Jan. 18, 2026 The digital environment has normalized a motivational regime long critiqued in educational psychology: reward–punishment conditioning. Decades before social media, Punished by Rewards demonstrated that external incentives — grades, praise, gold stars — undermine intrinsic motivation and degrade the quality of engagement. What the platform economy has done is scale this logic to everyday life. Likes, streaks, badges, and notifications operate as continuous micro-

Jan. 11, 2026 THE MENTAL FORECAST From a psychoanalytic perspective, the superego designates the psychic instance through which social authority is internalized as constraint. It is not reducible to moral conscience; it is the structure that produces guilt, shame, self-surveillance, and the internal demand to conform to an ideal. Historically, the superego emerged from identifiable figures of authority — parents, institutions, religious or cultural law — and operated through

Dec. 28, 2025 Neuroplasticity has become a central mechanism for how the brain reorganizes itself in response to repeated digital exposures. Contemporary work underscores that online environments rich in micro-rewards, algorithmic novelty, and variable reinforcement do more than occupy attention — they shape synaptic trajectories of learning. Platforms engineered for engagement are effectively training environments : repeated, patterned inputs that bias neural circuits toward

Dec. 25, 2025 What happens to mental life when belief, desire, and attention are shaped before we are even aware of choosing — and when this process is scaled like an industrial reaction? Recent neurobehavioral research reveals that distinctions between human and virtual sources of influence are not just sociological curiosities but neurologically consequential events. Qingxi Yao and colleagues (2025) show that virtual versus human influencers produce distinct patterns of br

Dec. 20, 2025 New interdisciplinary research confirms a troubling but clinically coherent reality: beliefs about success, money, and self-worth are not later cognitive distortions — they are installed early, quietly, before children have language for value. A landmark experimental study in Scientific Reports demonstrates that even preschoolers can associate possessions with happiness and social success, revealing that materialism is not a cultural accident but an early symbo

Dec. 18, 2025 THE MENTAL FORECAST What if leisure screen time is not merely eroding attention and mental health, but actively accelerating biological aging at the molecular level? This question is no longer speculative. Genetic epidemiology now forces a revision of how digital lifestyles are understood. Leisure screen time can no longer be treated as a neutral behavioral choice or a simple correlate of inactivity; it now appears as a causal biological exposure . Using Mendeli

Dec. 17, 2025 Rage bai t, named Oxford 2025 Word of the Year, should first be read as a clinical indicator. It designates a patterned form of stimulation that repeatedly activates anger, indignation, and moral alarm in the nervous system. This is not incidental exposure; it is chronic, rhythmic, and normalized. Rage bait works because anger is fast, self-amplifying, and difficult to metabolize. In digital environments, it produces a state of permanent low-grade activation: in

Dec. 16, 2025 Algorithmic attachment names a quiet mutation of attachment itself. Classical attachment theory described how early bonds organize safety, proximity-seeking, and self-worth through relationships with living others (Bowlby, 1988). Today, those same regulatory circuits are being continuously solicited by non-human systems. Platforms do not simply distribute content; they distribute reassurance, rejection, anticipation, and absence. The feed becomes a relational fi

Dec. 15, 2025 THE MENTAL FORECAST What happens to democratic life when persuasion stops looking like propaganda and starts looking like a “helpful conversation”? If a chatbot can shift political attitudes after a short dialogue, we’re not just talking about communication technology anymore — we’re talking about a new influence infrastructure that operates through trust, fluency, and cognitive overload. The immediate concern is not only whether these systems persuade, but how

Dec. 13, 2025 THE MENTAL FORECAST According to The Guardian , Donald Trump has signed an executive order designed to block state-level regulation of artificial intelligence and to actively challenge existing AI laws through a newly created federal AI Litigation Task Force. The order aims to prevent states from imposing requirements such as safety testing disclosures or algorithmic risk assessments, with Trump arguing that a fragmented regulatory landscape would deter investme

Dec. 10, 2025 THE MENTAL FORECAST A new category of threat has entered human experience — not catastrophic or dramatic, but ambient, continuous, and built into the architecture of digital life. Neuroscience shows that even the anticipation of potential danger suppresses parietal-occipital alpha and central mu rhythms, preparing the organism for defensive action and heightening responsivity in individuals with elevated anxiety traits (Mirifar et al., 2025). In ancestral conte

Dec. 9, 2025 Digital platforms have perfected a class of design strategies that function less as tools and more as behavioral engines . What appears as a simple interface — an infinite scroll, an auto-play button, a vibrating notification — actually operates as an invisible governance system shaping vigilance, micro-arousal, and self-doubt. These techno-design pathologies exploit intermittent reinforcement schedules and frictionless loops described extensively in the behavior

As artificial intelligence and algorithms increasingly govern our visual landscape, they transform images into active agents that mold...

Script: L. Poenaru _

Script: L. Poenaru _

Script: Liviu Poenaru _

Script: Liviu Poenaru, PhD _

Script: Liviu Poenaru, PhD _

Script: Liviu Poenaru _

When I reflect on the act of consuming from the tree of knowledge, I see it not as a simplistic fall into sinfulness or as the birth of...

The subpersonal cognitive level (Andler, 2023)—conceived in terms of connectionist and computational models within the brain—lies...

Cybercapitalism, through its pervasive influence at both the subpersonal and symbolic levels, presents a formidable challenge to the...

L. Poenaru   The father's strong influence on the nuclear family, supported by loving and ambivalent feelings, is irrefutable. The same...