Attention Span Quotes

I'd have a longer attention span if there weren't so many shiny things.

Our attention span is shot. We've all got Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD or OCD or one of these disorders with three letters because we don't have the time or patience to pronounce the entire disorder. That should be a disorder right there, TBD - Too Busy Disorder.

How in the world did they just jump from politics, to a ball, and now to daimon attacks? And here I’d thought I had the attention span of an ant on Red Bull.

People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that's the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.

He has the attention span of a hummingbird.

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.

The more you engage with the outside world, the more you’ll be able to turn down the volume on those worries. You’ll see that they’re unfounded. You’ll see that the world is a very busy and varied place and most people have the attention span of a gnat. They’ve already forgotten what happened. They don’t think about it. There will have been five more sensations since your incident.

An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers?

She's always getting into trouble because she gets bored really really easily. [...] My mum says it's because Celia has an attention span the size of a sesame seed. Celia's mum says it's because Celia's identity is unfurling itself slowly, like a tulip bud, and it's a breathtakingly beautiful thing to see.

I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing- a sunset or an old shoe- in absolute and simple amazement.

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It’s sort of a blog for people with attention spans.

Books are better than television, the internet, or the computer for educating and maintaining freedom. Books matter because they state ideas and then attempt to thoroughly prove them. They have an advantage precisely because they slow down the process, allowing the reader to internalize, respond, react and transform. The ideas in books matter because time is taken to establish truth, and because the reader must take the time to consider each idea and either accept it or, if he rejects it, to think through sound reasons for doing so. A nation of people who write and read is a nation with the attention span to earn an education and free society if they choose.

Daemon had not stayed. My smile slipped from my face. He was standing by the window, his back to me. “I got bored.” “I wasn’t even gone five minutes.” “I have a short attention span.

The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all.

His attention span was not long, shall we say?

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.

Of course, it would help if she could stay focused, but she had the attention span of a sick flea.’ (Sunshine)

I blame social media for their short attention spans. When you can't even take the time to listen to a god hold forth, that's just sad.

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.

The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

And here I’d thought I had the attention span of an ant on Red Bull.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. It was the future, and everything sucked.

Five houses?” Lothaire had sneered, cutting Trehan off. “You all live under one roof now. Mine. Because I’m the king of the castle.” Then his red eyes had grown vacant, and he’d begun muttering about “Lizvetta’s lingerie.” Trehan had been … underwhelmed by the Enemy of Old’s attention span.

I’d have a longer attention span if there weren’t so many shiny things. —T-SHIRT

This story is the ultimate example of American’s biggest political problem. We no longer have the attention span to deal with any twenty-first century crisis. We live in an economy that is immensely complex and we are completely at the mercy of the small group of people who understand it – who incidentally often happen to be the same people who built these wildly complex economic systems. We have to trust these people to do the right thing, but we can’t, because, well, they’re scum. Which is kind of a big problem, when you think about it.

Drosophila,” I said, remembering the word. “What?” Lily asked. “Why do girls always fall for guys with the at ention span of drosophila?” “What?” “Fruit flies. Guys with the attention span of fruit flies.” “Because they’re hot?” “This,” I told her, “is not the time for being truthful.

The whole bloody world's got a commitment problem. It's the three-minute culture. It's a global attention-span deficit.

I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.

It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West - one captured by the phrase ''homo distractus,'' a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.

But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention

The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don't yield immediate solutions.

