Bibliography

Selected sources cited or informing chapters of this book, organized by chapter. All sources listed are real; summaries are accurate to the best of the author's knowledge as of August 2025.

Part 1: Your Brain on Video

Chapter 1: Why We Can't Look Away - Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. - Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. - Posner, M. I. (1980). Orienting of attention. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 32(1), 3-25. - Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs.

Chapter 2: Your Brain on Screens - Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and Verbal Processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. - Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257-285. - Rizzolatti, G., & Craighero, L. (2004). The mirror-neuron system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 169-192. - Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row.

Chapter 3: The Scroll-Stop Moment - Itti, L., & Koch, C. (2000). A saliency-based search mechanism for overt and covert shifts of visual attention. Vision Research, 40(10-12), 1489-1506. - Yarbus, A. L. (1967). Eye Movements and Vision. New York: Plenum Press.

Chapter 4: The Emotion Engine - Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward: Hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience? Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309-369. - Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96-99. - Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297-314.

Chapter 5: The Curiosity Gap - Loewenstein, G. (1994). The psychology of curiosity: A review and reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 75-98. - Zeigarnik, B. (1927). Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen. Psychologische Forschung, 9, 1-85.

Chapter 6: Memory and Repeat - Von Restorff, H. (1933). Über die Wirkung von Bereichsbildungen im Spurenfeld. Psychologische Forschung, 18, 299-342. - Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - Ebbinghaus, H. (1885/1913). Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. New York: Teachers College.

Part 2: How Things Go Viral

Chapter 7: What "Going Viral" Really Means - Anderson, C. (2006). The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion. - Leskovec, J., Adamic, L. A., & Huberman, B. A. (2007). The dynamics of viral marketing. ACM Transactions on the Web, 1(1), Article 5.

Chapter 8: The Algorithm - Covington, P., Adams, J., & Sargin, E. (2016). Deep neural networks for YouTube recommendations. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. - Pariser, E. (2011). The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin Press.

Chapter 9: The Share Trigger - Berger, J. (2013). Contagious: Why Things Catch On. New York: Simon & Schuster. - Berger, J., & Milkman, K. L. (2012). What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192-205.

Chapter 10: Network Effects - Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380. - Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998). Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks. Nature, 393, 440-442. - Barabási, A. L., & Albert, R. (1999). Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science, 286(5439), 509-512.

Part 3: Storytelling for Screens

Chapters 13-18: Storytelling - McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: HarperCollins. - Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. - Gottschall, J. (2012). The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. - Zak, P. J. (2015). Why your brain loves good storytelling. Harvard Business Review, October 28, 2015. - Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction. Psychiatry, 19(3), 215-229.

Part 4: Sight and Sound

Chapters 19-24: Production - Zettl, H. (2017). Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics (8th ed.). Boston: Cengage. - Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2017). Film Art: An Introduction (11th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. - Blauert, J. (1997). Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization (revised ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Part 5: Content Genres That Click

Chapter 25: Comedy - McGraw, A. P., & Warren, C. (2010). Benign violations: Making immoral behavior funny. Psychological Science, 21(8), 1141-1149. - Morreall, J. (2016). Philosophy of humor. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Chapter 28: ASMR and Sensory Content - Fredborg, B., Clark, J., & Smith, S. D. (2017). An examination of personality traits associated with autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 247. - Smith, S. D., Fredborg, B. K., & Kornelsen, J. (2017). An examination of the default mode network in individuals with autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). Social Neuroscience, 12(4), 361-365.

Chapter 31: Wholesome Content - Haidt, J. (2003). Elevation and the positive psychology of morality. In C. L. M. Keyes & J. Haidt (Eds.), Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Part 6: The Creator's Strategy

Chapter 34: Analytics - Provost, F., & Fawcett, T. (2013). Data Science for Business. Sebastopol: O'Reilly Media.

Chapter 36: Community - Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. - Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Monterey: Brooks/Cole.

Chapter 37: Collaboration - Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380. (See Part 2) - Grant, A. (2013). Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. New York: Viking.

Part 7: The Bigger Picture

Chapter 38: Ethics and Mental Health - Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151. - Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117-140. - Fardouly, J., Diedrichs, P. C., Vartanian, L. R., & Halliwell, E. (2015). Social comparisons on social media. Body Image, 13, 38-45. - Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Media use is linked to lower psychological wellbeing. Psychiatric Quarterly, 90(2), 311-331. - Orben, A., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(2), 173-182. - Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. New York: Penguin Press.

Chapter 39: Monetization - Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup. New York: Crown Business. - Federal Trade Commission. (2023). Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers. Washington, DC: FTC.

Chapter 40: First 90 Days - Young, S. (2019). Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsell Your Peers, and Accelerate Your Career. New York: Harper Business. - Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits. New York: Avery.