Why Some Things Pull You In
You weren’t looking for it.
But you noticed it.
A familiar song.
The smell of ...
A countdown.
Someone saying your name.
A color.
A shape.
A headline that ...
Your attention moved.
Maybe you did too.
Nothing forced you.
Something simply…
pulled.
Why?
Not Everything Gets Through
At any moment, your senses are taking in more information than you could possibly respond to.
- Sounds
- Movement
- Faces
- Messages
- Choices
- Warnings
- Offers
- Requests
Most of it passes without much consequence.
Some of it doesn’t.
Something catches.
You look.
Pause.
Reach.
Click.
Turn around.
Keep looking.
The interesting question isn’t simply: What did you notice?
It’s: Why did this get through when other things didn't?
➖
You’re sitting outside on a summer afternoon.
Maybe you’re watching a child’s game. Reading on a blanket. Sharing a meal with friends. Strolling. When:
… just near your ear.
Your head jerks.
Maybe your whole body moves.
Maybe you swat first and then identify the insect.
Somehow, that signal got through.
➖
Now imagine you’re deeply absorbed in something.
Someone you know well says your name.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
You finally look up.
“I’ve been calling you.”
But what if the same person had said:
“Watch out.”
Would it have still taken three tries?
Would those same words get through the same way if they were whispered, said casually, or delivered with urgency? And what if it was a voice you didn’t know?
➖
Your senses don’t give your conscious attention an equal stream of everything around you.
Your interior system is continuously helping determine what matters enough to get through.
🔄 Memory participates
🔄 Expectation participates
🔄 Context participates
🔄 What you’re consciously doing participates
🔄 Bias can participate too
Attention isn’t ever starting from zero.
It’s starting from an interior system always in motion.
Pull Doesn’t Require Control
External systems don’t need to invent the machinery that produces pull.
Your attention is never at zero.
And that matters.
Because systems around you don’t have to create that motion.
They only need to tilt the conditions around it.
A phone alert uses sound or vibration to interrupt what you're already doing
An emergency siren is designed to break through the noise around it.
None creates attention from nothing.
Each changes the conditions competing for attention.
As human beings, there’s a you behind the curtain that is constantly filtering, prioritizing, anticipating, approaching, avoiding, learning, and adapting. Much of this machinery has very old roots: keeping us oriented toward what might matter and away from what might harm us.
One part of that machinery is the amygdala. Often associated with fear and threat, researchers have also described it more broadly as part of an evolved relevance-detection system — helping to flag what may matter enough to warrant greater attention or response.
And matter doesn’t only mean danger.
It can mean reward. Opportunity. Familiarity. Belonging. Something new.
Survival means knowing what to move away from.
But it also means knowing what might be worth moving toward.
Modern systems don’t need to control those mechanisms.
They only need to learn what tends to get through. (Then tilt accordingly.)
- Put one option first
- Make another harder to reach
- Create urgency
- Remove a step
- Add a reminder
- Show what other people chose
- Offer a reward
- Repeat a signal
None guarantees a response.
But guarantees aren’t what is necessary.
👉 Acting on probabilities can be enough.
And this works because people can be entirely different…
without being completely different.
We share enough recurring human patterns that systems can learn something useful from what people do or don’t do.
↔️ We notice contrast
↔️ We respond to familiarity
↔️ We learn from repetition
↔️ We react to uncertainty
↔️ We seek some rewards
↔️ We avoid some costs
Not identically.
Not every time.
But often enough for patterns to emerge.
And for you and me to be grouped by them.
MNKY Math calls part of this Patterned Susceptibility:
The important word is not identical.
☝️ It’s Patterned.
The System Doesn’t Need to Read Your Mind
Imagine a platform showing you something new.
It doesn’t know exactly what you’re thinking.
It doesn’t need to.
It can observe what becomes visible.
You pause.
You scroll away.
You return.
You click.
You watch longer.
You ignore it completely.
Each expression becomes information.
Across enough interactions…
patterns begin to emerge.
➡️ People who paused here often clicked there.
➡️ People who bought this often looked at that.
➡️ People who responded to this signal often responded to another one later.
➡️ People in this geography behaved differently than people in another.
The patterns can be broad.
Or remarkably specific.
