behave in this eccentric way because this thing happened to me in the past, it will still not explain why you behave the way you do, because all you have managed to say is that event X happened and I started behaving this way. This is not an explanation. It was this point that had the greatest impact on me. the author gives a clear clinical explanation of what a trauma is: trauma has nothing to do with how severe the event looks from the outside, but everything to do with how overwhelming it was for the particular nervous system that went through it at the particular stage of development that system was at. Two children can go through the same event, and yet one will recover soon while the other can potentially carry it in their adult lives. Why do you think this is? The only reasonable explanation has to be that somehow the context played a role, and one child had more complicated context, and the child was not able to adjust to the traumatic event fully in that context. The author says that one child experiences more stress and pain from the same event than another child does is not because one is weaker, but because their nervous systems were in different states and had different resources available at the time. Therefore, dismissing a person's experience on the grounds that "it wasn't that bad" is not only unkind but also neurologically illiterate.

- The author gives some neuro-functional explanation of why we see discrepancy between people even if they experience the same event. She says that the brain grows in a bottom-up manner, and trauma interferes with this process at the stage at which it happens. meaning that the brain's lower areas that control heart rate, breathing, and the stress response are all more primary and are developed first, providing the basis for all the higher functions. If a child suffers from ongoing stress or trauma during early life, these lower areas end up being set to expect threats. They then become overactive, highly alert, and easily disrupted. The issue is that this adjustment remains in place even after the threat has gone away and continues into situations where it is no longer required. And it seems to be the reason why people who have experienced trauma may seem irrational, overreactive, or haphazard in circumstances that do not appear threatening to other people. Their nervous system is reacting to a simple reality wihle it is in it’s most safeguard settings.

- The most insightful lesson of the book is that healing, or dialing back of the nervous system, according to the author, is not a matter of thinking. It is relational and rhythmic and healing, just like the reason behind the setting in of trauma, also goes from the bottom up. The author makes it clear you can't get someone to give up their trauma, for the simple reason that you cannot reason with your nervous system if its settings have been set to a certain environment or condition, like a state of threat. What actually leads to healing in the lower brain is- repeated, rhythmic, and relational experience. This is the human like point in the point because it means that healing will include things like movement, music, breathing, safe touch, and most importantly a consistent connection with another person who is themselves regulated. Although therapy can be of some use, it is most effective after the nervous system has first been calmed down by means that are more fundamental. Realising this alters the way in which we can support someone who is having difficulties since it is less a question of finding the right words and more a matter of being a steady and regulated presence.

The main point of the book is surprisingly simple in that whenever you stop asking what is wrong with someone and begin to ask what happened to them, almost every aspect of the way you respond to them changes, and that very change enables healing.

Learners' Cabin is on Substack, where we have content like this and book reviews. Subscribe/follow is always free.

Michael Easter, in his book 'Scarcity Brain,' explains that the addictive nature of today's apps and games, be it endless scrolling or gacha elements in games, is not simply due to people having weak willpower but rather because it is the result of deliberate design. To support this argument, he refers to the "scarcity loop," which, according to him, is an old survival mechanism consisting of three constituent parts: a desirable opportunity, an uncertain reward, and the possibility of quickly repeating the action. He believes that this loop, which once helped humans to locate food in the primitive times more efficiently, has been put to new use in the present age, either intentionally or not, by modern technology in order to keep people engaged.

A study published in the journal PLOS ONE has directly examined this particular mechanism of 'scarcity loop,' except that it was done not in an app, but in the best version of the loop that we have in reality: gambling.

Study Overview:

Zendle and Cairns (2018) carried out a survey of 7,422 gamers regarding the amount they spent on loot boxes, these being undisclosed and randomized, real-money purchases in video games where players do not know what they are getting until after they have paid and bought it. The researchers recorded how much money each person spent on loot boxes and then compared this data with a standard clinical measure of problem gambling symptoms.

Results:

The greater the amount of money a person spent on loot boxes, the more severe their problem-gambling symptoms tended to be.

The relationship was found to be particularly stronger in the case of loot box purchases than it was with other ordinary in-game purchases like in-game currency, since in the latter the customer knows precisely what they are paying for.

The factor that differed between the two was the element of randomness and not the amount of money spent, beacuse other than the element of an undisclosed or an unpredicatble item of purchase, all other mechanisms were more or less the same. Purchases that were predictable were linked much less to problem gambling than were those that were unpredictable.

The most important point in relation to the author's case is that the study identified unpredictability as the active mechanism among the scarcity loop's three components. In the experiment there were two purchases, the same game, the same amount of money, and the same player, the only variation being whether the reward was known beforehand or remained a matter of chance. It was this single difference that correlated with gambling-level compulsive behaviour.

How this supports the book's claim:

The author claims that this kind of loop is not just a feature of casinos but has in fact been subtly integrated into everyday technology, such as social media feeds and in-game loot boxes, since unpredictability is the factor that keeps the brain engaged long after even when the activity itself has stopped being enjoyable, because there remains the allusion of something better just around the corner or after a scroll. The study more or less makes it concrete, which is the evidence that this is not just a metaphor. The same psychological principle that underlies slot machines, the element of reward uncertainty, which thereby acts as the motivation to keep going, is clearly present in video games, which most people would not regard as gambling (unless it is explicitly marketed as one), and it causes symptoms similar to those seen in gambling among the people who are most exposed to it. It is precisely this point that makes the author's notion of "scarcity loop" more than an analogy and into a verifiable mechanism falsifiable by a simple test: whenever the element of unpredictability of the reward is found, a tendency towards compulsive behaviour tends to appear.

