Summary of Stolen Focus E-Book

Alexander Cooper

• Herausgeber: Ben Business Group LLC
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Summary of Stolen Focus - Why You Can't Pay Attention--and  How to Think Deeply Again - A Comprehensive Summary

Walking in Memphis
Johann Heinz: My godson's obsession with Elvis Presley began when he was nine years old. He asked to know everything about Elvis, and so I jabbered out the rough outline of his inspiring, sad story. Without thinking, I agreed to take him to Graceland one day. When I met Adam, he had dropped out of school and spent almost all his waking hours in front of screens. He struggled to stay with a topic for more than a few minutes without jerking back to a screen or abruptly switching to another topic; he seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat.
 
I'll pay for us to go four thousand miles. But I can't do it if, when we get there, all you're going to do is stare at your phone, he says. "We have to reconnect with something that matters to us." "If you swipe left, you can see the Jungle Room to the left," I told a man and his wife as they looked at their iPads. There's no need for your screen. We're actually here.”
“You don't have to see it on your screen,” I said. I was fracturing like they were fracturing. I wondered how I was losing my ability to be present too. “And I hated it,” says author Roxanne Jones. In Paris, nobody looked at the Mona Lisa for more than a few seconds.
Activities that require longer forms of focus, like reading, have been in free fall for years. I wondered if the motto for our era should be: “I tried to live, but I got distracted.” Scientist Roy Baumeister says he is losing some of his ability to focus. He used to be able to sit for hours, reading and writing, but now "it seems like my mind jumps around a lot more.” The average American college student spends just 19 seconds a day focused on one thing, compared to an adult working in an office where the median stay-on-focus is three minutes.

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Leseprobe

SUMMARY

Stolen Focus

Book by

Johann Hari

Why You Can't Pay Attention--and

How to Think Deeply Again

Alexander Cooper

Ben Business Group LLC© Copyright 2022 - Present. All rights reserved. This document is geared towards providing reliable information in regards to the topic and issue covered. The publication is sold with the idea that the publisher is not required to render accounting, officially permitted, or otherwise, qualified services. If advice is necessary, legal, or professional, a practiced individual in the profession shall be ordered.

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Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE—Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering

CHAPTER TWO—Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States

CHAPTER THREE—Cause Three: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion

CHAPTER FOUR—Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading

CHAPTER FIVE—Cause Five: The Disruption of Mind Wandering

CHAPTER SIX—Cause Six: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You (Part One)

CHAPTER SEVEN—Cause Six: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You (Part Two)

CHAPTER NINE—The First Glimpses of the Deeper Solution

CHAPTER TEN—Cause Eight: The Surge in Stress and How It Is Triggering Vigilance

CHAPTER ELEVEN—The Places That Figured Out How to Reverse the Surge in Speed and Exhaustion

CHAPTER TWELVE—Causes Nine and Ten: Our Deteriorating Diets and Rising Pollution

CHAPTER FOURTEEN—Cause Twelve: The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

Walking in Memphis

Johann Heinz: My godson's obsession with Elvis Presley began when he was nine years old. He asked to know everything about Elvis, and so I jabbered out the rough outline of his inspiring, sad story. Without thinking, I agreed to take him to Graceland one day. When I met Adam, he had dropped out of school and spent almost all his waking hours in front of screens. He struggled to stay with a topic for more than a few minutes without jerking back to a screen or abruptly switching to another topic; he seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat.

I'll pay for us to go four thousand miles. But I can't do it if, when we get there, all you're going to do is stare at your phone, he says. "We have to reconnect with something that matters to us." "If you swipe left, you can see the Jungle Room to the left," I told a man and his wife as they looked at their iPads. There's no need for your screen. We're actually here.”

“You don't have to see it on your screen,” I said. I was fracturing like they were fracturing. I wondered how I was losing my ability to be present too. “And I hated it,” says author Roxanne Jones. In Paris, nobody looked at the Mona Lisa for more than a few seconds.

Activities that require longer forms of focus, like reading, have been in free fall for years. I wondered if the motto for our era should be: “I tried to live, but I got distracted.” Scientist Roy Baumeister says he is losing some of his ability to focus. He used to be able to sit for hours, reading and writing, but now "it seems like my mind jumps around a lot more.” The average American college student spends just 19 seconds a day focused on one thing, compared to an adult working in an office where the median stay-on-focus is three minutes.

