You’ve probably spent years learning how to pay attention—reading closely, analyzing deeply, and thinking critically. But here’s something nobody taught you in school: in today’s digital world, knowing what not to pay attention to might be just as important as knowing what deserves your focus.
That’s the essence of critical ignoring, a concept developed by researchers Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ralph Hertwig . It’s basically the skill of deliberately and strategically choosing what information to ignore so you can invest your limited attention where it truly matters. I first became aware of this concept just a few weeks ago while reading an article by Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal.
Why This Matters Now
Think about your typical day online. You’re bombarded with news alerts, social media posts, clickbait headlines, and outrage-inducing content designed specifically to hijack your attention. Traditional advice tells you to carefully evaluate each source, read critically, and fact-check thoroughly. But here’s the problem: if you’re investing serious mental energy evaluating sources that should have been ignored in the first place, your attention has already been stolen.
The researchers make a crucial observation about how the digital world has changed the game. In the past, information was scarce and we had to seek it out. Now we’re drowning in it, and much of it is deliberately designed to be attention-grabbing through tactics like sparking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Our attention has become the scarce resource that advertisers and content providers are constantly trying to seize and exploit.
Critical ignoring is not sticking your head in the sand or refusing to hear anything that challenges you. Apathy is “I don’t care about any of this.” Critical ignoring is “I care enough to be selective, so that I can focus on what truly matters.” Denial is “I refuse to believe or even look at uncomfortable evidence.” Critical ignoring is “I’m not going to invest my time in sources that are clearly unreliable, or in discussions that are going nowhere, so I can better examine serious evidence elsewhere.”
The key distinction is that critical ignoring always serves better judgment, not comfort at any cost.
How To Actually Do It
The researchers outline three practical strategies you can use right away:
Self-Nudging: This is about redesigning your digital environment to remove temptations before they become problems. Think of it as changing your information ecosystem. Instead of relying on willpower alone, you might unsubscribe from inflammatory newsletters, turn off news notifications that stress you out, or use browser extensions to block certain websites during work hours. The idea is to design your environment so you can implement the resolutions you’ve made.
Lateral Reading: This one’s particularly clever. Instead of reading a website from top to bottom like you’ve always done, professional fact-checkers will open another browser tab and quickly research who’s behind the source. That way, you spend sixty seconds searching for information about the source rather than spending twenty minutes carefully reading content from a source that turns out to be backed by a lobbying group or known misinformation peddler. The researchers note this is often faster and more effective than trying to critically evaluate the content itself.
Don’t Feed the Trolls: This strategy advises you not to reward malicious actors with your attention. When you encounter inflammatory comments, deliberately misleading posts, or content clearly designed to provoke anger, the best response is often no response at all. Engaging with trolls or bad-faith content just amplifies it and wastes your mental energy.
I’ll Add Another
Ignore the Influencers: Refuse to click on miracle‑cure headlines or anecdote‑driven threads when you can go directly to professional medical sources, systematic reviews, or guidelines from reliable sources. Ignore influencers’ health claims unless they clearly cite solid evidence and expertise.
The Bigger Picture
What makes critical ignoring different from just being selective is that it’s strategic and informed. To know what to ignore, you need to understand the landscape first. It’s not about burying your head in the sand—it’s about being intentional with your attention budget.
The traditional approach of “pay careful attention to everything” made sense in a world of vetted textbooks and curated libraries. But on the unvetted internet, that approach often ends up being a colossal waste of time and energy. The admonition to “pay careful attention” is exactly what attention thieves exploit.
Making It Work For You
Start by taking inventory of your information landscape —all the apps, websites, notifications, and sources competing for your attention. Which ones consistently deliver value? Which ones leave you feeling manipulated, angry, or stressed? Practice self-nudging by removing or limiting access to the latter category.
When you encounter a new source making bold claims, resist the urge to dive deep into their content immediately. Instead, spend a minute or two doing lateral reading. Search for “who runs [site name]” or “[organization name] funding.” You’ll be amazed how quickly you can identify whether something deserves your time.
