The Science Behind Catch the Ghost

Rewire your brain: The science-backed path to peak focus.

A stylised anatomical illustration of a human brain.

Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences.

Other companies use neuroscience to get you addicted to scrolling through their social media platforms. With Catch the Ghost, we use neuroscience to help you , , , and .

See the peer-reviewed research →

A 364-day streak badge on the Catch the Ghost app, with an encouragement message and a weekly streak calendar below it.

An illustrated Albert Einstein in a grey suit, one of the guides you can choose in Catch the Ghost.

Positive reinforcement & neurobiological reinforcement

Catch the Ghost harnesses the power of positive reinforcement, transforming each focus session into a rewarding experience. Every completed session ends in something you actually wanted: another chapter of a life you are partway through, coins, a streak that holds. Rewards that arrive reliably at the end of an effort are exactly the conditions under which the brain's dopaminergic reward system learns to value the effort itself, which is how focus stops being a thing you force and starts being a thing you look forward to.

Intrinsic Motivation & Curiosity

Our app ignites your intrinsic motivation. Revealing apparitions, finishing a ghost's story, and following the threads through the Ghost Universe are satisfying in themselves, and they tap into your natural curiosity rather than bribing you past it. This internal drive makes the journey towards your goals as rewarding as the achievements themselves.

Hyperbolic Discounting

Catch the Ghost cleverly navigates the tendency of hyperbolic discounting by offering immediate, tangible rewards. This approach aligns your short-term actions with your long-term aspirations, ensuring that the focus and productivity you cultivate today build the foundation for your future success.

Planning Fallacy

We counter the planning fallacy by encouraging a realistic, achievable pace. Catch the Ghost fosters an environment where small, consistent actions are celebrated, guiding you to accurately assess your efforts and appreciate the true value of steady progress.

Mechanic by mechanic

Every feature traces to a finding.

It is easy to say an app is science-backed. It is harder to say which paper made you build which button. Here is that map, for the four newest parts of Catch the Ghost. Where a study argued against something we wanted to ship, we followed the study.

Apparition chapters

An unfinished story is a stronger pull than a finished one.

Curiosity, on the information-gap account, is not a pleasant appetite. It is a felt deprivation that appears the moment you become aware of a gap between what you know and what you want to know, and it gets sharper as the gap closes rather than duller. That is why a ghost is not one picture. It is a life told in order, from a cold open to a final chapter, so there is always a specific missing piece rather than a vague pile of more. Narrative research adds the second half: readers who are absorbed into a story are moved by it in a way that readers who are merely informed are not.

Focus Together

People try harder when someone is counting on them.

Social facilitation, one of the oldest reliable findings in social psychology, is that the mere presence of others changes your effort on a task. The Köhler effect sharpens it: pair two people so that the outcome depends on both, and the weaker performer persists dramatically longer than they do alone. That result dictated the shape of our bonus rather than the other way around. It pays only when at least two people finish, because that is the condition the effect actually requires, and a partner who stops early never subtracts from anyone, because guilt is not the mechanism doing the work here.

Your daily focus goal

"Do your best" is the weakest instruction there is.

Thirty-five years of goal-setting research converge on the same result: specific, moderately difficult goals beat vague encouragement, and effort scales with difficulty until the goal outruns ability. So the app asks you for a number of sessions per day rather than telling you to focus more, and it proposes a starting number based on how distracted you told it you are. The reminder is the second finding. Deciding in advance when you will act, rather than simply intending to act, has a medium-to-large effect on whether you do.

Streaks, and repairing them

One missed day does not undo a habit.

When ninety-six people were tracked forming a new daily habit, automaticity climbed an asymptotic curve to a median of about 66 days, with a range from under three weeks to over two hundred days. The finding we took most seriously was the smaller one: missing a single day did not measurably damage the trajectory. An app that responds to one bad Tuesday by resetting a year of work to zero is telling you something the evidence does not support. So the streak is real, it is computed on our servers rather than trusted to your phone, and it can be bought back.

Read the studies behind each of these →

Burnout

Our app is designed to prevent burnout by promoting balanced, moderated focus sessions. We understand the importance of mental well-being and ensure that Catch the Ghost supports a sustainable, healthy approach to productivity, safeguarding your enthusiasm and mental energy.

Commitment Devices

Catch the Ghost gives sessions stakes you choose. Ending a session early forfeits the apparition you were catching; the coins you have already earned are never taken. If you want stronger stakes, Deep Focus and the Sleep Timer each let you stake 25 to 500 coins on finishing the session: complete it and the stake returns with a bonus (10% on Deep Focus, 20% on the Sleep Timer), quit and the staked coins are forfeited. This is a classic commitment device, and the research on self-imposed stakes is consistent. In one randomized field experiment, savers offered an account that voluntarily restricted their own withdrawals until they hit a target they had set themselves saved substantially more than the control group, and kept doing so after the study ended. A voluntarily chosen cost on abandonment strengthens follow-through more reliably than either pure reward or imposed penalties. Before any loss counts, three one-minute grace windows per session, counted down live on your lock screen, let you step away and come back, and a longer 5-minute window can be bought for 200 coins. The stakes are real; the language is neutral; the goal is commitment, not compliance.

Psychological Loss Aversion

Tapping into loss aversion, our app makes the idea of not completing a task less appealing than the satisfaction of success. This light yet effective form of negative reinforcement motivates you to maintain focus, turning the natural human tendency to avoid loss into a powerful driver of productivity and goal completion.

CATCH THE GHOST^®

Our ultimate goal.

At Aeeiee we're not just creating an app; we're crafting a science-backed journey towards peak focus and productivity. By understanding and leveraging fundamental principles of neuroscience, we've developed a tool that not only enhances your focus but also reshapes your approach to work and life. Get ready to rewire your brain and embark on the path to peak focus with Catch the Ghost.