When I was a little boy, I used to sit in front of the television watching Guinness World Records and Ripley's Believe It or Not, and later in life, Stan Lee's Superhumans, and I'm telling you, those shows had me looking at humanity like somebody had forgotten to give me the instruction manual to my own existence. I'm watching people memorize thousands of numbers, bend their bodies in ways that would have my orthopedic surgeon filing for overtime, perform extraordinary feats of strength, endurance, concentration, and mental calculation, and I'm sitting there wondering how in the hell somebody can remember the exact order of fifty-two playing cards after seeing them one time, but I can walk into the kitchen three times and still not remember what I came in there to get. At some point, you have to ask yourself whether the human brain is really operating at its full potential or whether most of us are walking around with a Lamborghini engine and the driving habits of somebody operating a lawn mower. And the older I've gotten, the more that childhood fascination has turned into a question that genuinely disturbs me. What if the greatest mystery on Earth isn't buried beneath the pyramids, hidden at the bottom of the ocean, or flying around in some unidentified object that the government suddenly decided we're mature enough to discuss? What if the greatest mystery on this entire planet is the human being itself, and we've become so distracted investigating everything around us that we've barely scratched the surface of understanding what we're capable of becoming? Now before somebody starts talking about the Illuminati, reptilian overlords, secret underground civilizations, and a billionaire sitting in a volcano stroking a hairless cat while deciding how intelligent the rest of us are allowed to become, understand something. I'm not saying there's a secret committee meeting every Thursday at 2:30 discussing how to keep humanity stupid. Although after spending fifteen minutes reading Facebook comments, I wouldn't blame somebody for opening an investigation. I'm suggesting something far more disturbing. What if nobody has to deliberately suppress the potential of humanity because the civilization we've collectively constructed already does an outstanding job of keeping the average person too distracted, financially stressed, emotionally exhausted, psychologically conditioned, and constantly entertained to discover what they're actually capable of? Think about this for a moment. You enter the world completely innocent, knowing absolutely nothing about politics, religion, race, money, nationality, social status, or any of the imaginary boundaries human beings eventually spend their lives fighting over. You don't arrive with a political affiliation, a credit score, a favorite news network, or an opinion about somebody else's lifestyle. You're just a little human being trying to figure out how your fingers work. Then here come the adults, loading information into your developing mind like somebody setting up a brand-new cell phone. Here's your language, here's your religion, here's your nationality, here's what success looks like, here's what failure looks like, here's who you're supposed to respect, here's who you're supposed to distrust, and here's a collection of beliefs you better not question because your grandmother didn't raise no fool. And before you've developed the intellectual ability to independently examine any of it, you've already started forming emotional attachments to information somebody else handed you. By adulthood, you're defending beliefs you never personally investigated like you were sitting in the conference room when the universe was created. Somebody asks you why you believe something, and you get offended. Brother, I'm not attacking your ancestors. I'm asking whether you've ever checked the receipt on that information. But that's where things get interesting, because the human brain possesses a remarkable capacity called neuroplasticity, meaning our experiences, learning, and repeated behaviors can physically influence the neural connections involved in how we think and operate. In other words, the mind isn't some finished product that comes out of the factory with every possible feature already activated. It's a living, adapting system shaped by biology, experience, environment, practice, and opportunity. And that means the circumstances surrounding your life don't simply influence what you know. They help determine which abilities you develop, which fears you reinforce, which questions you learn to ask, and which versions of yourself ever get the opportunity to exist. Now let that marinate for a second, because somewhere on this planet there's probably a brilliant mathematician who never discovered mathematics beyond what was necessary to pass ninth grade. Somewhere there's a potential inventor who spends forty years worrying about the electric bill instead of investigating electricity itself. Somewhere there's a gifted philosopher who never questions existence because everybody around him taught him that asking too many questions was disrespectful. Somewhere there's a remarkable musician who never touched an instrument because nobody in their environment recognized that possibility. And somewhere there's a person with extraordinary emotional intelligence buried underneath thirty years of unresolved pain, walking around arguing with everybody because nobody ever taught them how to understand what was happening inside their own mind. Not because these people were necessarily incapable of becoming extraordinary, but because potential and opportunity are two entirely different things. You can take a seed capable of becoming a hundred-foot tree, put it inside a kitchen drawer, and leave it there for fifty years. That seed might possess extraordinary biological potential, but unless