Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari. 

5/5 rating. 283 pages.

Book #47 of 2023. Read November 19, 2023.

This has officially become one of my favorite books! Johann looks at the epidemic of failing attention throughout the world. 

If you talk to nearly anyone, they will tell you that they have issues focusing on things like they used to. We have hit this place where it takes a goliath effort even to do things that we purely enjoy. What’s happened!?! What (or who) has stolen focus away from us?

Johann looks at a lot of different causes – and there ARE a lot of different reasons! These range from many personal habits that are scientifically proven to hurt our attention:

– switching between tasks (and the related belief that people CAN multitask which is a myth!)

– exhaustion – both physical because of a lack of sleep, and mental because of the constant bombardment of distractions

– a lack of mind-wandering – it turns out that you taking time to yourself away from your phone, music, podcasts or anything else in order to have quiet time to think is not only NOT self-indulgent, but helps your creativity, your ability to think clearly and problem solve, and helps you be a happier person

– too much social media usage which has a plethora of problems that I think most people are aware of

– not enough reading, or sustained attention, he mentions specifically of fiction

– poor nutrition 

– the use of stimulants to help with attention deficits

These may be things that you yourself can work on, but Johann also introduces some larger societal concerns:

– the advent of surveillance capitalism – where YOU are the product; this is how today’s social media is set up. Their entire incentive structure is to make sure that you stay on the site and there is a lot of proof that the easiest way to do this is by enraging people and causing fights

– We work more than we used to both at work AND when we think we’re off the clock. Many people are expected to read email or answer calls or texts after hours, which is cutting into time that should be spent living their lives

– we have built a world where it is much harder to be healthy than not: between non-walkable cities, the easy access to highly processed food, many toxins and pollution, and a myriad of other problems

– We have taken away childhoods from nearly all kids. There is next to no time for unstructured play, that is one of the most useful ways for kids to learn all of the important skills we need in life: from problem solving, to creativity, to people skills, and more. This has been replaced either with adult-led activities that put in place the rules, or frankly with kids being more-or-less locked inside because of the parents’ fear of some boogeyman kidnapper that does not exist. 

Johann talks about some small changes that an individual can make to help with attention and focus, but I think it’s also great that he talks so much about the society-wide supports and solutions that must be made to fix this issue. He lists these as the three biggest fixes:

1. Ban surveillance capitalism

2) Introduce a four-day workweek

3) Rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely

“At the moment we think we’re prosperous if we are working ourselves ragged to buy things – most of which don’t even make us happy. He said we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don’t want a fast life – they want a good life.”

So often, its easy to read a book that is “life changing” but not actually do anything to make that happen, but I am hoping to implement some of Johann’s individual fixes. Even more than that, this has sparked a lot of thoughts about things to try to make some larger changes in our society, I am hoping to do some work on this year and next.

Legitimately, this should be a required read for every single person. We are at this place where everyone knows there’s a problem, but we don’t do anything about it. There are so many other problems in the world, but “we will need to be able to focus, to have sane conversations with each other, and to think clearly. These solutions are not going to be achieved by an addled population who are switching tasks every three minutes and screaming at each other all the time in algorithm-pumped fury.” Attention is the keystone problem that when fixed can help all others!

Additional Quotes:

“We have to return to reality. We have to reconnect with something that matters to us.”

“You don’t know how to be present! You are missing your life! You’re afraid of missing out – that’s why you are checking your screen all the time! By doing that, you are guaranteeing you are missing out! You are missing your one and only life!”

“I tried to live, but I got distracted.”

“Later I asked [Professor Joel Nigg, one of the leading experts in children’s attention problems] – if I put you in charge of the world, and you wanted to ruin people’s ability to pay attention, what would you do? He thought about it for a moment, and said: ‘Probably about what our society is doing.’”

“A study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus.”

“For the average American, [their screentime on their phone in a day is] three hours and fifteen minutes. We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.”

“If we don’t change course, [Professor Sune of the Technical University of Denmark] fears we are headed toward a world where ‘there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware’ of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of society with ‘fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.’”

“Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”

“There’s one key fact, [MIT Professor Earl Miller] said, that every human being needs to understand – and everything else he was going to explain flows from that. ‘Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts’ in your conscious mind at once. That’s it.”

“For example, a small study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that ‘technological distraction ‘ – just getting emails and calls – caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.”

“So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.”

“One study at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to take a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse. Other studies in similar scenarios have found even worse outcomes of 30 percent.”

“In fact, if you stay awake for nineteen hours straight, you become as cognitively impaired – as unable to focus and think clearly – as if you had gotten drunk.”

“Today 40 percent of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived, getting less than the necessary minimum of seven hours a night.”

“The effects of sleep deprivation, [Harvard Professor] Charles [Czeisler] found, are especially terrible for children. Adults usually respond by becoming drowsy, but kids usually respond by becoming hyperactive. He said ‘We’re chronically sleep-depriving them, so it’s no shock they’re exhibiting all the symptoms of sleep deficiency – the first and foremost of which is the [in]ability to pay attention.’”

“Our Western society is a bit ADHD-ish because we’re all sleep-deprived.”

“Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.”

“Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.”

“He realized ‘one of the ironies is there are these incredibly popular workshops at Facebook and Google about mindfulness – about creating the mental space to make decisions nonreactively – and they are also the biggest perpetrators of non-mindfulness in the world.”

“One day, James Williams – the former Google strategist I met – addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: ‘How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?’ There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.”

“I’ll ask the audience how many think Facebook is listening to their conversations, because there’s some ad that’s been served that’s just too accurate. It’s about a specific thing they never mentioned before [but they happen to have talked about offline] to a friend the day before. Now, it’s generally one-half to two-thirds of the audience that raises their hands. The truth is creepier. It’s not that they are listening and then can do targeted ad serving. It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.”