This poem is very long So long, in fact, that your attention span May be stretched to its very limits But that’s okay It’s what’s so special about poetry See, poetry takes time We live in a time Call it our culture or society It doesn’t matter to me cause neither one rhymes A time where most people don’t want to listen Our throats wait like matchsticks waiting to catch fire Waiting until we can speak No patience to listen But this poem is long It’s so long, in fact, that during the time of this poem You could’ve done any number of other wonderful things You could’ve called your father Call your father You could be writing a postcard right now Write a postcard When was the last time you wrote a postcard? You could be outside You’re probably not too far away from a sunrise or a sunset Watch the sun rise Maybe you could’ve written your own poem A better poem You could have played a tune or sung a song You could have met your neighbor And memorized their name Memorize the name of your neighbor You could’ve drawn a picture (Or, at least, colored one in) You could’ve started a book Or finished a prayer You could’ve talked to God Pray When was the last time you prayed? Really prayed? This is a long poem So long, in fact, that you’ve already spent a minute with it When was the last time you hugged a friend for a minute? Or told them that you love them? Tell your friends you love them …no, I mean it, tell them Say, I love you Say, you make life worth living Because that, is what friends do Of all of the wonderful things that you could’ve done During this very, very long poem You could have connected Maybe you are connecting Maybe we’re connecting See, I believe that the only things that really matter In the grand scheme of life are God and people And if people are made in the image of God Then when you spend your time with people It’s never wasted And in this very long poem I’m trying to let a poem do what a poem does: Make things simpler We don’t need poems to make things more complicated We have each other for that We need poems to remind ourselves of the things that really matter To take time A long time To be alive for the sake of someone else for a single moment Or for many moments Cause we need each other To hold the hands of a broken person All you have to do is meet a person Shake their hand Look in their eyes They are you We are all broken together But these shattered pieces of our existence don’t have to be a mess We just have to care enough to hold our tongues sometimes To sit and listen to a very long poem A story of a life The joy of a friend and the grief of friend To hold and be held And be quiet So, pray Write a postcard Call your parents and forgive them and then thank them Turn off the TV Create art as best as you can Share as much as possible, especially money Tell someone about a very long poem you once heard And how afterward it brought you to them

I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away.

Eden," Cyrus snapped bringing her back to the present. "I have a sword pointed at you. Will you please focus

My attention span and my available time and my caring-whatsoever-about-this-mess are not guaranteed to exist in Later Land, so I can’t go there.

There are limits to the human attention span, which is why a pitch must be brief, concise, and interesting,

Attention span of a – what was I saying?

Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

If we give priority to the outer life, our inner life will be dark and scary. We will not know what to do with solitude. We will be deeply uncomfortable with self-examination, and we will have an increasingly short attention span for any kind of reflection. Even more seriously, our lives will lack integrity. Outwardly, we will need to project confidence, spiritual and emotional health and wholeness, while inwardly we may be filled with self-doubts, anxieties, self-pity, and old grudges.

These days. Most of us have the attention span of a meth-addicted squirrel.

I love reading things on twitter its all well within my attention span of 140 characters.

This is why I suck at meditation. I have the attention span of a flea that forgot to take his ADHD meds.

I’d always wanted to play an instrument myself, but my folks didn’t have the dough to buy me one, and I didn’t have the patience to learn anyway. My attention span was five seconds.

These days, many of the younger generation lacked a serious work ethic and, having been hooked on tech and social media most of their lives, had the attention span of a Chihuahua with ADHD.

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 people’s attention spans. They’re 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. It’s not their goal, any more than ExxonMobil deliberately wants to melt the Arctic. But it’s an inescapable effect of their current business model.

The whole bloody world's got a commitment problem. It's the three-minute culture. It's a global attention-span deficit. It's typical of men to annex a global trend and turn it into a male device to reject women to make themselves feel clever and us feel stupid. It's nothing but fuckwittage.

I don't like phones. You can't be sure people are paying attention to you when you're talking to them.

researchers worry that heavy use of interactive media can, over time, reduce attention spans. The fear is that we grow so accustomed to frequent bursts of stimulation, we have trouble feeling satisfied in their absence.

Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed “civic demobilization,” conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses.

The 1:1:1 method can be summed up as starting a story as close to the end as possible. Most stories end before they get to the end, in terms of impact on the listener, their attention span, and the energy that you have to tell it.

Yeah…I need to nip this Dean idea in the bud. I don’t know why he’s so eager to jump into bed with me again, but I’m confident he’ll get over it eventually. The guy has the attention span of a fruit fly, and the affection-giving habits of a puppy, offering his sexual devotion to whoever happens to be holding the treat. By which I mean the vagina.

Storytelling--that's not the future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive.

Rather, our eyes have become lazy, our attention spans atrophied. Our self-preoccupation had reduced us to tunnel vision.

He says my number one quality is my attention span and I should never let anyone tell me otherwise.

And here I'd thought I had the attention span of an ant on Red Bull.

