Researcher of the Institute for Cognitive Neurosciences Presents at Tech-Friendly Weekend
Yulia Gorodnicheva, a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences of HSE University, took part in “Tech-Friendly Weekend” — a youth festival held as part of the Digital Industry of Industrial Russia (CIPR) conference. The festival aims to popularize technology among young people.
As part of the conference’s science popularization program, Yulia Gorodnicheva delivered a lecture titled “Brains in the Net: The Neurobiology of Media Consumption.”
The talk explored how the human brain — shaped by evolution in conditions of low information density — copes with today’s digital environment, where endless feeds, algorithmic curation, and multimodal stimuli push its capacities to the limit.
The presentation outlined key scientific concepts that explain modern media consumption: the brain’s predictive processing and the phenomenon of “controlled hallucination,” epistemic fatigue and the cost of doubt, parasocial relationships and social comparison in the digital space, the neural basis of polarization and echo chambers, and the unconscious detection of deepfakes. Special attention was given to the mechanisms of negative content consumption (doomscrolling), digital pressure (often referred to as “telepressure”), and interoceptive blindness — states that contribute to digital fatigue and background anxiety in modern users.
“In today’s media environment, we expend enormous cognitive resources on moral and epistemic evaluation of information that has no direct connection to our real lives. Understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of media consumption is essential for developing practical tools for digital resilience and media literacy,” Yulia Gorodnicheva noted.
CIPR (Digital Industry of Industrial Russia) is one of Russia’s leading conferences focused on the digitalization of the economy, the development of artificial intelligence, and technological sovereignty. Tech-Friendly Weekend is a youth festival held as part of CIPR, aimed at a broad audience and dedicated to popularizing science and technology through lectures, discussions, and interactive formats.