“The way our tech works now to corrode our attention was and remains a choice – by Silicon Valley, and by the wider society that lets them do it. Humans could have made a different choice then, and they can make a different choice now. You could have all this technology, Tristan told me,  but not design it to be maximally distracting. In fact, you could design it with the opposite goal: to maximally respect people’s need for sustained attention, and to interrupt them as little as possible. You could design the technology not so that it pulls people away from their deeper and more meaningful goals, but so that it helps them to achieve them.”

“But today, this attitude – condemn more, understand less – has become the default response of almost everyone, from the right to the left, as we spend our lives dancing to the tune of algorithms that reward furu and penalize mercy.”

“After studying all the hidden data – the stuff that Facebook doesn’t release to the public – the company’s scientists reached a definitive conclusion. They wrote: ‘Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,’ and ‘if left unchecked,’ the site would continue to pump its users with ‘more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.’”

“After carefully analyzing all the options, Facebook’s scientists concluded there was one solution: they said Facebook would have to abandon its current business model. Because their growth was so tied up with toxic outcomes, the company should abandon attempts at growth. The only way out was for the company to adopt a strategy that was ‘anti-growth’ – deliberately shrink, and choose to be a less wealthy company that wasn’t wrecking the world.”

“What happens to your ability to think clearly when you become more financially stressed? I learned that this has been studied carefully by Sendhil Mullainathan, professor of computational science at the University of Chicago. He was part of a team that studied sugar-cane harvesters in India. They tested their thinking skills before the harvest (when they were broke), and after the harvest (when they had a fair bit of money). It turned out that when they had the financial security that came at the end of the harvest, they were on average thirteen IQ points smarter – an extraordinary gap. Why would that be? Anyone reading this who’s ever been financially stressed knows part of the answer instinctively. When you are worried about how to survive financially, everything – from a broken washing machine to a child’s lost shoe – becomes a threat to your ability to get through the week.”

“Many of us have built our identity around working to the point of exhaustion. We call this success. In a culture built in ever-increasing speed, slowing down is hard, and most of us will feel guilty about doing it.”

“It turned out that more than 70 percent of the kids who cut out the preservatives and dyes improved their ability to pay attention, and the average improvement was a remarkable 50 percent.”

“In Canada, a study found that people who lived within fifty meters of a major road were 15 percent more likely to develop dementia than people who didn’t.”

“For example, if your mother was exposed to lead during pregnancy and she smoked cigarettes, you are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.”

“When it comes to our own attention problems as adults, we often readily acknowledge a whole range of influences on us – the rise of invasive technologies, stress, lack of sleep, and so on.”

“He showed me that the best long-term research we have is in animal studies – where the findings are sobering. I read them, and they show that if you give adolescent rats Ritalin for three weeks – which is the equivalent of giving it to a human for several years – you find that the striatum, a crucial part of the brain that deals with experiencing rewards, shrinks significantly.”

“After 14 months on stimulants, kids performed 1.8 percent better on academic tests. But kids who for the same amount of time were simply given guidance on their behavior improved by 1.6 percent.”

“The evidence couldn’t be clearer: if you stop kids from acting on their natural desire to run around, on average, their attention, and the overall health of their brains, will suffer.”

“They taught her that in fact it is when children play that they learn their most important skills – the ones they need for their whole lives.”

“One of Lenore’s intellectual mentors, Dr. Isabel Behncke, the Chilean expert on play, told me when we sat together in Scotland that the scientific evidence we have so far suggests ‘there are three main areas [of child development] where play has a major impact. One is creativity and imagination’ – it’s how you learn to think about problems and solve them. The second is ‘social bonds’ – it’s how you learn to interact with other people and socialize. And the third is ‘aliveness’ – it’s how you learn to experience joy and pleasure. The things we learn from play aren’t trivial add-ons to becoming a functioning human being, Isabel explained. They are the core of it.”

“One day, Barbara Sarnecka, an associate professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine, told Lenore that today ‘adults are saying: “Here’s the environment. I’ve already mapped it. Stop exploring.” But that’s the opposite of what childhood is.’”

“A 2004 study found that U.S. kids spent 7.5 hours more each week on academics than they had twenty years before.”

“In Aarhus in Denmark, Jan Tonnesvang, a professor of psychology there, had told me that we all need to have a sense of what he called ‘mastery’ – that we are good at something. It’s a basic human psychological need. When you feel you are good at something, you will find it much easier to focus on it, and if you feel incompetent, your attention will shrivel like a salted snail. When I listened to L.B., I realized that we have a school system right now that is so narrow that it makes a lot of kids (especially boys, I think) feel that they aren’t good at anything.”

“Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”

“The country that is often judged by international league tables to have the most successful schools in the world, Finland, is closer to these progressive models than anything we would recognize. Their children don’t go to school at all until they are seven years old – before then, they just play. Between the ages of seven and sixteen, kids arrive at school at 9 a.m. and leave at 2 p.m. They are given almost no homework, and they take almost no tests until they graduate from high school. Free play is at the beating heart of Finnish kids’ lives: by law, teachers have to give kids fifteen minutes of free play for every forty-five minutes of instruction. What’s the outcome? Only 0.1 percent of their kids are diagnosed with attention problems, and Finns are among the most literate, numerate, and happy people in the world.”

“Children have needs – and it’s our job, as adults, to create an environment that meets those needs. We don’t let them play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains drug-like additives that can make them hyper, and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that causes children to struggle to pay attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.”

“We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and our own society, and together, we are going to take them back.”

“I used to think there were no great political struggles left….How wrong I was. The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time. Its success is the prerequisite for the success of virtually all other struggles.”

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