Pivot Paper - The Half Here Mind and the Unraveling of Thought

We are designing a world for the “half here mind,” and it is costing us more than we realize.

This new Pivot Paper, looks at what soap operas, scrolling, and simplified streaming shows can teach us about the slow unraveling of thought. Not the loud collapse. The quiet one. The one we barely notice because our lives still function. To receive our substack Newsletter and receive our Pivot Papers in your inbox, email us at Subscription@SlateSpark.net.

Neuroscientists call it cognitive offloading. Attention researchers call it attentional residue. Psychologists remind us that repetition feels like truth. Put together, they start to explain why complex thinking is getting harder, why nuance feels exhausting, and why repetition so easily becomes belief.

This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about whether we will still be able to reason, question, plan, create, and hold complicated ideas long enough to make meaning out of them.

Thinking is no longer automatic. It is something we now have to protect. - Christine

“We confuse repetition with reflection. We mistake exposure for understanding. We let the rhythms of the scroll replace the rhythms of our own minds.” - Christine Merser

Repetition Is Not Reflection

I keep thinking about the old soap operas. The daily drip of story that unfolded across decades for the housewife at home. She would watch while ironing shirts or folding laundry or stirring a pot on the stove. She was present but not fully. Soft focus. Eyes up. Eyes down. The story waited for her. It knew she would return. Our lives were simpler then. We waited for things. We waited for people. That patience is gone now. We do not wait for anything. Not man. Not woman. Not child.

My investment banker ex-husband, who was as funny as he was unforgiving on a spreadsheet, was lying on his back after back surgery with a television bolted too high up on a hospital wall. He started watching General Hospital and became enthralled. Then he went back to work and left it behind. A few years later he had another surgery and ended up flat again, stuck with the same television and the same long hours to fill. He turned on GH and the same male character from five years earlier walked into a room and said something that could have been said the day he last watched years earlier. The plot had moved so slowly and asked so little of the viewer that he had not missed a thing. It was the same conversation. The same emotional beat. The same simplicity. He said it felt like he had never left, and we laughed because it was absurd.

That memory sits beside today’s multitasking culture. We already know the truth about attention. You can only do one thing at a time. Even artificial intelligence can only do one thing at a time. And here we are insisting that we can live our best lives on fractions of our own focus.

The Half-Here Mind

Screenwriters today are being told directly to write with simpler arcs and less complex plots. The notes are explicit. Assume the audience is half watching. Assume they are looking at their phones. Assume they will miss key moments and need the emotional beats repeated so they can return without confusion. Characters say exactly what they feel. Stakes are spoken out loud. Exposition is echoed throughout the episode. It is not an artistic choice. It is survival in the age of the half here viewer.

Which brings me to the deeper story. Because this is not just about film or television. That is the surface disruption. This is about the quiet collapse of the mind scaffolding and the ways it is happening without anyone noticing.

Scrolling repeats a point of view the algorithm thinks we want to hear. We hear it over and over again and end up believing we thought it through, but the truth is we never did. We confused repetition with reflection. We mistook exposure for understanding. We let the rhythms of the scroll replace the rhythms of our own minds. This is another example of what scrolling has done to the brain.

When Ease Starts to Feel Like Truth

Neuroscientists call it cognitive offloading. The brain stops storing what it believes the machine will remember for us. Attention researchers talk about attentional residue and the lag that follows every task switch. Psychologists warn that repetition produces fluency and fluency feels like truth. We are being trained to accept what is easy as what is real.

This is not new in history. In the age of radio, propaganda shaped people’s thinking without their awareness. In the early days of television, families worried about passive minds absorbing whatever flickered on the screen. Advertising has always relied on repetition to persuade. But this time is different. Because the machine is responding to us in real time, learning our patterns and looping them back, tighter each day. It is not just selling us toothpaste. It is shaping what we think thinking feels like.

I asked Celeste, my AI, what shows fit this new model. She said Bridgerton and then added Emily in Paris, Virgin River, and Firefly Lane. All wildly popular. All easy to follow if you look away. I was surprised. I find it hard to believe that Shonda Rhimes, who I think is a complex thinker and a genius at structure and emotional pacing, would ask her writers to simplify anything. But she and I do not brush each other’s hair and whisper secrets, so someone else will have to ask her.

