Adventures Through The Mind: MiCRO:16 — The Attention War: How Screens Are Hijacking Your Consciousness

MiCRO:16 — The Attention War: How Screens Are Hijacking Your Consciousness | Carl Hayden Smith

Jul 24, 2026

Is your attention being trained the same way an algorithm is trained?

In this micro, Carl Hayden Smith joins me to unpack what he calls the attention war: how algorithms and short-form media shape the brain toward ADHD-like patterns, whether you have ADHD or not. We also talk about what surfaces in the mind after a few phone-free days, and why Carl believes AI's real danger isn't sentience, but a mass hallucination of it: one that's already changing how we see ourselves.

Watch this MICRO on YouTube

This is a clip from 'Hyperhumanism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in the Age of AI | Carl Hayden Smith', Adventures Through The Mind Podcast, episode 198.

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EPISODE TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Cold open: are screens training our brains toward ADHD?
(00:45) McLuhan's "the medium is the message"
(01:28) Is technology leading us, or are we leading it?
(02:54) Losing wifi in Egypt, and realizing how addicted we are to data
(03:37) "It is an attention war": algorithms harvesting consciousness
(03:53) Gen Alpha, dumbphones, and phone-free tree apps
(04:51) Will AI's fake-everything problem make us abandon screens?
(05:56) Outsourcing cognition to AI, reclaiming the felt experience
(06:31) Attention seeds consciousness: seeing the world through memes
(07:45) "Designed to be like gambling machines"
(08:10) A phone-free hike, and what surfaced in the mind that night
(08:56) TV as "the opium of the masses," and a life review
(10:50) Jaron Lanier: "AI won't destroy us, it will make us insane"
(11:34) Machine learning vs. sentience: AI's "mass hallucination"
(12:43) Should the machine be the artist, or should we keep that role?
(13:21) Outro: about this clip and the full episode with Carl Hayden Smith