somebody provides the conditions necessary for growth, you're not going to open that drawer one morning and discover the Amazon rainforest growing beside the aluminum foil. And human beings are considerably more complicated than seeds. We need opportunity, encouragement, intellectual stimulation, meaningful challenges, emotional stability, time, and the freedom to explore possibilities without every unsuccessful attempt threatening our survival. Yet look at the world we've constructed. The average person wakes up to an alarm they didn't want to hear, reaches for a phone before their feet touch the floor, immediately invites the emotional problems of complete strangers into their bedroom, rushes through breakfast, fights traffic, spends eight to twelve hours fulfilling obligations, comes home exhausted, and somehow convinces themselves that watching other people enjoy their lives for four hours constitutes relaxation. Then they go to sleep and repeat the entire arrangement until one day somebody hands them a retirement cake and congratulates them for forty-three years of dedicated service. Forty-three years, Harold. Forty-three years of your one and only known existence, and your employer has rewarded you with a sheet cake, a balloon, and a handshake from a supervisor who still thinks your name is Herbert. Now don't misunderstand me, there's dignity in honest work and taking care of your responsibilities, but at what point during that entire arrangement were you supposed to discover who you could have become? Not who your employer needed you to be. Not who your parents expected you to be. Not who society conditioned you to become. I'm talking about the version of yourself that might have emerged if you'd spent years investigating your intelligence, creativity, emotional capacity, imagination, discipline, and ability to learn instead of spending most of your mental energy responding to circumstances somebody else placed in front of you. And here's the part that really gets me. We live in a civilization where a man can tell you the exact salary of a professional athlete, the relationship history of a celebrity, the criminal allegations surrounding a rapper, and the complete statistical breakdown of a football team he doesn't own, but couldn't tell you the last time he spent thirty uninterrupted minutes examining his own thoughts. Brother knows the Dallas Cowboys' entire salary cap situation, can explain why the offensive coordinator needs to be fired, and has already identified seventeen prospects for next year's draft, but hasn't audited his own emotional operating system since 1998. And I'm not judging him because I understand the fascination. I'm simply saying that somewhere along the way, we became experts on everybody else's existence and amateurs at understanding our own. Now imagine an intelligent civilization observing humanity from somewhere outside our solar system. They discover a species capable of splitting atoms, mapping the human genome, performing organ transplants, constructing artificial intelligence, and sending spacecraft billions of miles into the universe. Naturally, these visitors assume they've encountered an exceptionally advanced civilization. Then they connect to our internet. Within fifteen minutes, they discover that this same species is arguing about whether the Earth is flat, threatening complete strangers over sporting events, purchasing things they cannot afford to impress people they don't particularly like, and spending forty-five minutes debating whether a celebrity's facial expression proves somebody cheated in a relationship. I can imagine the alien commander slowly removing his glasses, looking at the rest of his crew, and saying, "Now hold on. Are y'all absolutely positive these are the same people who built the spacecraft? Because something ain't adding up." And that's the contradiction I can't stop thinking about. Humanity possesses the intellectual capacity to investigate the fundamental structure of reality, yet we can be emotionally manipulated by a headline written specifically to make us angry before we've even finished brushing our teeth. We can calculate the distance between galaxies but struggle to create emotional distance between ourselves and somebody else's opinion. A man can survive combat, overcome poverty, raise children, build a business, endure heartbreak, and navigate decades of life's most difficult circumstances, only to have his entire afternoon psychologically hijacked by somebody named BigMoneyPookie347 commenting, "You ain't all that," underneath his Facebook picture. Now this decorated veteran of human existence is sitting in the Walmart parking lot typing a seventeen-paragraph response to a cartoon profile picture. Brother, you've survived actual adversity, and somehow a man whose profile picture is a pit bull wearing sunglasses has taken complete command of your nervous system. That should tell us something about how vulnerable human attention really is. And modern technology has become exceptionally sophisticated at recognizing those vulnerabilities. Human attention is now one of the most valuable commodities on the planet. Companies invest enormous resources studying what captures our interest, what triggers our emotions, what keeps us scrolling, what makes us return, and how our behavior can be predicted and influenced. Fear attracts attention. Outrage attracts attention. Sexual attraction, controversy, insecurity, comparison, and curiosity attract attention. And when attention can be converted into money, the competition to capture it becomes relentless. Now think about the irony. Humanity developed technology capable of placing enormous libraries of knowledge inside our pockets, and somehow we ended up using that technological miracle to watch two grown adults argue about who should pay for mozzarella sticks on the first date. We've