Attention’s Hidden Currency
How neuroscience advances our understanding of focus, concentration and productivity
I consider myself a lucky person.
I know effort brings success, and yeah, sometimes that looks like luck. But still, I do consider myself lucky.
I’ve been writing for around 10 months now, almost 11…holy smokes. And along the way, I’ve met amazing people. People who are eager to help — not to throw unsolicited advice — but who are genuinely interested in what I’m building. People who are open and vulnerable enough to share their world with me, and with you.
How not to feel lucky?
It’s led to some beautiful relationships. And while they might seem like pen-pal connections, I’d 100% sit down for a coffee or a drink with them to talk about life. And discipline.
One of those people is Ash Stuart.
You might remember him from a past issue of What Is Your Purpose? But if you’re hearing about him for the first time — at least here — he:
…describes himself as an engineer, technologist, polyglot, linguist, and geek—but that’s just the beginning. He’s also a researcher, consultant, and writer whose interests span AI and tech, history and futurism, economics and finance, business and geopolitics.
Ash is the writer behind several thought-provoking publications, including Vīta Brevis, Wit Artefāctōrum Ætērna, and Polymathon. In each, he explores complex topics through a multidisciplinary lens, navigating, in real time, the rich (and sometimes stormy) seas of intersecting fields.
I could tell you liked his writing. He could tell too.
And he kindly, and generously, offered to collaborate again.
I immediately said yes. I’d seen the response to our last piece, and I’ve read his work long before that. If you haven’t, you should. This was clearly a win. For me, for him, and for you.
This time though, we’re shifting gears. Unlike our previous collaboration, rooted on the Purpose pillar, this one shifts the focus to Mindset.
This piece explores the mechanics of attention: how it works, how it gets spent, how it gets hijacked, and how all of that shapes our ability to stay disciplined in a world built to distract us.
Let’s get to it.
Bart Simpson is said to have insisted that every time you learn a new thing, your brain throws out an old thing. Sherlock Holmes is known to have been famously ignorant of the planets and other basic astronomy, there’s even the story of Dr. Watson’s astonishment in questioning the great detective if he did even know or care that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Holmes of course insisted, not unlike Simpson, that there’s a limit to how much the brain can store and he’d rather prioritize his mental resources on more important matters (such as the different types of cigarette ash!)
Whatever the factual merits of the beliefs of these fictional characters, or indeed notions held by their real-life creators, on the topic, there’s probably something to be said about the limits of the brain. Today I want to discuss specific processes in the brain and explore what bearing they have or may have, firstly on attention, and ultimately, on discipline.
Paying Attention’s Price
Let’s first pay attention to, well, attention. I like to think of attention as a currency, each time you divert your attention to something, you pay, let’s call it, ‘attention tokens’. There is a cost. Furthermore, every time you switch your attention from one thing to another, there’s a bigger cost, because the brain has to align itself to the new item of focus. It’s not unlike how a computer works - it has to clear the memory of the resources dedicated to one application to make room for the other, and haven’t we all struggled with our laptops getting too slow and heated? Or perhaps your browser with too many tabs open?
So yes, we can say the brain has its own ATM - Attention Teller Machine! Every time you switch your attention to something, you are drawing from this ATM. And as you can imagine, this directly impacts the focus and concentration you can muster to whatever important task you have on your plate.
Thus the quality of your work can vary based on how many attention tokens you’ve probably spent on other things. Such ATM withdrawals could be mildly weakening or even actively detrimental to your main goal for the session. So the work you end up putting towards your intended task can turn out a bit shallow.
Digging Deeper
This realization came to me as part of reading this book called Deep Work, by Cal Newport. In this book, the author talks about, of course, what makes work deep. I don’t remember if he uses such an analogy as I am using here, but I find it useful to think about these attention tokens, and there being a finite supply of them, and thus our brains being constrained by what reserves of focus and concentration they can muster.
Before I proceed, let me mention another key concept relevant to our discussion here: that there are at least two modes of brain operation: the intense, focused creative state, which is sometimes called ‘flow’ and the more ‘administrative’ state which is necessary but fundamentally different from the state of flow. There are times when we have to engage in a bunch of routine, not-necessarily-pleasant-but-needed administrative and maintenance type of chores. There’s no getting around such stuff. But what I am focusing on here is that focused state of flow, which is when we are at our most productive, most efficacious.
And yes, in this context there is this argument that some people are better at multitasking than others. I don’t know about others, but at least for me, the context-switching that comes with multitasking can soon get tiring. Such a thing might be fine for these chores, but the point I’m trying to make is that it can be a big cost when it comes to those productive sessions of concentration we need for… deep work!
Focus’s Great Foe
And how far can I go in a discussion on the topic of focus, attention and concentration without mentioning the elephant in the room; that great havoc-wreaker and attention-wrecker of our time: social media!
Haven’t we all been there? Alright, let me just quickly check the feed, just a couple of minutes, I know this assignment has a deadline for today and I have much researching and writing to do, but it’s ok, just a couple of minutes, no harm done. And then we realize it’s been 25 minutes! What we may or may not realize though is that it has also exhausted the brain. It’s much harder to get back to concentrating. After all it’s not called ‘doomscrolling’ for nothing!