I recently completed the fourth season of The Morning Show. I watched the last two episodes three times. Each time I watched it I learned something new. What now scares me is that maybe I learned something new because I am not as able as I used to be to take in complex plot lines in their entirety, and I was beginning to miss things. Maybe that old adage she misses the plot is going to become reality.

Here is what I believe. This shift is not a quirky change in viewing habits. It is another example of what scrolling has done to the brain. We are already designing entertainment, education, and information for the half here mind, and the result is terrifying. A mind fed repetition mistakes repetition for insight. A mind fed simplicity loses the muscle required to weigh information and form an original point of view. We are losing the ability to solve problems, to plan, to build goals and purpose. The very thing that makes us spectacular, the ability to think, begins to thin out.

A single data point shows how fragile our thinking has become. Researchers at the University of Texas found that people who had their phones in the same room scored lower on tests of reasoning and memory even when the phones were turned off. The presence of the device itself was enough to thin out cognitive space.

The consequences reach far beyond entertainment. In politics, repeated claims become belief regardless of evidence. In media, the loudest voices drown out the truest ones because volume is easier to absorb than nuance. In daily life, people confuse familiarity with certainty. We are losing the ability to hold conflicting ideas long enough to resolve them. This is how a culture becomes easier to steer.

Thinking is Now a Choice

Thinking used to be natural. Now it is a choice. This moment requires vigilance. We have to stay with our own thoughts long enough to know which ones are ours. We have to resist the urge to let the machine finish our sentences. We have to build habits that protect the scaffolding of the mind. Even small acts help. Slowing down before we click. Asking ourselves what we actually think before we take in what we are told to think. Limiting the number of times we switch tasks. Remembering that attention is a finite resource and a precious one.

Which brings me to the future nobody wants to talk about. If this continues, artificial intelligence will be the one to write the last script of the last movie. The final scene will not be about heroes or villains. It will be about humans who became so accustomed to being fed simple stories and repeated thoughts that we no longer knew how to generate our own. The ending will show a world where artificial intelligence took over not through violence or force but because humans lost the ability to think and became automatons who simply executed what the machine told them to do.

And here is the tragedy that would follow. The beauty of our lives is built on passion. On debate. On conversations that stretch late into the night. On dinner tables where ideas are passed like plates. On designing and developing our purpose. On wrestling with our own beliefs until they become clear. The treasure of a life well lived will disappear if this continues. - Christine Merser

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Addendum: My Short List for Protecting the Mind

1. Slow down before consuming anything.

2. Ask yourself what you think before you take in what the world thinks.

3. Watch something complex without your phone in the room.

4. Do one task at a time even when you feel the impulse to do three.

5. Leave blank space in your day and sit in it.

6. Notice when repetition feels like truth.

7. Say out loud what you believe and ask yourself how you arrived there.

8. Have conversations that require attention and hold them without distraction.

9. Read something harder than you want to read.

10. Create something with your hands so your mind can follow one unbroken line of thought.

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Additional Resources: Journalists to Watch and Podcasts to Follow

Zeynep Tufekci writes about technology, cognitive overwhelm, and the quiet ways systems shape human behavior. Her work often reveals how attention and belief are engineered.

Twitter and Threads

@zeynep

Ezra Klein examines how our information environment is changing our minds and our politics. His deeper episodes on attention, algorithmic reinforcement, and mental overload are essential listening.

Twitter@ezraklein

Shoshana Zuboff, whose reporting and analysis on surveillance capitalism remains one of the clearest maps of how digital architectures reshape thought and autonomy.

https://shoshanazuboff.com

Her book

Kara Swisher continues to track the technology leaders who are shaping how and what we consume, and her interviews often show the gap between what is built and what it does to us.

Twitter@karaswisher

The podcast Hidden Brain offers clear explorations of attention, memory, bias, repetition, and the ways our thinking is being quietly redirected.

The podcast Your Undivided Attention from the Center for Humane Technology examines the design of digital platforms and how they erode the ability to think with complexity.

The Slowdown with Krista Tippett offers a counterpoint and a reminder that a quieter mind can still be cultivated if we choose it.

A Slate Spark Pivot Paper, by Christine Merser