And when you see obvious rage-bait or trolling, practice the “scroll on by” technique. Your attention is valuable—don’t give it away for free to people trying to manipulate you.
Critical ignoring isn’t about being less informed. It’s about being better informed by focusing your limited cognitive resources on reliable sources and meaningful content rather than letting the algorithm’s latest outrage-of-the-day consume your mental bandwidth.
Sources:
Kozyreva, A., Wineburg, S., Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(1), 81-88. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09637214221121570
∙Full text also available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7615324/
∙Interview with lead researcher: https://www.mpg.de/19554217/new-digital-competencies-critical-ignoring
Mims, Christopher. “Your Key Survival Skill for 2026: Critical Ignoring.” The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2026.
American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans
Lane, S. & Atchley, P. “Human Capacity in the Attention Economy”, American Psychological Association, 2020.
What Is This Thing Called Love?
By John Turley
On February 14, 2026
In Commentary
Every February 14th, we’re reminded that we’re supposed to understand love well enough to celebrate it with cards, chocolates, and carefully chosen gifts. Yet if you ask a hundred people to define love, you’ll get a hundred different answers—and most of them will involve a lot of hand-waving and phrases like “you just know.”
So, what is love? After thousands of years of poetry, philosophy, and now neuroscience, we still don’t have a tidy answer. But we do know more than we used to about how it works, why it matters, and what makes it one of the most powerful forces in human experience.
The Chemistry of Connection
Let’s start with the brain, because love—for all its mystery—has a biological basis we can measure. When you’re falling in love, your brain lights up like a Christmas tree in very specific ways. The caudate nucleus and ventral tegmental area, both parts of the brain’s reward system, show intense activity when people look at photos of their romantic partners. These are the same regions that activate when you’re anticipating a reward or experiencing pleasure. Your brain is essentially treating your beloved like the best possible prize.
The neurochemistry is equally dramatic. Dopamine floods your system, creating that giddy, can’t-eat, can’t-sleep sensation of new love. Norepinephrine heightens attention and memory—which is why you remember every detail of your early dates. Meanwhile, serotonin levels actually drop, which creates the obsessive thinking patterns familiar to anyone who’s ever fallen hard for someone. It’s not unlike the neurochemistry of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which explains why new love can feel so all-consuming.
But here’s where it gets interesting: long-term love shows different neural patterns than early infatuation. In established relationships, the brain’s attachment systems become more active, involving oxytocin and vasopressin—hormones that promote bonding and trust. The frenzy calms, but a different kind of connection deepens.
More Than Just Romance
Our cultural obsession with Valentine’s Day focuses almost exclusively on romantic love, but we experience love in multiple forms that are equally powerful. The ancient Greeks understood this—they had several words for different types of love.
There’s eros, the passionate romantic love we celebrate on Valentine’s Day. But there’s also philia, the deep friendship love that bonds us to chosen family and lifelong companions. Storge describes familial love, the affection between parents and children or siblings. Agape is selfless, universal love—the kind that drives people to help strangers or dedicate their lives to causes. And pragma is the mature, enduring love that develops in long partnerships built on compatibility and mutual respect.
Research on attachment theory, pioneered by psychologist John Bowlby, shows that our capacity for all these forms of love develops from our earliest relationships. The bonds we form with caregivers in infancy create templates that influence how we connect with others throughout life. Those early experiences shape whether we tend toward secure, anxious, or avoidant attachment patterns in adult relationships.
The Meaning We Make
So, what does love mean to us? The answer seems to be almost everything.
Love is fundamentally about connection in a species that evolved to be deeply social. We’re not built to survive alone. Anthropological evidence suggests that cooperation and bonding have been essential to human survival for hundreds of thousands of years. Love—in its various forms—is the emotional mechanism that makes us want to stay together, protect each other, and invest in relationships that extend beyond immediate self-interest.
