Your brain wants to stay with it. Something keeps pulling it away.
Attune reads your attention while you study and conducts a second channel — audio, a change in the light, an anchor to what it builds on — that gives the wandering mind somewhere to go that isn’t away.
Graduate students, and adults teaching themselves something genuinely hard, from their own PDFs, chapters and papers, not a course catalogue.
- ·Camera stays on-device
- ·Lessons stay in your source
- ·Nothing optimises for time-on-app
When focused attention relaxes, the default mode network does not switch off. It switches on. It starts generating narrative: memory, planning, rehearsal, the argument you should have won. It is very good at this. It is the circuit that takes the paragraph away from you, and it is not a malfunction. It is a circuit looking for something to do.
Silence. Nothing is intervening: the correct behaviour while you are with it. Stay still for 45s to see the other state.
Signals: pointer · keys · scroll · touch · visibility
Threshold: — to drift
Derived state only: nothing recorded
The same estimator is being extended to read gaze, on-device.
Every focus tool tries to suppress the wandering circuit. None of them occupy it.
Timers
They measure time, not attention. The clock runs; the mind drifts inside the interval.
Blockers
The phone is where the mind goes when it leaves, never why it leaves.
Lo-fi
Closest to the real thing, and completely unresponsive. It cannot tell flow from drift.
Willpower
The one that runs out. Fighting the mind is the problem renamed.
Two channels, conducted by your own state.
Channel one: the sponge
A generated audio layer that occupies the default mode network instead of suppressing it. It shifts when you drift, recedes when flow returns, and stops entirely when you are with the work. Silence is a setting, not a failure.
Channel two: the material
Your own chapter, paper or PDF, shown to you whole and in its own order, a passage at a time. Nothing is selected, shortened or skipped, and no model runs while you read. The pacing stays yours; only the presentation answers your attention.
We would rather you know exactly what is running.
Attune is in private beta with a live study loop and a rule-based attention engine. The statistical model is still being fitted on real sessions, which is the honest reason we want a small cohort rather than a launch.
On-device
Camera frames never leave your machine. What is stored is derived state (drifting, engaged), never an image or a keystroke.
Erasable
Your source text and every lesson made from it are yours alone and are destroyed when you delete your account.
Working toward obsolescence
The instrument aims to be needed less over time. Nothing here optimises for engagement; dependency is a failure state.
We are looking for a few people with something hard to learn.
Bring the chapter you keep failing to get through. You study; we watch what the instrument gets wrong. Short weekly conversations, no obligation, and you keep the sessions.
We reply to everyone.