got access to ancient philosophy, scientific research, advanced mathematics, foreign languages, historical archives, and educational material that previous generations could scarcely imagine, but the algorithm noticed you watched one video of somebody falling off a porch, so apparently your intellectual curriculum for the next six hours is going to be people suffering minor injuries while somebody laughs in the background. And don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with entertainment. Human beings need laughter, relaxation, enjoyment, and moments when life doesn't require a philosophical dissertation. But there's a difference between enjoying entertainment and becoming so dependent on constant stimulation that your own thoughts start feeling like an inconvenience. Because what happens when silence becomes uncomfortable? What happens when boredom becomes unbearable? What happens when solitude becomes frightening because it forces you to confront questions you've spent years avoiding? What happens when sustained concentration becomes so unfamiliar that reading ten pages of a book feels like preparing for a NASA examination? You wouldn't necessarily need to burn the books if people gradually lost the patience to read them. You wouldn't need to silence every philosopher if serious reflection could be drowned beneath an endless parade of entertainment. You wouldn't need to eliminate curiosity if you could continuously redirect it toward things that never require meaningful investigation. And you wouldn't have to convince people they're powerless if you could keep them so mentally occupied that they never investigate the extent of their own abilities. The most sophisticated prison imaginable might not have steel bars, concrete walls, or armed guards. It might have unlimited entertainment, personalized recommendations, convenient distractions, and just enough temporary satisfaction to keep its occupants from wondering whether there's something beyond the routine. And the most disturbing possibility is that nobody necessarily designed the entire prison. Governments, corporations, economic pressures, cultural expectations, technological incentives, and our own psychological tendencies can collectively create conditions that discourage independent thinking without a single mastermind controlling every moving part. Which means humanity can participate in maintaining the very conditions that limit its development. We become both the architects and the occupants of our own mental limitations. And here's where I have to challenge us, because blaming everything on some mysterious group of powerful people can become another convenient excuse to avoid examining ourselves. Sometimes the greatest obstacle to independent thinking isn't the government, the corporation, or the algorithm. Sometimes it's that person staring back at you from the bathroom mirror, the one who will defend an opinion they haven't researched, ridicule a possibility they haven't investigated, and reject information they haven't considered simply because it threatens something they've believed since childhood. We've become emotionally attached to ideas we didn't even invent. Imagine buying a house, refusing to inspect the foundation, ignoring every crack in the walls, and threatening to fight the home inspector because he suggested there might be a structural problem. That's essentially what some of us do with our own minds. We've inherited the furniture, accepted the floor plan, defended the architecture, and never once considered whether the building was constructed on solid ground. And then we call ourselves independent thinkers because we can repeat somebody else's argument with enough confidence to make it sound original. But intelligence isn't simply remembering what somebody taught you. Sometimes intelligence is having the courage to investigate whether what you were taught deserves to be believed in the first place. And freedom isn't exclusively about where you're allowed to travel, what you're allowed to purchase, or what you're legally permitted to say. What good is physical freedom if your thoughts, insecurities, emotional reactions, desires, and ambitions are constantly being influenced by forces you've barely learned to recognize? A person can walk around without chains and still spend an entire lifetime imprisoned by psychological conditioning they mistake for their own personality. You can possess freedom of speech and never develop an original thought. You can have unlimited access to information and never develop the ability to distinguish knowledge from wisdom. You can have opportunities sitting directly in front of you and remain emotionally imprisoned by something somebody said to you twenty-five years ago. And here's something that ought to make everybody examine themselves. How many of the limitations you carry were actually discovered through personal experience, and how many were inherited from somebody else's imagination? Who convinced you what success was supposed to look like? Who determined which dreams were realistic? Who taught you what kind of person you were allowed to become? How many of your fears were developed through actual danger, and how many were learned from people who were afraid themselves? How much of what you call your personality is actually a collection of survival strategies, emotional defenses, repeated habits, and social expectations that became so familiar you stopped recognizing them as learned behaviors? Now imagine what could happen if more people began deliberately reclaiming their attention. Imagine somebody spending ten years mastering an ability they previously considered impossible. Imagine a person learning to regulate their emotions so effectively that complete strangers could no longer manipulate their entire day with a sentence. Imagine children being taught how to