In 2000, Microsoft Canada reported that the average human had an attention span of twelve seconds; by 2013 that number had fallen to eight seconds. (According to Microsoft, a goldfish, by comparison, has an average attention span of nine seconds.)

A woman's touch?!' he repeated, 'What is he thinking hermano? Stukeley frowned. ''Captain doesn't know whether it's dinnertime or doomsday, mate. That's the state Lady Losckwood's got him in.We'be tried to talk some sense into him, but it just goes in one ear and out the other. IT's not as if he had much of an attention span to begin with, but since Lady Muck came on to the scene...

Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.)

We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground... Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.

The imaginary child implied by the toys on exhibit in Hong Kong was impossible to reconcile with my actual child. I didn't think I'd like to meet the imaginary child they implied. That child was mad with contradictions. He was a machine-gun-toting, Chopin-playing psychopath with a sugar high and a short attention span.

Because of the way grief impacts the mind and cognitive processes, you’ve probably also lost interest in things you used to enjoy, your intellectual faculties may have changed, and your memory and attention span may be virtually nonexistent.

I don't want to be looked at and grab attention, that's exhibitionism.. I would rather be seen more for my intelligence, for my elegance, for not being just another girl seeking attention. I don't want to catch someone's eyes because those kind of attention spans are short and easily shifted to the next exhibitionist, I would rather stay in the memory as someone who refused to be a performer yet made an impact.

During discussions in his office, Bradlee frequently picked up an undersize sponge-rubber basketball from the table and tossed it toward a hoop attached by suction cups to the picture window. The gesture was indicative both of the editor's short attention span and of a studied informality. There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee: Boston Brahmin, Harvard, the World War II Navy, press attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, police-beat reporter, news-magazine political reporter and Washington bureau chief of Newsweek. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

There's no way you could last a sit-down with Luther. He'd end up exorcising you when you snapped." "It could be entertaining," Neil said. "It could be," Andrew allowed. "Let's all go," Neil said. "Aaron will agree for Nicky's sake and Nicky can see if his parents have come around. There's no way you'll let Kevin that far out of your sights, so take him with you. I'll tag along so you can harass me instead of Luther. Imagine how uncomfortable Nicky's parents will be if they have to contend with the five of us." "Or we could stay here." "Not as interesting," Neil said. "Appealing to my nonexistent attention span is a cheap trick," Andrew said. "But is it effective?" "You wish it was." "Please?" "I hate that word." "Does your shrink know you have a grudge against half of the English language?" Neil asked, but Andrew only grinned.

An ambitious, paradoxical world we live in - of short attention spans paired with the massive fear of being forgotten too soon.

I’d have a longer attention span if there weren’t so many shiny things. —T-

An hour later, we’d indulged in the traditional St Mary’s ritual for dealing with any sort of crisis, which is to imbibe vast reservoirs of tea. People laugh, but it works. By the time the kettle has boiled, the tea made, the amount of sugar added has been silently criticised, the tea blown on and finally drunk … all this takes time, and if you’re a member of St Mary’s with the attention-span of a privet hedge, then you’ve forgotten what you were arguing about in the first place.

Choosing to listen actively to someone, looking them squarely in the eyes, and purposely remembering the major points may take more than the 15 seconds that defines the attention span of the average adult, but will add value and honor and dignity to the person with whom you are interacting.

My adult life has been a patchwork of projects, most of which were fleeting fancies of overreaching vision. I tend to seize on things, only to abandon them due to a lack of time, talent or inclination.

Everything, every cell, every atom in the existence can be a doorway to the beyond if you go steadily at it. But the problem is, people keep shifting and shifting and shifting. That is the biggest problem with today’s world, like never before. People think it is a virtue for them to say, “Our attention spans are very short.” If you keep shifting, nothing happens. Which way you want to go, I am not deciding that – go wherever you want to go, but steadily. Not every day altering it, altering it, altering it.

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where “the long term” is measured at least in centuries.

But that’s the thing about anxiety, it doesn’t care if something is rational or not. It takes hold of your mind and squeezes tighter and tighter until it can’t be ignored, demanding your undivided attention. It turns from insignificant to all-consuming in the span of a breath, a fog so thick it’s impossible to see through, and no amount of breathing or counting or visualizing undoes it.

