Johann Hari Stolen Focus Quotes

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

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.

You don’t get what you don’t fight for.

The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.

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.

The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It’s never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.

She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.

When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s 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 people—which is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have. Together, they decided to begin to study this question scientifically.

If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.

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.

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 world’s attention burns.

goes back to the design of the brain…. It’s designed to pay attention to the stuff that matters to you.

Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain,” Nathan told me. “It’s a new association between two things that were already there.

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.

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.

We live in a culture that is constantly amping us up with stress and stimulation.

Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year.

At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Auden—when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans—warned: “We must love one another, or die.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.

Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

(The one exception, intriguingly, was Wikipedia, where the level of attention on topics has held steady.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s always tempting to mistake your personal decline for the decline of the human species

The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.

We live in a gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do.

The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

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

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

In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a little bit difficult. What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.

if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.

The truth is creepier. It’s not that they are listening and then they 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.

One of the things that happens is that during sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day. “During slow-wave sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up more and remove metabolic waste from your brain,” Roxanne explained to me. Every night, when you go to sleep, your brain is rinsed with a watery fluid. This cerebrospinal fluid washes through your brain, flushing out toxic proteins and carrying them down to your liver to get rid of them. “So when I’m talking to college students, I call this brain-cell poop. If you can’t focus well, it might be you have too much brain-cell poop circulating.” That can explain why, when you are tired, “you get a hung-over sort of feeling”—you are literally clogged up with toxins. This positive kind of brainwashing can only happen when you are asleep.

seeing this as a debate between whether you are pro-tech or anti-tech is bogus and lets the people who stole your attention off the hook. The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?

There’s this thing about speed that feels great…. Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it’s 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, there’s no time to reach depth.

Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure of the brain,” and it’s 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.

Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego-- it loves you, it hates you, it's talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It's never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.

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’s the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.” Let them be present.

It’s not your fault you can’t focus. It’s by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

It said that we are, collectively, experiencing “a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.

I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.

I have been around a lot of addiction in my life, and I knew what I was feeling—the addicted person’s craving for the thing that numbs their nagging sense of hollowness.

What does it mean to be a society and culture so frantic that we don’t have time to dream?

we need to move beyond the idea of growth, to something called a “steady-state economy.

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.

You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.

It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.

were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world

There’s nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “It’s the only thing that ever has.

He has analyzed what happens to a person’s 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 nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. “That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. It’s not about humming or wearing orange robes.” Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.

started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis.

The writer James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Silicon Valley sells itself by articulating “a big, lofty goal—connecting everyone in the world, or whatever it is. But when you’re actually doing the day-to-day work, it’s about increasing user numbers.

We can change habits. The way we change a habit is by understanding what the internal trigger is, and making sure that there’s some kind of break between the impulse to do a behavior and the behavior itself.

I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind’s 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.

A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine—who I interviewed—observed how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes.

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 fury and penalize mercy.

If you take five milligrams of melatonin—which is often a standard dose that’s sold over the counter in the U.S.—Roxanne said you risk “blowing out your melatonin receptors,” which would make it harder to sleep without them.

I’m not ready for this, I thought. Then somewhere, from the back of my mind, I remembered something the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset said: “We cannot put off living until we are ready…. Life is fired at us point-blank.

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.

So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Once you have created these conditions, and you hit flow, you can recognize it because it’s a distinctive mental state. You feel you are purely present in the moment. You experience a loss of self-consciousness. In this state it’s like your ego has vanished and you have merged with the task—like you are the rock you are climbing.

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.

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.

If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked; who switch tasks every three minutes; who are tracked and monitored by social-media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll; who are so stressed that we become hypervigilant; who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash; who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day—then, yes, we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems.

Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. “I liken it to putting a Post-it note over your fuel-gauge indicator. You’re not giving yourself more energy—you’re just not realizing how empty you are. When the caffeine wears off, you’re doubly exhausted.

I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention's resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.

When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.

Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: “If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can’t do that, it’s really hard to do anything.

Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain,” Nathan told me. “It’s a new association between two things that were already there.” Mind-wandering allows “more extended trains of thought to unfold, which allows for more associations to be made.

