In this talk we will discuss a new approach to understanding eigenfunction concentration. We characterize the features that cause an eigenfunction to saturate the standard supremum bounds in terms of the distribution of L^2 mass along geodesic tubes emanating from a point. We also show that the phenomena behind extreme supremum norm growth is identical to that underlying extreme growth of eigenfunctions when averaged along submanifolds. Using the description of concentration, we obtain quantitative improvements on the known bounds in a wide variety of settings.