The author traveled the world to find out how we can get our attention back. What's happening to our ability to pay attention is not just the fault of individuals, but of society as a whole. This is being done to us all by powerful forces, including Big Tech, and may be caused by an attentional "pathogenic culture.” There are twelve deep forces at work that are damaging our attention. We can only solve this problem in the long term if we understand them.

There are real steps you can take as an isolated individual to reduce this problem for yourself. But unless you are very lucky, they won't allow you to escape. It can take up to 23 minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus if you are focusing on something else. This fracturing of attention isn't just causing problems for us as individuals, it's causing crises in society. As a species, we are facing a slew of unprecedented tripwires and trapdoors.

Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems. If we lose that, we lose our ability to have a fully functioning society. Science is fallible and fragile and needs to be handled with care. This isn't because the science is rickety but because humans are extremely complex.

I'm not an expert on any of these questions; I'm a journalist, approaching experts, testing and explaining their knowledge. I abandoned the buzz in which I had vibrated for twenty years. I knew this ditching of the internet couldn't be a long-term solution for me. But I felt that if I stripped everything back for a time, I might start to glimpse the changes we could all make.

CHAPTER ONE—Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering

The writer is going away for three months, specifically so he can be totally offline. The idea of going offline completely seemed to them so bizarre that he had to explain it again and again. "It doesn't seem right," the man in Target said when he first heard what I was asking for. “I kept explaining to people my age that we had spent half our lives without phones. Nobody seemed to find this persuasive.

People began to fantasize about what they would do with all the time they spent on their phones if it was all suddenly freed up.” Psychologists have shown that pre-commitment, or resolving clearly to do something and sticking to it, makes people more likely to stick with it. I had felt tired for so long that all I knew was how to outrun it. As people disembarked, I heard the ping of an incoming text message somewhere on the ferry and reached instinctively for my pocket. I visited Provincetown a year ago to visit my friend Andrew, who lives there every summer.

The town is like a cross between a Cape Cod village and a sex dungeon. I wanted a pretty purgatory where I could decompress, and nothing more. It was close to the sea, a short walk from the center of the town. Beyond the house was the ocean, vast and open and warm. I felt then a sudden certainty that I had done the right thing.

I saw a man standing on the water, out in the middle of the ocean, he writes. I waved to him; he waved back; and then he turned away, and stood with his palms out In Provincetown, the sand beneath the water is uneven, giving the impression that you are walking on water. I spent a week in Provincetown, Massachusetts, listening to music on Spotify and talking to strangers. I ate enough lobsters that I will be remembered as their Stalin figure, destroying them on an industrial scale. The last song we sang was "A Whole New World.”

Every morning I would buy three newspapers and not know what happened in the news until the next day. My normal mode of consuming news induced panic; this new style induced perspective. He found himself mindlessly following events like the U.S. presidential election on social media. This wasn't just affecting him as a parent, but as a scientist. Twitter has eight years' worth of data on what people are talking about and how long they discuss them for.

They've found that over the last 130 years, topics have come and gone faster and faster than people's attention span has ever kept up or slowed down. In 1986, the volume of information being blasted at the average human being amounted to 40 newspapers' worth of information every day. By 2007, that figure had risen to 174 newspapers per day. Sune: "What we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions.” In Provincetown, I was absorbing as much information as I could handle.

The fire hose of information was turned off. Sune fears we are headed toward a world where "there's going to be an upper class that are very aware" and find ways to live within their attention's limits. Self discipline is an ongoing battle, Sune says. What makes us happy is doing the thing that's a little bit difficult, he says.

CHAPTER TWO—Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States

 

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent. When my phone was taken away, I felt like a large part of the world vanished. Everywhere I looked, I saw people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism is a corruption of attention. It's where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego.

It was as if I was saying to myself, See? More people are following you. Now the signals were gone and it felt like the world was saying: You don't matter. He returned to the research of a man who opened up a new field of psychology in the 1960s. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheek-sent-me-high-ee) was born in 1934 in Fiume, an Italian town close to the Yugoslavian border.

He grew up on a street where people spoke three or four languages. You can teach a pigeon to play ping-pong or a rabbit to pick up coins and put them in piggy banks. Many animals will focus on very complex, meaningless things if you reward them right. He wanted to explore aspects of human psychology that were positive, nourishing and generated something more than hollow mechanical responses. What he found was a fundamental human instinct that had not been studied by scientists before.