I want to lengthen, not shorten, my attention span, and most of the material splendors of the twenty-first century bully me in the opposite direction. The fault is mine, I'll admit. I'm too slow-witted, reluctant to evolve, constitutionally unable to get with the program. I can't afford the newest gadgets and I'm not a natural multitasker.

Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity. If you don’t “transform,” if you don’t find something beautiful inside this, you’ve failed. And if you don’t do it quickly, following that narrative arc from incident to transformation within our collective attention span, you’re not living the right story.

Are you saying I have a short attention span?” “Not at all. I’m saying there’s a fire in you that drives everything you do, that makes you need to better the world and those you love. To stand up for those you can’t. It’s one of the wonderful things about you.

When we suffer prolonged anxiety, we have a tendency to become self-obsessed...You believe the whole world is thinking about you constantly. You believe the world is judging you and talking about you...The more you engage with the outside world, the more you'll be able to turn down the volume on those worries. You'll see that they're unfounded. You'll see that the world is a very busy and varied place and most people have the attention span of a gnat. They've already forgotten what happened. They don't think about it.

One of my favorite apparent discrepancies—I read John for years without realizing how strange this one is—comes in Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the last address that Jesus delivers to his disciples, at his last meal with them, which takes up all of chapters 13 to 17 in the Gospel according to John. In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, where are you going?” A few verses later Thomas says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going” (John 14:5). And then, a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, “Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” (John 16:5). Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters, creating an odd kind of disconnect.

Another subtle but worrisome effect television has on its viewers is its tendency to promote passivity and a lack of creativity. Watching television requires little mental activity on the viewer’s part. You simply sit and let the images flow by. Some research suggests that this sort of nonparticipatory viewing fosters a short attention span, making it hard for children to apply themselves in school. Obesity

Like serious reading itself, travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.

Ours is an age of onrushing turbo-capitalism, wherein the present feels more abbreviated than it used to be – at least for the world's privileged classes who live surrounded by technological time-savers that often compound the sensation of not having enough time. Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental justice. If, under neoliberalism, the gulf between the enclaved rich and outcast poor has become ever more pronounced, ours is also an era of enclaved time wherein for many speed has become self-justifying, propulsive ethic that renders "uneventful" violence (to those who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak claimant on our time. The attosecond pace of our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment, prompts us to keep flicking and clicking distractedly in an insatiable –often insensate– quest for quicker sensation".

There is an aversion to long chunks of sentences...The dire problem is that long chunks of sentences are still the best way humans have to express complex thoughts, intricate observations, fleeting emotions-the whole range of what we are...It is unclear whether the American attention span can support book reading for much longer...

The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled with the clicker culture of mass media, in which attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, the movies, the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible!, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Loose Change, Zeitgeist: The Movie. Mysteries, magic, myths, and monsters. The occult and the supernatural. Conspiracies and cabals. The face on Mars and aliens on Earth. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. ESP and psi. UFOs and ETIs. OBEs and NDEs. JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr.—alphabet conspiracies. Altered states and hypnotic regression. Remote viewing and astroprojection. Ouija boards and tarot cards. Astrology and palm reading. Acupuncture and chiropractic. Repressed memories and false memories. Talking to the dead and listening to your inner child. It’s all an obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture, reality and fantasy, nonfiction and science fiction. Cue dramatic music. Darken the backdrop. Cast a shaft of light across the host’s face. Trust no one. The truth is out there. I want to believe.

The world is awash with terrible arguments, conflict, divisiveness, fake news, victimhood, exploitation, prejudice, bigotry, blame, shouting, and miniscule attention spans. When cat memes attract more attention than murders, is logic dead? When a headline goes viral regardless of its veracity, has rationality become futile? Too often, people make simple and dramatic statements for effect, impact, acclaim, and to try and grab some limelight in a world where endless sources are competing relentlessly for our attention all the time.

That concentrating intently on anything is very hard work.

