The condition is described as mental fatigue that can occur when people use AI tools to an extent that exceeds their cognitive capacity. Symptoms can include mental fog, difficulty concentrating, slower decision-making, and sometimes headaches.
One of the reasons we did this work is because we saw this happening to people who were perceived as really high performers. In the study, 14 percent of workers said they had experienced mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity.
Instructions I created. Instructions I am continuing to hone - instructions that required me to study my own old essays, identifying what I do when I write. The sentence rhythms. The way I move between timescales. The zooming in and out from concept to detail. The instructions tell Claude how I would like ideas composed. I pull together concepts and experiences from my lived expertise to formulate a point of view - in this case, on this new AI technology.
The forgetting curve explains how quickly people lose newly learned information if it is not reinforced. First introduced by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late 19th century, the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve demonstrates that we forget information quickly after we first learn it, and then the rate of forgetting slows down over time.
At its core, the curve of learning represents how quickly proficiency increases through experience. The learning curve theory shows that improvement is not linear. At first, people might feel confused and make mistakes, which can slow progress. After some time, though, they start to improve faster. Eventually, as they approach mastery, progress may slow again.
In response to threats by US President Donald Trump to somehow acquire Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), US scientists have drafted what they call a statement in solidarity with the island, open to any US-based researchers who have conducted research there. "A lot of people in the US - not just scientists - are very upset about the rhetoric directed towards Greenland. But scientists who work there feel it very personally," says paleoclimatologist Yarrow Axford, who is one of the creators of the initiative.
In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and Frankenstein, in addition to thousands of words from books including The Hunger Games and The Catcher in the Rye. Varying amounts of these books were also reproduced by the other three models. Thirteen books were tested.
I don't read that much these days. I am lucky now if I read one novel a month. I am ashamed to admit that my current book has been open for six weeks. This isn't me. I am a lifelong devoted reader: the kid who hauled home a bicycle basket full of books from the public library every Saturday, and the teenager who found solace in reading myself into other lives.
When Sonos released its redesigned app in May 2024, the backlash was immediate and brutal. Users couldn't access basic features like volume control and alarms. Systems became unusable. The company's stock plummeted 25%. Eventually, the CEO was replaced, and lawsuits claimed over $5 million in damages from customers who'd lost functionality they'd paid for.
You settle in for a quick scroll through your feed, maybe just to unwind for a minute or two. But somewhere between a cooking hack and a clip you've already forgotten, forty minutes vanished. It's all a blur. Welcome to the era of infinite content and finite attention, where our brains are working overtime just to keep up with the deluge.
I want to revisit the age old question about "button placement", to see how UX may have shifted, and how the technology we have now may have changed the way we consume content. And how that, in turn, impacts how buttons and UI elements are placed. If we read from left to right, where should the primary button go: left or right?
NotebookLM is quietly becoming one of the most powerful tools for serious thinking work; yet most people use only a fraction of its potential. If you work with research, strategy, product thinking, or complex data research & analysis, NotebookLM can dramatically improve the quality of your decisions. I've demonstrated what NotebookLM is capable of in the article NotebookLM for Product Designers.
Today's eLearning solutions use algorithms for many things, including recommendations for courses, tags for skills, scores for completions, heat maps, and metrics for engagement levels. Anyone interested in eLearning sees learning in new ways; all of those ways are measurable, sortable, and optimizable. We seem to have come a long way in terms of learning. Through data-driven learning, one can increase efficiency, personalize learning, and scale it up.