Psychological research backs this up. Studies consistently show that strong social connections are among the most reliable predictors of happiness and wellbeing. A famous Harvard study that followed people for over 75 years found that close relationships—more than money, fame, or achievement—were what kept people happy throughout their lives. The quality of our relationships influences everything from our physical health to our resilience in facing life’s challenges.
Love also gives us a sense of meaning and purpose. Philosopher Martin Buber wrote about “I-Thou” relationships—moments when we genuinely see and are seen by another person, not as objects to be used but as complete beings. These connections, he argued, are where we find authentic existence. Whether or not you buy the full philosophical framework, there’s something to the idea that being truly known and still loved is profoundly meaningful to us
How We Describe the Indescribable
The challenge with love is that it’s simultaneously a biological process, a psychological state, a social bond, and a subjective experience. It’s a feeling, but also a choice. It involves chemistry but transcends chemistry. It’s universal, but manifests differently across cultures and individuals.
When people try to describe love, they often resort to metaphors: it’s a journey, a flame, a force of nature, a home. These metaphors capture something real—that love is dynamic (a journey), consuming (a flame), powerful beyond our control (a force), and provides security (a home). Each metaphor reveals an individual facet of love but is incomplete in itself.
Psychologists sometimes describe love through its components. Robert Sternberg’s triangular theory proposes that love involves intimacy (closeness and connection), passion (physical attraction and arousal), and commitment (the decision to maintain the relationship). Different combinations create different experiences: romance without commitment is infatuation; commitment without passion is companionship; all three together create what he calls “consummate love”.
But even these frameworks feel incomplete because love is also characterized by paradoxes. It makes us feel both euphoric and vulnerable. It’s intensely focused on one person yet can expand our capacity for compassion generally. It’s simultaneously selfish (wanting the beloved) and selfless (wanting their happiness above our own). It’s stable and changing, rational and irrational, simple and impossibly complex.
What We Know, and What We Don’t
Here’s my honest assessment of our understanding: We’re fairly confident about love’s neurological basis and its importance for human wellbeing. The research on attachment, bonding hormones, and the psychological benefit of connection is solid and replicated across many studies.
We’re less certain about the boundaries between types of love or whether our categories reflect universal realities or cultural constructs. The line between deep friendship and romantic love can be fuzzy. What Western culture calls romantic love may be experienced or expressed differently in cultures with arranged marriages or different social structures.
And we really don’t know how to explain why one person falls for this particular person and not that one, why some relationships endure while others fade, or how exactly the alchemy of genuine connection works. We can identify correlates and patterns, but the lived experience of love retains its mystery.
The Point of It All
Maybe the reason love resists simple definition is that it’s less like a thing and more like a capacity—the human ability to extend beyond our individual boundaries and form bonds that transcend pure self-interest. It’s what allows parents to sacrifice for children, friends to show up in crises, partners to build lives together, and strangers to feel compassion for people they’ll never meet.
Valentine’s Day, for all its commercial trappings, is trying to celebrate something genuinely important: our ability to connect, to care, to find meaning in each other. Whether you’re celebrating romantic love, friendship, family bonds, or simply the human capacity for affection, you’re acknowledging one of the most fundamental aspects of what makes us human.
Love might be indefinable, but that doesn’t make it any less real or necessary. It’s the force that pulls us out of isolation and reminds us we’re part of something larger than ourselves. And maybe that’s enough of a definition to work with.
Sources
Cole Porter – What’s This Thing Called Love? Lyrics, 1929
Scientific American – The Neuroscience of Love https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-neuroscience-of-love/
Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley – The New Science of Love https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_new_science_of_love
Simply Psychology – Bowlby’s Attachment Theory https://www.simplypsychology.org/bowlby.html
Harvard Gazette – Harvard Study on Adult Development https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/
Verywell Mind – Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love https://www.verywellmind.com/triangular-theory-of-love-2795884
Illustration generated by author using ChatGPT.