Certainly we can say that the pace of modern life, increased and supported by our technology in general and our personal electronics in particular, has resulted in a short attention span and an addiction to the influx of information. A mind so conditioned has little opportunity to think critically, and even less chance to experience life deeply by being in the present moment. A complex life with complicated activities, relationships and commitments implies a reflexive busy-ness that supplants true thinking and feeling with knee-jerk reactions. It is a life high in stress and light on substance, at least in the spiritually meaningful dimensions of being.

Dear Ms. Dunne, I was hoping that you could come to the school to discuss Katie’s rapidly deteriorating behavior in class. Her attention span is short and she distracts other students by her note-passing. How does Wednesday after school sound? You can reach me at the school. You know the number. Ms. Casey To Katie, What do you mean your mum just laughed? From Toby Ahern, Cecelia (2005-02-01). Love, Rosie (p. 99). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to our lives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’re doing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on an album and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.

Of course that was before reality TV, Twitter, Twaddle, and the like managed to reduce the average attention span of most of the world’s population to two minutes, wither our long-term memory to fourteen months, and convince us that the most admirable of all individuals are not the likes of George Washington, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jonas Salk, Mother Teresa, and Nikola Tesla, but instead whatever celebrity just won Dancing with the Stars and whatever dancing cat just drew ten million hits for its YouTube video.

As it moves closer, Galen can make out smaller bodies within the mass. Whales. Sharks. Sea turtles. Stingrays. And he knows exactly what’s happening. The darkening horizon engages the full attention of the Aerna; the murmurs grow louder the closer it gets. The darkness approaches like a mist, eclipsing the natural snlight from the surface. An eclipse of fish. With each of his rapid heartbeats, Galen thinks he can feel the actual years disappear from his life span. A wall of every predator imaginable, and every kind of prey swimming in between, fold themselves around the edges of the hot ridges. The food chain hovers toward, over them, around them as a unified force. And Emma is leading it. Nalia gasps, and Galen guesses she recognizes the white dot in the middle of the wall. Syrena on the outskirts of the Arena frantically rush to the center, the tribunal all but forgotten in favor of self-preservation. The legion of sea life circles the stadium, effectively barricading the exits and any chance of escaping. Galen can’t decide if he’s proud or angry when Emma leaves the safety of her troops to enter the Arena, hitching a ride on the fin of a killer whale. When she’s but three fin-lengths away from Galen, she dismisses her escort. “Go back with the others,” she tells it. “I’ll be fine.” Galen decides on proud. Oh, and completely besotted. She gives him a curt nod to which he grins. Turning to the crowd of ogling Syrena, she says, “I am Emma, daughter of Nalia, true princess of Poseidon.” He hears murmurs of “Half-Breed” but it sounds more like awe than hatred or disgust. And why shouldn’t it? They’ve seen Paca’s display of the Gift. Emma’s has just put it to shame.

But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema. To a generation for whom everything which used to nourish the imagination because it had to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned, and chopped into little bits, the creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention; and the world which used to be so grand à la charté des lampes is diminishing in inverse ratio to the new means of spanning it; so that the more we add to its surface the smaller it becomes.

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, there’s 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. It’s pulling us more and more up onto the surface.

It true, Bigfoot career been in hole lately. Bigfoot mania of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s but distant memory. I famous for ability to not be see but don’t think I not notice you not notice. I blame music television and internet. People too lazy and stupid to appreciate conceptual artist like Bigfoot who appeal is absence.

This was how I discovered the power of journalism—not just as a force to right wrongs and change my world, but as a force that turned my anguished brain into a functioning machine. I liked many things about journalism. I liked that it was one thing people thought I was good at. I liked that it gave me a reason to go out into the world, like an explorer heading into the jungle to collect specimens. And I liked that journalism was a puzzle. You lay out your evidence and order it from most important to least; the inverted pyramid a force against woeful attention spans and chaos. I could take feelings and injustices and even tragedies and figure out a way to shape them all into something purposeful. Something controlled.

Just in time to pick up the shells after the shoot-out is over, I'm sure. I've known a few analysts and number crunchers. You work with paper, computers, pore over printouts-charts, graphs, scatter plots but you don't deal with people. You're more comfortable with bits and bytes," Caston tilted his head. "John Henry did beat the steam drill once. Maybe you were sleeping in when the information age dawned. Today, technology spans borders. It watches. It hears. It registers patterns, small statistical perturbations, and if we're willing to pay attention--" "It can hear, but it can't listen. It can watch, but it can't observe And it sure as hell can't converse with the men and women we've got to deal with. There's no substitute for that, goddammit.