Geography. Timing. Cohort. Prior behavior. Combinations of all of them.
Some systems go further, assembling evolving models of customers or groups of customers — including what are now sometimes called digital twins of a customer — to model how one might respond under different conditions.
The system doesn’t need direct access to the interpretation that produced your expression.
It can learn from the expression itself. But the traces that expression leaves behind can be even more durably useful.
And your traces don’t stand alone.
They can be compared with traces from people who behaved similarly, lived in similar places, responded at similar times, or encountered slightly different conditions.
Your behavior becomes more actionable when it can be situated inside a pattern.
Expression Becomes Feedback
Once a pattern appears, the system can try something.
Show a different recommendation.
Change the order.
Alter the timing.
Add friction.
Remove friction.
Introduce scarcity.
Offer another reward.
Then watch again.
Did you click?
Pause?
Leave?
Return?
The expression produces traces. And both can become feedback.
The feedback informs the next set of conditions.
And the loop continues.
Conditions
→ interior system
→ expression
→ traces
→ feedback
→ new conditions
The system doesn’t have to know you perfectly.
It only has to learn enough to tilt what happens next.
This Is Why Pull Can Become Powerful
Pull isn’t one single thing.
Sometimes it’s curiosity.
… familiarity
… reward
… relief
… belonging
… novelty
… sometimes a mashup of many things
Different signals can reach different parts of your interior system for different reasons.
And the same signal won’t pull everyone equally, or you the same each time. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.
and another toward the exit.
A sale may create urgency for one person…
and suspicion for another.
A notification may feel useful…
or irritating.
The surrounding system can create a condition.
Your interior system still participates in what that condition becomes… for you.
Patterned Doesn’t Mean Predictable
This is also why systems get people wrong.
The pattern isn’t the person.
What worked yesterday may not work today.
What pulls one person closer may push another away.
What mattered once may stop mattering.
Experience continues tuning the interior system.
Conditions continue changing.
And no model sees everything.
Prediction can still be useful…
without becoming certainty.
Why This Matters
It’s easy to treat pull as evidence of preference.
I clicked because I wanted it.
Maybe?
But clicking tells us what became visible.
It doesn’t necessarily explain everything that happened before the click.
Acting on patterns it has inferred, a system may have:
- placed something where you were likely to see it
- timed it when you were likely to respond
- removed effort
- introduced urgency
- repeated a familiar signal
- adjusted based on what worked before
Sometimes the tilt is deliberately designed. Sometimes software can learn to adjust it. Sometimes it simply emerges from how the system is arranged.
None of that eliminates choice.
But neither is choice happening in empty space.
The conditions may be getting tilted… by monkey math you didn’t know was there.
And your interior system is responding to the tilt.
So, preference? Maybe. Or maybe not as much as you think.
The pull to hang with
Systems don’t need perfect models of people.
They need patterns reliable enough to learn from…
… and conditions they can adjust.
The pull doesn’t have to work every time.
It only has to work often enough to influence what you do next.
Challenge: Take a MNKY Pause.
Consider the traces you leave behind that a system could measure and act on.
What are the obvious ones?
Clicks. Purchases. Likes. Searches.
What are the less obvious ones?
For example, an app with location access may periodically record where your phone is.
One location point may say very little.
Repeated points might reveal that you:
⏵ spend about 20 minutes at the same gym,
⏵ visit the same gas station every few days,
⏵ regularly arrive somewhere around the same time.
The trace is the location.
The pattern is what the system may infer from it.
What might a system learn from traces you barely notice you’re leaving?
Continue the publishing sequence
Attention isn't ever starting from zero. And repetition gives it more to work with. When the same conditions, actions, and responses keep returning, something can begin to change. Next, we'll explore when repeating becomes routine.
Sources:
- Sander, D., Grafman, J., & Zalla, T. (2003). “The Human Amygdala: An Evolved System for Relevance Detection.” Reviews in the Neurosciences, 14(4), 303–316.
- Ousdal et al. (2008). “The human amygdala is involved in general behavioral relevance detection…” Neuroscience, 156(3), 450–455.
- Gartner (2024). “Gartner Hype Cycle Reveals Top Technologies That Will Transform Sales in the Next Decade.”