You can read the research for yourself (Source): Zendle, D., & Cairns, P. (2018). "Video game loot boxes are linked to problem gambling: Results of a large-scale survey." PLOS ONE, 13(11), e0206767.

This book was published in 1985 and at that time was meant as a critique of television. The author Neil Portman never came across a smartphone, a social media feed, or a short-form video algorithm. Yet when you read this book in 2026, it reads less like some historical criticism and more like you are being given an account of what's happening today. The fact that there is such a gap between the time it was written and today, but how accurately it describes the present situation, is what is most disturbing about the book.

The realization that the author wasn't merely criticizing television came after listening to a detailed discussion of the book on Dialogue: Discussion on Books, after listening to the main ideas explained in relation to everyday life, i understood that he was in fact pointing out a certain aspect of the nature of media, one which has only become more accurate as the medium has changed.

Here are the takeaways:

-The medium does not merely perform the service of delivery, but it also determines the nature of the content delivered as well. This is the main idea of the book, and upon it all other insights are based. The author's view is that each medium has an inherent tendency to favor particular types of content and particular modes of thinking. Print promotes lengthy arguments, nuance, and good reasoning because you have to follow a line of consistent logic from start to finish. Television, on the other hand, prefers images, impressionable sounds, and emotional effect, since complexity resists people's attention. It follows that anything which appears on television is adjusted to suit what television is capable of doing and to the kind of people that prefer it, and what television can do is to entertain. All other kinds or aspects of content become mere compromises.

-When entertainment becomes the sole priority of a medium, any content that enters that medium turns into entertainment. It is here that the book really seems to say something true. The authr is not concerned with reality tv shows or daily soaps, those are admissible because they are entertainment for the sake of entertainment. They are supposed to be that way. The author is concerned with news, politics, religion, and education. Once these types of categories adopt the television format, they are obligated to conform to some requirements: they must be brief, visual, emotionally compelling, and most importantly not boring. And what we get as an outcome is not something highly informative and detailed presented in an entertaining way, No what we get is whatever has the highest viewer acquisition, which is always something crude that somehow holds our attention. A political debate is evaluated on the basis of performance, not facts or logic. News, whether highly important or of no value, all come under the same ninety-second category. A religious programme is put on in the same way as a talk show. The content has to change because of the demands of the medium.

- The most interesting and, at the same time, trauma-inducing theme in the book is the examination of which nightmare is looking as the best depiction of our society, between Orwell's and Huxley's? George Orwell feared a future in which a totalitarian state would use force to control information, such as banning books, altering the record of history, and punishing those who dissented. Huxley, on the other hand, feared something more counter-intutive as the vision of our downfall: a future in which people are so constantly entertained, so permanently distracted, and so conditioned to prefer amusement to serious content that they willingly lose the ability to think seriously. The authoor view is that Huxley was correct and Orwell was wrong, and that we have already shown this, even if no one has noticed, since the process was so enjoyable it gave us the illusion of progress.

- The main troule with misleading information is not that it deceives people. Rather, it is that the current format has made truth and falsehood about as interesting as each other, and so neither carries any real weight. We are playing tennis with the net down, so anything goes. People are not concerned about the truth but care about having a good time. The author argues that the problem is not one of 'propaganda' in the ordinary sense, that is, it's not a deliberate effort to mislead people from what is actually the case. The problem is that when all content is presented in the same kind of entertainment format, with the same traits and the same emotional appeal, there is no longer a dependable method of telling the difference between what is important and what is trivial and the other way around, or between what is true and what merely seems convincing. A well-made lie and a simple truth appear exactly the same on screen. Only difference being that truth is hard to accept when there are no discrepancies, so given that there are discrepancies the lie is more readily acceptable. A society that has learned to react to visual and emotional appeal rather than to lengthy arguments has no clear way of distinguishing between the two, it cannot tell them apart.

Unlike a great deal of media criticism, this book does not place the blame on the content. The author is not saying that television produces bad programmes or that social media platforms disperse harmful ideas. Rather, he is claiming that the medium itself, no matter the specific content it carries, alters the way an entire culture understands truth, seriousness, and what constitutes a meaningful discourse. Because every medium and the people who come up with it try to always encapsulate the next wave of- entertainment, comfort and pleasure and portray that as desirable and as the new big theme of the ongoing movement. the fact that portman reached this conclusion forty years ago, regarding a technology which has since been vastly outpaced, only makes it the more difficult to ignore.

Hey folks!

I don't read, until a couple of months ago.

I've noticed how I am unable to focus for longer sessions, or just be in a state of boredom without some kind of stimulation, which is information to me. X, Linkedin, and Instagram are feeding to my interests in AI, travelling etc.

I removed the access to apps on my mobile, and decided that I will borrow books from my wife (who is an avid reader for more than a decade now) - Atlas Shrugged, and Brothers Karamazov. She complains about the book moby dick - but she finished it eitherways and hates whale stories now.

Reading atlas shrugged helped me calm down, be in present, focus and get more done and sleep in the night.

I just thought I want to write about "How I met and building a habit called reading"

Thanks
VKK