Throughout the human life span there remains a constant two-way interaction between psychological states and the neurochemistry of the frontal lobes, a fact that many doctors do not pay enough attention to. One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. The dominant tendency is to explain mental conditions by deficiencies of the brain’s chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters. As Daniel J. Siegel has sharply remarked, “We hear it said everywhere these days that the experience of human beings comes from their chemicals.” Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin — and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. The answer is Prozac, which increases serotonin levels in the brain. Attention deficit is thought to be due in part to an undersupply of dopamine, one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters, crucial to attention and to experiencing reward states. The answer is Ritalin. Just as Prozac elevates serotonin levels, Ritalin or other psychostimulants are thought to increase the availability of dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal areas. This is believed to increase motivation and attention by improving the functioning of areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although they carry some truth, such biochemical explanations of complex mental states are dangerous oversimplifications — as the neurologist Antonio Damasio cautions: "When it comes to explaining behavior and mind, it is not enough to mention neurochemistry... The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. The deficiencies and imbalances of brain chemicals are as much effect as cause. They are greatly influenced by emotional experiences. Some experiences deplete the supply of neurotransmitters; other experiences enhance them. In turn, the availability — or lack of availability — of brain chemicals can promote certain behaviors and emotional responses and inhibit others. Once more we see that the relationship between behavior and biology is not a one-way street.

You’ve probably also noted the impacts of virtual distraction on your own and others’ behaviors: memory loss, inability to concentrate, being asked to repeat what you just said, miscommunication the norm, getting lost online and wasting time you don’t have, withdrawing from the real world. The list of what’s being lost is a description of our best human capacities—memory, meaning, relating, thinking, learning, caring. There is no denying the damage that’s been done to humans as technology took over—our own Progress Trap. The impact on children’s behavior is of greatest concern for its present and future implications. Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, a highly skilled physician in rehabilitation, is author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. He describes our children’s behavior in ways that I notice in my younger grandchildren: “We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.”17 These very disturbing behaviors are not just emotional childish reactions. Our children are behaving as addicts deprived of their drug. Brain imaging studies show that technology stimulates brains just like cocaine does.

Everyone has had the experience of suddenly feeling intense physiological and psychological shifts internally at trading glances with another person; such shifts can be exquisitely pleasurable or unpleasant. How one person gazes at another can alter the other’s electrical brain patterns, as registered by EEGS, and may also cause physiological changes in the body. The newborn is highly susceptible to such influences, with a direct effect on the maturation of brain structures. The effects of maternal moods on the electrical circuitry of the infant’s brain were demonstrated by a study at the University of Washington, Seattle. Positive emotions are associated with increased electrical activity in the left hemisphere. It is known that depression in adults is associated with decreased electrical activity in the circuitry of the left hemisphere. With this in mind, the Seattle study compared the EEGS of two groups of infants: one group whose mothers had symptoms of postpartum depression, the other whose mothers did not. “During playful interactions with the mothers designed to elicit positive emotion,” the researchers reported, “infants of non-depressed mothers showed greater left than right frontal brain activation.” The infants of depressed mothers “failed to show differential hemispheric activation,” meaning that the left-side brain activity one would anticipate from positive, joyful infant-mother exchanges did not occur — despite the mothers’ best efforts. Significantly, these effects were noted only in the frontal areas of the brain, where the centers for the self-regulation of emotion are located. In addition to EEG changes, infants of depressed mothers exhibit decreased activity levels, gaze aversion, less positive emotion and greater irritability. Maternal depression is associated with diminished infant attention spans. Summarizing a number of British studies, Dale F. Hay, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, suggests “that the experience of the mother’s depression in the first months of life may disrupt naturally occurring social processes that entrain and regulate the infant’s developing capacities for attention.

