> Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at th

> Mindless browsing is like a walk through the woods, just looking for what is happening, navigating a huge amount of information that is hardly important at the moment – oh, the cherry tree is blooming – but could be important later. Your instinct points to the right direction; mild distraction is actually conducive to insight generation. But we have co-evolved with outside and can have a very intuitive grasp on the hierarchy of information; to dynamically tell apart what is noise what is signal in any moment. In contrast, apps are engineered by an army of experts to hijack those intuitions as a side-channel attack on our attentional heuristics. Browsing becomes mindless because we are oversaturated in our attentional system through the every trick available to keep us engaged and click on ads. E.g. red notification buttons vs. ripe fruit.