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.

Every second you spend thinking about what you don't want in your life is a second denying focus and energy from getting what you do want. Every minute you worry about what's not working is a minute drawn away from creating what will work. And every hour spent reflecting on the disappointments of the past is an hour stolen from seeing the possibilities that your future holds.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Her life has seen little light. She is twelve years old but has a woman’s weathered poise. Her abyss-blue eyes have a piercing focus that some adults find unsettling. [...] She has fired a gun into a human head. She has watched a pile of bodies set alight. She has starved and thirsted, stolen food and given it away, and glimpsed the meaning of life by watching it end over and over.

Originally, he'd wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem, And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction - the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, to, about the "war on drugs." And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they'd think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

You know I don't understand what you mean, right?" I asked. "I'm counting on it," she said, and then her eyes focused behind me. "I think your friends are upset that I've stolen you." Suddenly I could feel all their eyes boring into my back. For once, it didn't bother me at all. "They'll survive." She grinned. "I may not give you back, though." I swallowed too loud and she laughed.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We can always restore that part of ourselves, but we can’t do it when we’re focusing all our energy on the person who abused us. As long as we believe a part of us has been “stolen,” we are distracted from the very tools needed to heal it.

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

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.

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

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

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

What’s your favorite word?” Startled, I looked up at him, unsure I’d heard him right. “My favorite word?” He nodded, slipping his glasses up his nose with a quick, practiced scrunch of his face that made him look angry and then surprised within a single second. “You have seven boxes of books up here. A wild guess tells me you like words.” I suppose I had never thought about having a favorite word, but now that he asked, I kind of liked the idea. I let my eyes lose focus as I thought. “Ranunculus,” I said after a moment. “What?” “Ranunculus. It’s a kind of flower. It’s such a weird word but the flowers are so pretty, I like how unexpected that is.” They were my Mom’s favorite, I didn’t say. “That’s a pretty girly answer.” “Well, I am a girl.” He kept his eyes on his feet but I knew I wasn’t imagining the gleam of interest I’d seen when I said ranunculus. I bet he had expected me to say unicorn or daisy or vampire. “What about you? What’s your favorite word? I bet it’s tungsten. Or, like, amphibian.” He quirked a smile, answering, “Regurgitate.” Scrunching my nose, I stared at him. “That is a gross word.” This made him smile even wider. “I like the hard consonant sounds in it. It kinda sounds like exactly what it means.” “An onomatopoeia?” I half expected trumpets to blast revelatory music from an invisible speaker in the wall from the way Elliot stared at me, lips parted and glasses slowly sliding down his nose. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m not a complete idiot, you know. You don’t have to look so surprised that I know some big words.” “I never thought you were an idiot,” he said quietly, looking toward the box and pulling out another book to hand to me. For a long time after we returned to our slow, inefficient method of unpacking the books, I could feel him looking up and watching me, tiny flashes of stolen glances. I pretended I didn’t notice.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you put shampoo into a car engine, you're not going to scratch your head when the thing conks out,' [Dale Pinnock] said. Yet every day, all over the Western world, we are putting into our bodies substances 'which are so far removed from what was intended for human fuel.

[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.

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.

Desmonde looked over to where Delilah had gone, his gaze focused on it. He smiled wryly and said softly, "You'd be surprised to know that I am a man whose heart could be stolen by a woman who loved beauty in darker things. A woman who loved chaos and disorder. A woman who loved poetry, and beautiful sonatas.

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 want to think about thinking itself, he told me, you should see it as being like a symphony. “You’ve got two violin sections, violas, cellos, basses, woodwinds, brass, percussion—but it operates as a whole. It has rhythms.” You need space in your life for the spotlight of focus—but alone, it would be like a solo oboe player on a bare stage, trying to play

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.

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.

[Bluestone's] dark eyes, which had been focused on the blue sky outside the cellblock window, shifted to Wicklow. "A lot of white folks in these parts, their ancestors were killed in what your history books call the Great Sioux Uprising. In schools, they teach that the Dakota were savages, that we rose up against our neighbors and slaughtered them." "The Sioux--Dakota--here probably have ancestors killed by whites." "But the Dakota didn't win that war. In the end, a war is always about who wins. My people had no chance. It doesn't matter that they had every reason to be angry and desperate. They'd been lied to, cheated, starved, their land and everything on it stolen. So they fought. And they lost. But the history has been written by the whites. In Black Earth County, it's the whites who believe they were set on unfairly, cruelly, and have the right to carry all that hatred in their hearts.

cruel optimism.' This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.

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.

She looked to Pippa. "Have I made it difficult for you?" Pippa hedged. "Not at all. Castleton sent news to Father just last week that he was planning to court me in earnest, and it's not as though I'm the most ordinary of debutantes." It was an understatement. Pippa was something of a bluestocking, very focused on the sciences and fascinated by the insides of living things, from plants to people. She'd once stolen a goose from the kitchens and dissected it in her bedchamber.

The mystique of rock-climbing is climbing; you get to the top of a rock glad it’s over but really wish it could go on forever. The justification of climbing is climbing, like the justification of poetry is writing. You don’t conquer anything except things in yourself…. The act of writing justifies poetry. Climbing is the same: recognizing you are a flow. The purpose of flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move up to keep the flow going.

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 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.

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.

A month passed, and it was time again for Marcus to return to his research. He had been avoiding it because it wasn’t going well. Originally, he’d wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction—the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the ’60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the ’80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.

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

It is an attention rebellion,' [Ben Stewart] said. I realised this requires a shift in how we think about ourselves. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention. We are free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and our own society, and together, we are going to take them back. At times it seemed to me that this would be a hard movement to get off the ground - but then I remembered that all the movements that have changed your life and my life were hard to get off the ground. ...What we face is, in many ways, vastly less challenging than the cliff they had to scale. They didn't give up. Often, when a person argues for social change, they are called 'naive.' The exact opposite is the truth. It's naive to think we as citizens can do nothing, and leave the powerful to do whatever they want, and somehow our attention will survive. 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. I realised that we have to decide now: do we value attention and focus? Does being able to think deeply matter to us? Do we want it for our children? If we do, then we have to fight for it. As one politician said - you don't get what you don't fight for.