Brain Science
Sustained attention is in decline across populations - and it's not just smartphones. Here's how deliberate logic puzzle practice rebuilds the attention
The average person in 2024 switches between apps or websites every 47 seconds. That's not a personality flaw or a generational weakness - it's the predictable outcome of spending hours per day in environments engineered for constant interruption.
Most digital products profit from your attention being divided. Social media platforms, news sites, notification systems - their business models run on fragmenting your focus into the smallest possible intervals so they can sell each fragment to advertisers. The product you're using is often specifically designed to prevent sustained attention.
Logic puzzles are a rare exception. They don't work at all if you can't sustain attention. The game mechanics select for focus rather than against it.
A logic puzzle has a fundamentally different relationship to attention than social media. Social media can be consumed in fragments - each notification, post, or clip is self-contained. A puzzle is a single object that can only be solved if you hold its entire constraint structure in mind simultaneously.
You cannot partially solve a MyRin puzzle and then switch to something else and come back without losing your place mentally. Each interruption resets at least some of your working memory load. The puzzle structure punishes attention fragmentation directly and rewards sustained engagement directly.
This is not an accident of design. It's a structural property of the puzzle format that predates apps by centuries.
Attention works like a muscle in a specific sense: it improves with resistance and degrades with disuse. Research on sustained attention training consistently shows that practices requiring deliberate maintenance of focus - against the pull of distraction - improve the ability to sustain attention in other contexts.
The key phrase is "against the pull of distraction." Watching a movie you're fully absorbed in doesn't train attention - you're not resisting anything, because the movie is doing the engagement work for you. Solving a difficult logic puzzle does train attention because it requires sustained effort, and the temptation to abandon the effort is real and must be resisted.
Players who are honest about their MyRin experience report this directly: the urge to close the app and check something else arises mid-puzzle, especially on difficult levels. The habit of resisting that urge and staying with the problem - which gets easier with practice - is exactly what's being trained.
One of the more interesting effects of regular logic puzzle practice is a change in the experience of focus itself. Players who work through difficult puzzles consistently report that the experience of being deeply engaged - the flow state - becomes more accessible over time. The brain seems to get better at entering and maintaining that state.
This makes sense in terms of what's happening neurologically. Sustained attention is partly a skill and partly a habit. The neural circuits involved in maintaining focus strengthen with use, like any other circuit. Regular practice in environments that require and reward deep focus shifts the default toward focus, making it easier to access in contexts where you need it.
There's an obvious irony in using a phone app to train focus in an era when phones are the primary source of focus fragmentation. It's worth acknowledging directly.
The difference is structural. When you open MyRin, notifications are still a distraction - the phone format doesn't change that. What changes is what the app is asking you to do. Other apps are asking you to consume fragments. MyRin is asking you to stay with something complex until you understand it. One habit builds fragmentation; the other builds resistance to it.
The phone is the medium. What matters is the activity you're choosing to do with it.