Conscious use of technology — What the smartphone era taught no one

What it is

Days broken up by screens make the slope of disalignment steeper: a paragraph read twice and nothing of it kept, a thought going round on a loop and resolving nothing, the smallest decision costing more than it should. The mind rarely fails outright; it narrows, and that is what is hardest to see from the inside.

Pascal wrote in the Pensées, more than three and a half centuries ago: “All the unhappiness of men comes from one thing alone: not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.” Nothing has changed since except the number of screens in the room. This work is about the conscious use of tools, AI included, so that human intelligence is strengthened rather than delegated.

It is the studio’s work for organisations: in the margin of the practices, and taught alongside them.

What it asks of you

For whom

Teams, schools and institutions.

Where

On your premises, or in our hall in Paris.

Languages

French, English or Spanish.

Content

Shaped around the people who will be in the room: attention, stress, discernment, the conscious use of AI tools.

Belief

None is asked of you: you practise, observe, and judge for yourself.

The format is not fixed in advance: we build it with you.

What practitioners report

What practitioners say first is that they notice, a little earlier than before, the thought that goes round, the irritation that rises, the tiredness that comes on. Seen from outside, nothing changes: the same meeting, the same unanswered message. Inside, it is a little more often the person who decides, and a little less often the reflex. These are individual experiences, not results promised to a team.

We present these practices as tools for prevention and wellbeing — not as medical treatment.

What the research says

What this work trains is what psychology named at its very beginning: “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will” (William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890). A small randomised study has since measured a gain of 16 percentile points in reading comprehension after two weeks of attention training (Psychological Science, 2013). An MRI study, also small, observed increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus after eight weeks of practice (Harvard Medical School, 2011).

These are two isolated studies, and neither concerns screens, AI tools or work within organisations. They report changes measured after a few weeks; they do not say what this work will produce in your organisation.

Many studies are small: we present them as promising, not as settled.

For an organisation

Write to us on behalf of your team, your school or your institution: we will build this work with you, on your premises or in our hall on place Monge, in Paris 5e. And if your organisation carries a question larger than its own walls, that is what the Agora is for: it brings together companies, researchers, local authorities, associations and citizens around one question, until it becomes a project.

Coming to your organisation ⟶ See the Agora ⟶

The place

Address

50 rue de la Clef — Place Monge, 75005 Paris See the map ⟶

Schedule

The timetable is being drawn up. See the schedule ⟶

For a first session

An empty stomach, and an hour. No flexibility, no equipment, no belief.

Contact

bonjour@studioetre.fr
+33 6 52 30 71 00 · WhatsApp