As a culture, in the Western world, we work longer with each decade that passes. Ed Deci, a professor of psychology who I interviewed at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, has shown that an extra month per year has been tacked on to what, in 1969, was considered a full-time job.

The best experiences in life that I had, when I thought back on it, came from times when I had been in the mountains climbing…climbing and doing something really kind of difficult and dangerous—but within the scope of what I could do.” When you are approaching death, I thought, you won’t think about your reinforcements—the likes and retweets—you’ll think about your moments of flow.

As you become tired, your attention will indeed blink out, for a simple reason. People think you’re either awake or asleep, he told me, but he found that even if your eyes are open and you are looking around you, you can lapse—without knowing it—into a state called “local sleep.” This is where “part of the brain is awake, and part of the brain is asleep.” (It’s called local sleep because the sleep is local to one part of the brain.) In this state, you believe you are alert and mentally competent—but you aren’t. You are sitting at your desk and you look awake, but parts of your brain are asleep, and you are not able to think in a sustained way. When he studied people in this state, he found “amazingly, sometimes their eyes were open, but they couldn’t see what was in front of them.

After studying all the hidden data—the stuff that Facebook doesn’t release to the public—the company’s scientists reached a definite 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.

In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing—we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest—if you don’t replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward—you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.

If we don’t change course, he 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 the 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.

He explained that when you’re very young, if you get upset or angry, you need an adult to soothe you and calm you down. Over time, as you grow up, if you’re soothed enough, you learn to soothe yourself. You internalise the reassurance and relaxation your family gave to you. But stressed out parents, through no fault of their own, find it harder to soothe their children because they are so amped up themselves.

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.

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions. But here's the truth: this despair isn't just self-defeating; I think it's actually empirically wrong. I reminded myself - forces as powerful as the tech companies have been defeated many times in human history, and it always happens in the same way. It is when ordinary people form movements and demand something better, and they don't give up until they have achieved it.

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.

if you check your texts often while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts—you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterward, which can be much longer. He said: “If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted brain-processing time.” This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.

Your ability to develop deep focus is, I have come to believe, like a plant. To grow and flourish to its full potential, your focus needs certain things to be present: play for children and flow states for adults, to read books, to discover meaningful activities that you want to focus on, to have space to let your mind wander so you can make sense of your life, to exercise, to sleep properly, to eat nutritious food that makes it possible for you to develop a healthy brain, and to have a sense of safety.

[Marshall McLuhan] explained that 'the medium is the message.' What he meant, I think, was that when a new technology comes along, you think of it as a pipe - somebody pours information at one end, and you receive it unfiltered at the other. But it's not like that. Every time a new medium comes along - whether it's the invention of the printed book, or TV, or Twitter - and you start to use it, it's like you are putting on a new kind of goggles, each with their own special colours and lenses. Each set of goggles you put on makes you see things differently.

To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it,” Mihaly has explained. “We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?” In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing—we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest—if you don’t replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward—you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.

Some scientists used to side with my initial gut instinct—they believed it was possible for people to do several complex tasks at once. So they started to get people into labs, and they told them to do lots of things at the same time, and they monitored how well it went. What the scientists discovered is that, in fact, when people think they’re doing several things at once, they’re actually—as Earl explained—“juggling. They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.” There are three ways, he explained, in which this constant switching degrades your ability to focus. The first is called the “switch cost effect.” There is broad scientific evidence for this. Imagine you are doing your tax return and you receive a text, and you look at it—it’s only a glance, taking five seconds—and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another,” he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it, “and that takes a little bit of time.” When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.

If you’re asleep, you’re not spending money, so you’re not consuming anything. You’re not producing any products.” He explained that “during the last recession [in 2008]…they talked about global output going down by so many percent, and consumption going down. But if everybody were to spend [an] extra hour sleeping [as they did in the past], they wouldn’t be on Amazon. They wouldn’t be buying things.” If we went back to sleeping a healthy amount—if everyone did what I did in Provincetown—Charles said, “it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That’s just the cost of doing business.