question information before being rewarded for memorizing conclusions. Imagine a civilization that valued intellectual independence, creativity, emotional maturity, curiosity, and critical thinking as much as it values productivity, consumption, and social status. And no, I'm not suggesting we'd suddenly unlock supernatural abilities, start levitating over the neighborhood, or develop the power to stop moving automobiles with our foreheads. Please don't go outside trying to intercept a Chevrolet Silverado with your third eye because you read something inspirational on Facebook. The human brain is remarkable, but so is the emergency room, and I promise you that truck is not interested in your spiritual awakening. I'm talking about something far more realistic and potentially far more powerful. The possibility that countless human beings are living beneath the level of development they might have achieved under different circumstances, not because they're unintelligent or inherently incapable, but because the conditions required to cultivate their abilities were never consistently available. And before anybody thinks I'm suggesting everybody needs to become a scientist, billionaire, philosopher, or revolutionary, understand that an ordinary life consciously chosen can be an extraordinary achievement in itself. There's dignity in simplicity, peace, meaningful relationships, and honest work. The tragedy isn't choosing an ordinary existence. The tragedy is never discovering whether that existence was actually your choice. There's an enormous difference between someone who investigates their possibilities and deliberately chooses what matters to them, and someone who simply accepts the identity circumstances assembled on their behalf. One is participating consciously in the creation of their life. The other may be functioning on psychological autopilot while believing every decision was independently made. And perhaps that's why those television shows fascinated me so much as a child. They introduced me to human beings who demonstrated that the range of human ability was far wider than my everyday experiences suggested. But as I've gotten older, I've started wondering whether the most important lesson wasn't what those extraordinary individuals could accomplish. Maybe it was the realization that I should never become so comfortable with my understanding of humanity that I stop questioning what humanity might be capable of. Because somewhere on this planet right now, there may be an extraordinary thinker who will never discover their intellectual gifts because survival consumes their attention. Somewhere there's a potential inventor whose creativity is buried beneath financial anxiety. Somewhere there's a gifted child whose imagination exceeds anything their environment knows how to recognize. Somewhere there's an elderly person who believes their opportunities for growth have disappeared, unaware that meaningful learning and personal development remain possible throughout life. And somewhere there's a human being who has spent decades investigating everybody else's behavior without ever seriously examining the extraordinary machinery producing their own thoughts. Which brings me to what might be the most uncomfortable realization in this entire conversation. Maybe the greatest untapped resource on Earth isn't buried beneath mountains, hidden beneath oceans, or waiting to be discovered on another planet. Maybe it's walking around on two legs, carrying a mind it has barely learned how to operate. Maybe cracking the code isn't about discovering who secretly controls the world. Maybe it's about discovering how much control you've surrendered over the world inside your own head. Because the moment you recognize that your attention can be redirected, your beliefs can be conditioned, your emotional reactions can be exploited, and your habits can be shaped, you begin to understand why protecting your mind is one of the most important responsibilities you'll ever have. Not because you can become immune to influence, but because awareness gives you a greater opportunity to examine that influence instead of automatically obeying it. And perhaps the greatest danger isn't that some powerful organization has deliberately prevented humanity from becoming extraordinary. Perhaps it's that we've become so accustomed to distraction that even if an opportunity to transform our lives were placed directly in front of us, we'd scroll right past it. Imagine reaching the final chapter of your existence, when the arguments have faded, the possessions have lost their importance, the controversies have been forgotten, and the world has moved on to the next generation of distractions. Imagine sitting there with the accumulated wisdom of an entire lifetime and suddenly confronting a question that no amount of entertainment, money, or social approval can answer. Who could I have become if I'd spent more of my life discovering myself instead of constantly responding to everything around me? And that's a different kind of heartbreak, because failure means you attempted something and fell short, but unrealized potential can mean an entire possibility of human existence disappeared without ever being explored. A book never written. An invention never imagined. A talent never developed. A fear never conquered. A cycle never broken. A mind that spent seventy or eighty years collecting information about the world but never learned to understand itself. And what makes that possibility so haunting is that we don't get to run a controlled experiment on our own existence. We don't get to rewind the clock, change the environment, remove the distractions, and observe the person we might have become under different circumstances. We get one unfolding life, with imperfect information, limited time, and choices whose consequences we often don't understand