Top highlights from Stolen Focus
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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You dont get what you dont fight for.
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Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them.
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The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other peoples emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasnt just a sign that you were better educatedbecause reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.
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When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what its like to be inside another persons head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. So maybe, he said, if you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps fiction is a kind of empathy gym, boosting your ability to empathize with other peoplewhich is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have. Together, they decided to begin to study this question scientifically.
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I don't think it's a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can't focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions--and less likely to see clearly when they fail. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can't get a handle on any of them.
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In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.
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Tristan [Harris] believes that what we are seeing is the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused.
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She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.
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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.
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goes back to the design of the brain. Its designed to pay attention to the stuff that matters to you.
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What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.
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If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesnt kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.
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The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"--which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.
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The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. Its never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.
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There's a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.
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Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention
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The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.
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The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attentionto focuswas cracking and breaking.
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At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Audenwhen he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humanswarned: We must love one another, or die.
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The more people stared at their phones, the more money these companies made. Period. The people in Silicon Valley did not want to design gadgets and websites that would dissolve peoples attention spans. Theyre not the Joker, trying to sow chaos and make us dumb. They spend a lot of their own time meditating and doing yoga. They often ban their own kids from using the sites and gadgets they design, and send them instead to tech-free Montessori schools. But their business model can only succeed if they take steps to dominate the attention spans of the wider society. Its not their goal, any more than ExxonMobil deliberately wants to melt the Arctic. But its an inescapable effect of their current business model.
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Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. That
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I now had a sense of what a movement to reclaim our attention might look like. I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can't focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can't pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely--in their neighborhoods and at school--because children who are imprisoned in their homes won't be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention. If we achieve these goals, the ability of people to pay attention would, over time, dramatically improve. Then we will have a solid core of focus that we could use to take the fight further and deeper.
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Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing thats emerged from your brain, Nathan told me. Its a new association between two things that were already there.
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The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the worlds attention burns.
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We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.
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We live in a culture that is constantly amping us up with stress and stimulation.
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The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Survey--which studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americans--found that between 2004 and 2017, the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40 percent, while for women, it was down by 29 percent. The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. 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.
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Supporters of Bolsonaro had created a video warning that his main rival, Fernando Haddad, wanted to turn all the children of Brazil into homosexuals, and that he had developed a cunning technique to do it. The video showed a baby sucking a bottle, only there was something peculiar about itthe teat of the bottle had been painted to look like a penis. This, the story that circulated said, is what Haddad will distribute to every kindergarten in Brazil. This became one of the most-shared news stories in the entire election. People in the favelas explained indignantly that they couldnt possibly vote for somebody who wanted to get babies to suck these penis-teats, and so they would have to vote for Bolsonaro instead. On these algorithm-pumped absurdities, the fate of the whole country turned. When Bolsonaro unexpectedly won the presidency, his supporters chanted Facebook! Facebook! Facebook! They knew what the algorithms had done for them.
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It could be that reading fiction, over time, boosts your empathy. But it could also be that people who are already empathetic are simply more drawn to reading novels. This makes his
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Its that their model of you is so accurate that its making predictions about you that you think are magic.
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Some 57percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year.
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started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carralandmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis.
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So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, youll make more mistakes, youll be less creative, and youll remember less of what you do.
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were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world
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Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts in your conscious mind at once. Thats it. Were very, very single-minded. We have very limited cognitive capacity. This is because of the fundamental structure of the brain, and its not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.
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Theres this thing about speed that feels great. Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that its awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out about it and learn about it. But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion: It becomes exhausting. More importantly, Sune said, what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, theres no time to reach depth.
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The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
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When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what its like to be inside another persons head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. So maybe, he said, if you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps fiction is a kind of empathy gym, boosting your ability to empathize with other peoplewhich is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have.
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We dont 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 doesnt contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. Its not a flaw in them that causes children to struggle to pay attention. Its a flaw in the world we built for them.
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You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.
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what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, theres no time to reach depth. Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes long time spans. And it takes commitment. It takes attention, right? All of these things that require depth are suffering. Its pulling us more and more up onto the surface.
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I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your minds own ability to focus deeply? I remember what Mihaly taught me are the main components of flow, and I say to myself: What would be something meaningful to me that I could do now? What is at the edge of my abilities? How can I do something that matches these criteria now? Seeking out flow, I learned, is far more effective than self-punishing shame.
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In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.
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When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other peoples emotions. It was a huge effect.
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The science is so clear on this that a recent summary explained: It is now obvious that stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long-term effects.
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the top causes of stress in the U.S. have been identified by scientists at Stanford Graduate School of Business in a major study. They are a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organizational justice, and unrealistic demands.
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If we dont change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where theres 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 the society with fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and theyre going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.
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(The one exception, intriguingly, was Wikipedia, where the level of attention on topics has held steady.)
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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.
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The truth is creepier. Its not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. Its that their model of you is so accurate that its making predictions about you that you think are magic.
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We can change habits. The way we change a habit is by understanding what the internal trigger is, and making sure that theres some kind of break between the impulse to do a behavior and the behavior itself.
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The writer James Baldwinthe man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth centurysaid: Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
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Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.
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It said that we are, collectively, experiencing a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.
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In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing thats a little bit difficult. Whats happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket thats with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.
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Its always tempting to mistake your personal decline for the decline of the human species
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He has analyzed what happens to a persons focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, or tai chi, or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies, and he has shown they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount. I asked him why. He said that we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth. If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human natureand you build that into your daily lifeyou begin to train your attention and focus. Thats why those disciplines make you smarter. Its not about humming or wearing orange robes. Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.
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The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Surveywhich studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americansfound that between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40percent, while for women, it was down by 29percent. The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year.
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A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvinewho I interviewedobserved how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes.
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