RESEARCH BRIEFS

Published research from
the Institute.

Summaries of ongoing work at the intersection of complexity science, evolutionary biology, and organizational adaptation.

All AI Acceleration Applied Hypernovelty Evolutionary Mismatch Organizational Adaptation Policy & Governance

Evolutionary Mismatch April 22, 2026

Evolutionary Mismatch and the Attention Economy

Why human attention architecture is a structural liability in hypernovelty

Human attention evolved for environments characterized by salient physical threats, social bonding signals, and low-frequency novel stimuli. The modern information environment exploits each of these evolutionary adaptations simultaneously and at scale, producing a systematic mismatch between our attentional architecture and the environments we have constructed.

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