Maybe we know all this, but perhaps we are somehow unwilling to accept it. At least I was – I didn’t want to think of how detrimental such distraction is. It’s not stretching the analogy too much to say it takes us into attention-token debt or even temporary bankruptcy! Some of that final acceptance came as part of reflecting on that deep work concept I alluded to. Although, unlike that book’s author I’m not suggesting anything in the direction of completely giving up on all social media! That seems like a form of self-flagellating, world-renouncing asceticism most of us would not countenance. And since I was slyly making a Buddhist metaphor there, let me add that there’s probably a middle way!
The Dope on the Chemistry of Craving
Let me also add that my goal of all this is just to create an awareness, I’m not offering any solutions, although I could discuss how I dealt with the whole thing another time if it’s of interest. My key point is that we have to each reflect on this ourselves, and in the context of our own experience, preferences and priorities.
So in that light, let’s delve into how social media functions and how it relates to what I started off with. Social media is specifically designed to maximize your “time on platform”, to capture your attention, to make you spend your attention tokens on those platforms. It’s designed to be unpredictable, it has a variable reward schedule.
And all this works (in the social-media app’s favor and to our detriment) because its design hijacks key processes of the brain. It’s in how the chemical dopamine, called a neuromodulator, works. I won’t get into the technical details of the neuroscience underlying this, but fundamentally, and we broadly know this: dopamine is one of those chemicals in our brains responsible for our behaviors, along with other chemicals we’ve heard of such as serotonin and adrenaline.
But the point I want to emphasize is this: dopamine is not the pleasure chemical as it’s often referred to, rather it’s the anticipation-of-pleasure chemical. The classical example of course is that of Pavlov’s experiments with the dogs: ring bell, give food. Eventually the dog salivates just on the bell-ringing even if there’s no food.
There have been experiments carried out more recently by neuroscientists, such as by Kent Berridge – as quoted by Max Bennett in his excellent History of Intelligence – where increasing dopamine made rats consume more food, even when the rats were not hungry. In fact, even when they were too stuffed to eat any more. Even in human experiments, stimulating dopamine neurons have been seen to produce intense cravings and frustration, not pleasure.
And even in natural circumstances, dopamine is released in the anticipation of whatever pleasurable activity, but not in the partaking of that pleasurable activity itself.
Discerning Insights for Deeper Work
Why does all this matter? Because we’re not particularly different from Pavlov’s dogs or Berridge’s rats! We operate on many of the same processes as other beings. And understanding how this works is the first step to deciding what to do about it - not to suppress or subvert but to channel these things so we get more desirable outcomes.
So yes, social media is similar to smoking or gambling: it creates craving, it leads to compulsiveness, it makes us seek rewards. The rewards themselves don’t matter, because we simply crave for more. So someone clicked the Like button on something I shared. Ok, who else is going to click that Like now… Are we then satisfied after one more person has additionally clicked Like now? How many Likes shall full and proper satisfaction make?
Social Media of course is just one example of where we see all this in action. The Neurochemistry underlying this evolved the way it did because it is, or was, necessary for intelligent behavior, not just in humans but all living beings, because decision-making is part of all intelligent life. It’s been necessary for our survival itself.
When it comes to being productive, getting into that state of flow that’s needed for a great many of the important tasks in our life demanding focus and concentration, conserving our attention tokens for the task at hand is important. And taking a closer look at how the anticipation-seeking processes in our brain influence how we manage our attention tokens is, I hope, useful in our own pursuit of Self Discipline.
References and Further Reading
Newport, Cal. (2018). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Mindquest Press. ISBN 979-8998801228.
Bennett, Max. (2023). A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains. Mariner Books. ISBN 978-0063286344.
Thank you, Ash — again —, for sharing your perspective with such clarity.
As a father of two, this hits close. The idea of social media creeping into my kids’ lives isn’t just unsettling, it’s quietly terrifying. Not only because of the obvious risks, but because of how it can shape their ability to focus, to reflect, to just be. I still get anxious thinking about it. I’ve learned to manage it better, but it lingers.
What Ash describes — social media mimicking gambling, encouraging compulsive behavior — isn’t just a feeling. It’s measurable. Studies show that heavy social media use affects the same brain regions involved in impulse control, emotional regulation, and reward processing. The prefrontal cortex. The amygdala. These areas light up in both social media and gambling addiction. The result? Less regulation. More chasing. A brain wired for reaction instead of direction1.
Discipline lives in the prefrontal cortex. That’s where we decide to pause, to plan, to stay aligned. But it doesn’t work in isolation. It depends on dopamine, and dopamine is easy to hijack. Social media platforms have learned how to exploit this. They design systems that keep us engaged by triggering short bursts of unpredictable reward. Every notification, every scroll, every flick of the feed trains the brain to crave short-term stimulation. And over time, the parts of us meant to lead — the ones that guide with intention — get buried under noise.
The good news is, this isn’t fixed. The brain reshapes itself through repetition. Practices like mindfulness help reactivate the circuits responsible for regulation and choice. Not by forcing focus, but by rebuilding access to it. That’s what the discipline I’m trying to practice is about. Not trying harder, but learning how to return2.
So if you catch yourself spiraling into the scroll, try coming back to the moment. No judgment. Just awareness. That small act of noticing is how it begins.
Have a wonderful week!
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De, D., Khera, A., Muacevic, A., Adler, J. R., & Hahn, P. J. (2025). Social Media Algorithms and Teen Addiction: Neurophysiological Impact and Ethical Considerations. Cureus, 17(1). PMCID: PMC11804976; PMID: 39925596. — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11804976/
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