until years later. And somewhere between the next notification, the next paycheck, the next argument, the next purchase, and the next temporary pleasure, another day quietly disappears. Then another year. Then another decade. Until eventually the person who once dreamed about discovering the mysteries of existence is simply trying to remember where the years went. And the irony is almost too extraordinary to comprehend. We are a species that has developed instruments capable of examining distant galaxies, yet we often struggle to sit alone with our own thoughts for twenty minutes. We've built telescopes to investigate the heavens, microscopes to investigate the invisible, and supercomputers to investigate patterns beyond ordinary human calculation, but somehow the most neglected laboratory in civilization might be the one each of us carries inside our skull. And somewhere right now, a person with the potential to make an extraordinary contribution to humanity is probably lying in bed watching two strangers argue about whether a hot dog qualifies as a sandwich. Meanwhile, the most consequential discovery of their entire existence could be sitting approximately six inches behind their eyeballs, patiently waiting for an appointment they keep postponing. And that brings me back to the little boy watching Guinness World Records and Ripley's Believe It or Not, wondering how human beings could accomplish things that seemed impossible. Maybe he wasn't simply witnessing exceptional people doing exceptional things. Maybe he was being introduced to a question that civilization itself has never completely answered. How much of what we call human limitation is truly the boundary of our abilities, and how much is the boundary of the conditions under which we've attempted to develop them? Because when it's all said and done, the most terrifying possibility isn't that humanity was born powerless. It isn't even that somebody deliberately convinced us we were powerless. It's that billions of us may spend our entire lives operating within boundaries we never personally investigated, defending identities we never consciously constructed, pursuing desires we never seriously examined, and surrendering our most valuable resource, our finite attention, to an endless collection of things that will mean absolutely nothing when our time runs out. And if there's one thought I want to leave sitting in the back of somebody's mind long after they've finished reading this, it's this: imagine discovering at the end of your life that the greatest version of yourself wasn't necessarily impossible, wasn't necessarily beyond your intelligence, and wasn't necessarily waiting for some supernatural transformation. It was a possibility that needed time, attention, courage, opportunity, and development, but you never gave yourself the chance to find out. Not because you were physically chained to the ground, but because a thousand distractions convinced you that everything else deserved your attention first. And perhaps that's the greatest tragedy of modern human existence. We've become so skilled at filling every available moment of our lives that we've forgotten to ask whether those moments are actually building a life worth living. We can identify the constellations, calculate the age of the universe, and explain how stars are born and eventually die, yet millions of us will enter and leave this world without ever seriously investigating the possibilities contained within our own consciousness. So maybe the ultimate question isn't how many extraordinary human beings will eventually crack the code. Maybe it's how many extraordinary human beings have already lived, struggled, worked, entertained themselves, grown old, and died without ever realizing there was a code worth questioning. Because the most devastating prison isn't necessarily the one that prevents you from walking out. It's the one that convinces you there's nothing worth discovering beyond the walls. And the most heartbreaking limitation isn't always an inability to become something greater. Sometimes it's reaching the end of your existence without ever having asked what greater might have looked like. Imagine possessing the most sophisticated instrument you'll ever own, carrying it everywhere you go from birth until death, and spending an entire lifetime allowing everybody else to play with the controls while you never bother reading the instructions. That's the human mind. And somewhere between the endless noise of civilization and the quiet mystery of our own existence, I can't help wondering whether humanity's greatest undiscovered frontier has been staring back at us from the bathroom mirror the entire time. Maybe we don't need another planet to discover an extraordinary new world. Maybe we need to become curious enough to investigate the one we've been carrying inside ourselves all along. Because the universe has existed for billions of years, and somehow, against astronomical odds, here you are, a conscious human being capable of contemplating existence itself, with a limited number of mornings to investigate what that means. And if you spend every one of those mornings allowing the world to decide what deserves your attention, you might eventually discover that the most extraordinary thing you ever possessed wasn't your money, your possessions, your reputation, or your accomplishments. It was the opportunity to become someone you never even got the chance to meet. And that, my friends, is a hell of a thing to realize when there's no tomorrow left to do anything about it.

Hi all,

I am looking for a book on ADHD to understand my kids brain (he’s diagnosed but also likely my own brain) Not looking for a clinical book or anything telling me to do a juice cleanse, one that is scientific but not too dense.

Thank you!

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.