Last Night’s Moon," “When will we next walk together under last night’s moon?” - Tu Fu March aspens, mist forest. Green rain pins down the sea, early evening cyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedy toques of low tide, pillow lava’s black spill indelible in the sand. Unbroken broken sea. — Rain sharpens marsh-hair birth-green of the spring firs. In the bog where the dead never disappear, where river birch drown, the surface strewn with reflection. This is the acid-soaked moss that eats bones, keeps flesh; the fermented ground where time stops and doesn’t; dissolves the skull, preserves the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud. — In the autumn that made love necessary, we stood in rubber boots on the sphagnum raft and learned love is soil–stronger than peat or sea– melting what it holds. The past is not our own. Mole’s ribbon of earth, termite house, soaked sponge. It rises, keloids of rain on wood; spreads, milkweed galaxy, broken pod scattering the debris of attention. Where you are while your body is here, remembering in the cold spring afternoon. The past is a long bone. — Time is like the painter’s lie, no line around apple or along thigh, though the apple aches to its sweet edge, strains to its skin, the seam of density. Invisible line closest to touch. Lines of wet grass on my arm, your tongue’s wet line across my back. All the history in the bone-embedded hills of your body. Everything your mouth remembers. Your hands manipullate in the darkness, silver bromide of desire darkening skin with light. — Disoriented at great depths, confused by the noise of shipping routes, whales hover, small eyes squinting as they consult the magnetic map of the ocean floor. They strain, a thousand miles through cold channels; clicking thrums of distant loneliness bounce off seamounts and abyssal plains. They look up from perpetual dusk to rods of sunlight, a solar forest at the surface. Transfixed in the dark summer kitchen: feet bare on humid linoleum, cilia listening. Feral as the infrared aura of the snake’s prey, the bees’ pointillism, the infrasonic hum of the desert heard by the birds. The nighthawk spans the ceiling; swoops. Hot kitchen air vibrates. I look up to the pattern of stars under its wings.

A Personal Atonement At some point the multitudinous sins of countless ages were heaped upon the Savior, but his submissiveness was much more than a cold response to the demands of justice. This was not a nameless, passionless atonement performed by some detached, stoic being. Rather, it was an offering driven by infinite love. This was a personalized, not a mass atonement. Somehow, it may be that the sins of every soul were individually (as well as cumulatively) accounted for, suffered for, and redeemed for, all with a love unknown to man. Christ tasted "death for every man" (Hebrews 2:9; emphasis added), perhaps meaning for each individual person. One reading of Isaiah suggests that Christ may have envisioned each of us as the atoning sacrifice took its toll—"when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed" (Isaiah 53:10; emphasis added; see also Mosiah 15:10–11). Just as the Savior blessed the "little children, one by one" (3 Nephi 17:21); just as the Nephites felt his wounds "one by one" (3 Nephi 11:15); just as he listens to our prayers one by one; so, perhaps, he suffered for us, one by one. President Heber J. Grant spoke of this individual focus: "Not only did Jesus come as a universal gift, He came as an individual offering with a personal message to each one of us. For each one of us He died on Calvary and His blood will conditionally save us. Not as nations, communities or groups, but as individuals."55 Similar feelings were shared by C. S. Lewis: "He [Christ] has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world."56 Elder Merrill J. Bateman spoke not only of the Atonement's infinite nature, but also of its intimate reach: "The Savior's atonement in the garden and on the cross is intimate as well as infinite. Infinite in that it spans the eternities. Intimate in that the Savior felt each person's pains, sufferings, and sicknesses."57 Since the Savior, as a God, has the capacity to simultaneously entertain multiple thoughts, perhaps it was not impossible for the mortal Jesus to contemplate each of our names and transgressions in concomitant fashion as the Atonement progressed, without ever sacrificing personal attention for any of us. His suffering need never lose its personal nature. While such suffering had both macro and micro dimensions, the Atonement was ultimately offered for each one of us.

Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” Consider Shakespeare: we’re most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton tracked the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, measuring how often they’re performed and how widely they’re praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development. In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit. Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies. In science, Einstein wrote papers on general and special relativity that transformed physics, but many of his 248 publications had minimal impact. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.* Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone. But during that period, he filed well over one hundred patents for other inventions as diverse as stencil pens, a fruit preservation technique, and a way of using magnets to mine iron ore—and designed a creepy talking doll. “Those periods in which the most minor products appear tend to be the same periods in which the most major works appear,” Simonton notes. Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.