Monolist, the Attentional Capture Context-Switching Tool

It’s a small world after all.

Just the song title is a little cringe-inducing. It’s not that the song is bad, exactly, but that we all know it will get stuck in our head and we’ll be humming it for hours or days.

That’s probably the most recognizable and universal earworm. Many are more personal. I nearly crashed once trying to turn off the radio in the car rather than listen to Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something from 1994.

Do you know the trick to get rid of an earworm?

It’s actually easy. You listen to Take 5, the all-time iconic jazz song. And the special bonus to this solution (as opposed to listening to the Hamilton soundtrack or something else to eject an earworm) is that because it has a completely weird rhythm, it doesn’t get stuck in your head as a replacement earworm.

A Five-Four Fix for a Nine-to-Five Problem

I was thinking about that the other day when I felt like I needed something like Take 5 for my work day. I was focused super intensely on some work for the 2026 version of the Local Journalist Index. I finished that, and needed to move on to a project for trust.txt, the standard I invented to help local news providers behind the scenes.

The problem, of course, is that if you just try to switch, you drag along some of what you were doing before, like an earworm.

Scientists call this Context Switching, and there’s tons of research about how hard it is to do.

The trick is that you need to do something between the two tasks, something that will hold your attention long enough to get your brain off the first task, but not something so intense that it will stick around when you pick up the new task. This one the people in the lab coats call Attentional Capture.

(I don’t know if the fine people in psychology departments actually wear lab coats, but I’d like to think that they do at least some of the time.)

Scroll. Hole.

The problem is that what most people do to help them context switch these days is that they scroll. Social media. Reddit. News pages.

Speaking on behalf of all those people in lab coats studying our brains, all I can say is ugh.

Scrolling is the heroin of Context Switching. It is designed to suck you in and in the words of another earworm, never gonna give you up. They do everything they can to set hooks in you.

So I started looking for a new way to do that context switching. I remembered that back in the olden days before scrolling was such a thing, I was a fan of a game called Monolist, which was on an obscure Japanese site. It was Javascript, and it was awesome. Super minimalist, but required great focus. Took just a few minutes to play, so not one of these games that like social networks, was designed to get you to play for as long as possible.

It must still be on the internet, I thought. It wasn’t. There were some echoes of it, but because it was a Javascript game, the actual game wasn’t anywhere.

Well, the modern tools being what they are, I just reimagined it and created it. And now you can play it, too.

Your Prefrontal Cortex Called. It Wants Two Minutes.

If it doesn’t seem that fancy of a game, that’s on purpose. Most games and every social network are specifically engineered to get into your reward circuitry and stay there. I included nothing that’s going to creep from your dorsal attention network through the amygdala and worm its way into your nucleus accumbens. Total focus and fun while playing, and then the blocks and the game all go poof, and you move on to the next thing.

How to play

So the game is just a cannon that is always shooting lasers at blocks, in the style of Space Invaders or Galaga. The trick is that there’s three layers descending at the same time. Up and down arrows control which of the three you are aiming at.

Randomly triangles will fall from blocks. Those are power-ups. Let them hit you to get the power.

Have fun, and let me know what you think.

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