Beyond the Scroll

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Sep 9

In 1978, the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon offered a quiet prophecy: when information becomes abundant, attention becomes scarce. At the time, he was speaking as an economist. Today, in the era of infinite feeds and bottomless scrolls, his words have acquired the force of inevitability.

From the invention of movable type to the endless cascade of TikToks and Reels, our senses have been battered by abundance. More channels. More inputs. More noise. Each new medium promised enrichment, but each also demanded something in return: our focus.

The familiar lament is that attention spans are collapsing—that we now struggle to concentrate for less time than a goldfish. The image is memorable, but the science is shaky. A 2024 study in Nature Communications challenged that narrative, showing that attention is not vanishing but fragmenting—adapting to the demands of an environment saturated with competing streams of information. At MIT Media Lab, researchers found the average mobile user now switches tasks every nineteen seconds, not necessarily out of failure but as a form of adaptive filtering. And Microsoft Research has shown that consumers are learning to process and retain complex content in short, high-focus bursts, so long as it is intuitive and relevant.

As Wired reported last year: “Gen Z doesn’t lack attention; they lack patience for bad content.” If the human brain is not in decline but re-evolving, the question becomes: what anchors us in this sea of flickering fragments?

The Anchors We Forget

Here, the neglected senses—taste and smell—reassert their quiet importance. Unlike notifications, they cannot be swiped away. Unlike headlines, they do not compete in the same marketplace of distraction. They cut through.

Sanne Boesveldt, a sensory scientist at Wageningen University, has shown that smell is not ornamental; it underpins nutrition, emotional regulation, and social bonding. When olfaction falters, as millions discovered during the Covid-19 pandemic, the result is not merely inconvenience but a profound diminishment of life.

WTSA Advisor Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist at Brown University, has long argued that smell is inseparable from memory and identity. “Smell is the sense that gives us our most profound emotional memories,” she once told an interviewer. “Without it, our lives are impoverished.”

That impoverishment is now being quantified. A 2024 study in Science Advances, led by Gregory Bratman, linked olfaction directly to emotional regulation, cognitive function, and life satisfaction. Harvard researchers recently found that stronger scent detection correlates with slower brain volume loss in regions tied to memory and decision-making. And at Mass General Brigham, scientists are using simple peel-and-sniff tests to detect cognitive decline—including Alzheimer’s—years before conventional symptoms appear.

Smell, in other words, is not a luxury. It is diagnostic, protective, and deeply tied to our capacity to attend.

Embodied Attention

The paradox is that in an age defined by rapid cognitive adaptation, the most effective anchors may be the most ancient. Taste and smell tether us to presence in ways that no algorithm can. The aroma of rain on asphalt, the bitterness of coffee, the sweetness of a late-summer peach—these are not distractions. They are reminders that perception is embodied, that cognition is not confined to the scroll.

Herbert Simon’s warning, reread today, is not simply about economics. It is about survival. When the abundance of information creates a poverty of attention, it is the body—the nose, the tongue, the gut—that offers wealth.