Imagine a graph that shows how cultural attention is distributed. At the far left are the hits. The bestselling novels, the most-streamed songs, the blockbuster films. These works attract enormous audiences and dominate public visibility. But the graph does not end there. As it moves to the right, attention drops

Every day, audiences encounter hundreds of cultural messages. Event listings. Newsletter subjects. Instagram posts. Exhibition announcements. Most are processed and dismissed before the brain registers them as worth reading. This is not disengagement, but efficiency. The human brain uses automatic processing to manage information overload. When incoming stimuli match a