I would never wait two minutes in a store without looking at my phone or reading a book. The idea of not filling every minute with stimulation panicked me, and I found it weird when I saw other people not doing it. On long train or bus journeys, whenever I would see somebody just sit there for six hours, doing nothing but stare out of the window, I would feel an urge to lean over to them and say, “I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s none of my business, but I just wanted to check— you do realize that you have a limited amount of time in which to be alive, and the clock counting down toward death is constantly ticking, and you’ll never get back these six hours you are spending doing nothing at all? And when you are dead, you’ll be dead forever? You know that, right?

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 it—the 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 couldn’t 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.

If you’re not sleeping well, your body interprets that as an emergency,” Roxanne said. “You can deprive yourself of sleep and live. We could never raise children if we couldn’t drop down on our sleep, right? We’d never survive hurricanes. You can do that—but it comes at a cost. The cost is [that] your body shifts into the sympathetic nervous system zone—so your body is like, ‘Uh-oh, you’re depriving yourself of sleep, must be an emergency, so I’m going to make all these physiological changes to prepare yourself for that emergency. Raise your blood pressure. I’m going to make you want more fast food, I’m going to make you want more sugar for quick energy. I’m going to make your heart-rate [rise].’…So it’s like all this shifts, to say—I’m ready.” Your body doesn’t know why it’s staying awake. “Your brain doesn’t know you’re sleep-deprived because you’re goofing off and watching Schitt’s Creek, right? It doesn’t know why you’re not sleeping—but the net effect is a physiological sort of alarm bell.” In

After gathering evidence on this for decades, Alan concluded that “none of what I originally believed turned out to be true,” and a “clear majority” of the kids who were later diagnosed “were not born to be ADHD. They developed these problems in reaction to their circumstances.” There was one crucial question, Alan said, that held the key to whether parents overcame these problems—one that seemed to me to tell us a lot about Sami’s work: Is there somebody giving you support? The families they studied sometimes got help from people around them. It usually wasn’t from a professional—they just found a supportive partner, or a group of friends. When their social support went up in this way, they found “the children are less likely to have problems at the next stage.” Why would this be? Alan wrote: “Parents experiencing less stress can be more responsive to their infants; then infants can become more secure.” This effect was so large that “the strongest predictor of positive change was an increase in social support available to the parents during the intervening years.” Social support is, I reflected, the main thing Sami provides to families whose children struggle with attention.

It’s one thing to have a hunch that there’s a crisis. It’s another thing to hear one of the leading neuroscientists in the world tell you we are living in a “perfect storm” that’s degrading your capacity to think. “The best we can do now,” Earl told me, is “try to get rid of the distractions as much as possible.” At one point in our conversation, he sounded quite optimistic, suggesting that we can all achieve progress on this, starting today. He said: “The brain is like a muscle. The more you use certain things, the stronger the connection’s getting, and the better things work.” If you are struggling to focus, he said, just try monotasking for ten minutes, and then allow yourself to be distracted for a minute, then monotask for another ten minutes, and so on. “As you do it, it becomes more familiar, your brain gets better and better at it, because you’re strengthening the [neural] connections involved in that behavior. And pretty soon you can do it for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, you know?…Just do it. Practice at it…. Start slow, but practice, and you’ll get there.” To achieve this, he said you have to separate yourself—for increasing periods of time—from the sources of your distraction. It’s a mistake, he said, to “try to monotask by force of will—because it’s too hard to resist that informational tap on the shoulder.

If life has accelerated, and we have become overwhelmed by information to the point that we are less and less able to focus on any of it, why has there been so little pushback? Why haven’t we tried to slow things down to a pace where we can think clearly? I was able to find the first part of an answer to this—and it’s only the first part—when I went to interview Professor Earl Miller. He has won some of the top awards in neuroscience in the world, and he was working at the cutting edge of brain research when I went to see him in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He told me bluntly that instead of acknowledging our limitations and trying to live within them, we have—en masse—fallen for an enormous delusion. There’s one key fact, he 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. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure of the brain,” and it’s 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. To pretend this was the case, we took a term that was never meant to be applied to human beings at all. In the 1960s, computer scientists invented machines with more than one processor, so they really could do two things (or more) simultaneously. They called this machine-power “multitasking.” Then we took the concept and applied it to ourselves.