Cited Research: Pinggal, E., Jackson, J., Kusztor, A., Chapman, D., Windt, J., Drummond, S.P.A., Silk, T.J., Bellgrove, M.A., & Andrillon, T. (2025). Sleep-like Slow Waves During Wakefulness Mediate Attention and Vigilance Difficulties in Adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. bioRxiv. doi: 10.1101/2025.07.27.666103
We have built an always-on world for an intermittently-on brain. And we keep wondering why humans can't keep up.
A landmark new study out of Monash University and the Paris Brain Institute just gave scientific form to something I have been designing around for over a decade — and building Vibes AI to address directly. Researchers found that adults with ADHD experience significantly higher rates of sleep-like slow waves during wakefulness. Parts of the brain, particularly in the parieto-temporal regions, are briefly going offline, not just wandering, not just distracted, functionally entering a sleep-like state while the person is technically awake and at a desk.
But here is what stopped me cold: the study's mediation analysis showed these slow waves don't just correlate with poor attention in ADHD. They mechanistically explain it. The brain state is the cause. And it is largely invisible to every device, app, and interface we have built.
The Attention Economy Is Built on a Lie
For 25 years, I have sat at the intersection of human cognition and the machines we build to serve it — from IBM Watson to Amazon Alexa to the autonomous delivery systems at Uber, and AI product design at Samsung. In every chapter, the underlying design assumption has been the same: the user is present. Alert. Ready. Continuous.
That assumption is wrong. And we are living through what I call the Triple Brain Epidemic: a collision of attentional collapse, cognitive fatigue, and digital overwhelm that is degrading human performance at population scale. ADHD diagnoses are rising. Algorithmic fatigue, also referred to as 'Brain Rot' is real and spreading. Burnout has become the default operating state for knowledge workers. And the devices we carry with us — brilliant, capable, relentlessly demanding — are calibrated for a version of human attention that exists only in our design documents.
"The interface is not the screen. The interface is the brain state. Until our devices understand that, they are shouting into a room where half the audience has briefly fallen asleep."
The Pinggal et al. study gives us the neurological substrate of this epidemic. Sleep-like slow waves — high-amplitude bursts of delta/theta activity typically associated with deep sleep — were significantly elevated in the ADHD group, especially over parieto-temporal electrodes. These aren't gentle dips in attention. They are local cortical shutdowns. The brain's equivalent of a screen going dark.
What the Science Actually Found
The researchers had 63 adults (32 with ADHD, 31 neurotypical) complete a sustained attention task — the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) — while high-density EEG recorded their brain activity. Every 40–70 seconds, participants were asked to report their mental state: on-task, mind-wandering, or mind-blanking.
The ADHD group didn't just report more distraction. They reported significantly more mind-blanking — the experience of thinking about nothing, a momentary absence of conscious thought. And critically, the mediation analysis showed that slow wave density accounted for a substantial portion of the performance gap: more omission errors, slower reaction times, greater variability in responses, and higher subjective sleepiness.
The finding that stays with me most is about intentionality. Neurotypical participants reported mind-wandering that was "somewhat intentional" — a form of productive daydreaming or strategic disengagement. ADHD participants reported mind-wandering that was "entirely unintentional." Their attention didn't drift. It dropped out. That is a qualitatively different phenomenon. And it demands a qualitatively different design response.
Key data points from the study:
- ADHD participants showed significantly higher slow wave density, particularly in parieto-temporal electrodes
- Slow wave density correlated with more omission errors, slower mean RTs, and greater RT variability
- Mediation analysis confirmed slow waves mechanistically link ADHD diagnosis to attentional performance gaps
- ADHD participants reported higher sleepiness across all task blocks, with steeper omission error increases over time
- ~2.5% of adults have ADHD globally; ~50% of waking hours are spent mind-wandering in the general population
Six Design Imperatives for State-Aware Systems
This research is not just a clinical finding. It is a design brief to anyone building the next generation of Native AI devices or multimodal interfaces.
At Vibes AI, the team have been building toward this understanding from the product side — using voice biomarkers to detect cognitive state shifts before they manifest as errors. Here is what I believe every product designer and AI builder needs to internalize:
- Design for state, not task. Stop assuming the user is ready. Start sensing whether they are. Cognitive state is variable, rhythmic, and detectable — through voice cadence, interaction latency, scrolling behavior, and emerging biosensor data. The next generation of AI interfaces must read the room before they speak into it.
- Restorative audio is infrastructure, not content. The study's findings on slow-wave intrusion align precisely with the neuroscience behind 40Hz gamma entrainment — the therapeutic mechanism we built Vibes AI around. When the brain drifts toward sleep-like states, targeted audio interventions can re-synchronize cortical activity. This is not wellness theater. It is a clinical opportunity.
- Multimodal redundancy is equity design. When visual cortex regions are affected by local sleep, visual-only interfaces fail disproportionately for users with ADHD and for anyone in a high-fatigue state. Voice, haptics, and spatial audio are not accessibility features — they are parallel pathways that keep people connected to their devices even when one modality goes offline
- Ambient guidance, not interruptive notification. The study shows that alertness levels directly predict attentional state — "extremely sleepy" ratings saw 59% mind-wandering and 22% mind-blanking. Notifications are designed for alert users. We are sending them to sleepy brains. AI agents must learn to hold information, reshape it, and deliver it when the human is actually receptive.
- Re-entry design is as important as onboarding. If attention dropout is inevitable — and this research confirms that it is — then designing graceful re-entry is not a nice-to-have. It is a core UX requirement. Soft checkpoints, context reminders, state-aware handoffs. The app that helps you pick up where your brain left off is the app that earns trust.
- Ear-worn devices are our highest-leverage platform. I spent years at Amazon Alexa designing the Echo Buds with this understanding: the ear is not a speaker mount. It is a biological thunderbolt port connected to the brain, capable of both writing to cognition (through sound) and reading from it (through biosignal capture). The researchers at Monash are measuring brain state through EEG electrodes. The ear-worn devices of 2027 will do this passively, continuously, and invisibly.
The Triple Brain Epidemic Demands a Triple Response
ADHD is the clinical extreme of a spectrum that now includes most of us. Cognitive fatigue, algorithmic overload, and chronic sleep debt have made slow-wave intrusion a near-universal experience — not just for the 2.5% diagnosed with ADHD, but for the professional who has been in back-to-back meetings since 8am, the caregiver who hasn't slept through the night in weeks, the teenager whose nervous system is being shaped by notification loops optimized for engagement, not wellbeing.
The Triple Brain Epidemic is attentional collapse, cognitive fatigue, and digital overwhelm arriving simultaneously at a moment when our most consequential decisions — medical, financial, civic — are being made through the very interfaces least designed to support impaired cognition.
This is why brain health is not a niche. It is the design challenge of our era.
"We don't need smarter notifications. We need smarter attunement. The future of computing is not about making humans behave more like machines — it is about building machines that finally understand what it means to be human."
What I Am Building — and Why This Study Matters to Us
The team at Vibes AI has been working since 2023 on a vocal biomarker platform that extracts brain readiness scores from human voice audio — achieving 85% accuracy in our current model. The premise is exactly what this research illuminates: that cognitive state is detectable, trackable, and — critically — improvable through targeted audio intervention.
The Pinggal et al. study (2025) gives our work a profound new foundation. If slow-wave density mediates the relationship between ADHD diagnosis and attentional performance — and if pharmacological treatments like methylphenidate reduce those slow waves over frontal and central regions — then non-pharmacological approaches like frequency-based audio entrainment deserve serious clinical investigation as a complementary pathway.
We are partnering with neuroscientists, sound engineers, audiologists, and NIH-funded researchers to build exactly that evidence base. Because the future of brain health is not a prescription. It is a daily practice — accessible, personalized, and embedded in the devices we already own and the native AI devices that have not yet come tow market.
The science is telling us: the human brain is not a continuous computing device. It is a rhythmic, state-dependent biological system that needs interfaces designed for its actual operating conditions — not the idealized version we assumed when we built the attention economy.
It is time to move from the attention economy to the state economy.
Not how long you hold attention — but how well you support it.
The brain that drifts is not broken. It is human. Build for that brain.
Citation: Pinggal, E., Jackson, J., Kusztor, A., Chapman, D., Windt, J., Drummond, S.P.A., Silk, T.J., Bellgrove, M.A., & Andrillon, T. (2025). Sleep-like Slow Waves During Wakefulness Mediate Attention and Vigilance Difficulties in Adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. bioRxiv. doi: 10.1101/2025.07.27.666103