Stolen Focus, Johan Harri

Cause One: The increase in speed, switching, and filtering

• It’s when you set aside your distractions that you begin to see what you’re distracting yourself from
• Studies on speed reading have consistently found that retention degrades the faster we read, even with professional speed readers
• Evidence shows that there is no alternative to focusing carefully on one thing at a time if you desire quality outcomes. Multitasking unequivocally degrades performance on each task involved

  Cause Two: The crippling of our flow states

• To find flow, choose a simple goal (monotask, do NOT multitask); ensure your goal is meaningful to you; and push yourself to the edge of your abilities
• Fragmentation makes us smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes us whole, deeper, and calmer. Do you want to atrophy your attention, dancing for meaningless rewards? Or to be able to find and concentrate on the meaningful?

  Cause Three: The rise of physical and mental exhaustion

• Lack of sleep encourages a sympathetic physiological response. Ancestrally, when we were sleep deprived, it usually meant we were in a high stakes environment, like raising a newborn or fighting through a natural disaster. Thus, lack of sleep raises our blood pressure, has us craving more energy rich foods (e.g., fast food), and making us more paranoid/anxious
• Dreaming may allow for emotional adaptation without real world costs. Exposure to stressful moments in dreams may help prepare one for stressful moments in real life
• Longest REM cycles, those cycles filled with more dreams, occur seven to eight hours into sleep. A good portion of sleep-deprived society is dreamless—what effects could a dream-depraved society have
• Sleep is an active process, so when we take sleep aid prescriptions, we dampen the active processes as well and lose their benefits. They produce an empty sleep

  Cause 4: The collapse of sustained reading

• Reading fiction forces you to simulate a social situation, and imagine others experiences in a complex way. Perhaps fiction is like a gym for training empathy
• Experiments have shown that readers of fiction tend to empathize better than those who don’t read fiction—non-readers and non-fiction readers included
• Though it could be that empathetic people are more drawn to fiction. However, one study in early childhood showed that kids who are read story books are better at reading others’ emotions, suggesting story-reading experiences expand empathy

  Chapter 5: The disruption of mind wandering

• Mind wandering allows us to make sense of the world, as sensory inputs are associated with past experiences. Connections are made between concepts, allowing unresolved issues to resolve themselves via creative melding. Our scope retracts, allowing us to tie together past and present to get a better sense of the future.
• Attention is commonly thought of as a spotlight, but mind wandering is an important and more diffuse form of attention. Instead of a spotlight, this attention is like a warm all-encompassing glow
• Focus is required to feed us knowledge, mind-wandering is required to digest it
• In low-stress and safe situations, mind wandering is a gift; in high stress and dangerous situations, it becomes tormenting rumination

  Cause 6: The rise of technology that can track and manipulate you

• Engagement is the fuel for tech companies. Competition between these companies fragments our attention as it is pulled between engagement hungry apps
• Ironically, there are popular workshops at google and Facebook about mindfulness, and the companies themselves are some of the biggest perpetrators of mindlessness in the world
• Enragement generates engagement

  Cause 7: The rise of cruel optimism

• Cruel optimism: to take a complex problem with deep cultural causes, and offer an upbeat, simplistic, individualistic solution to that problem. Examples include obesity, depression, and addiction.
• Those who design phones and apps add features to help limit phone use (do not disturb, time limits, etc.). Yet, they still produce apps and tech intentionally designed to be addictive, whose forces tower above the individual and their ability to restrain themselves. This is not a fair fight: tech companies have a lightsaber; users have a butter knife.

  Cause 8: The surge of stress and how it’s triggering vigilance

• Narrowing focus is a great strategy in a safe environment, which allows for learning and development. But, in a dangerous environment, narrow focus is a dumb strategy. The better option would be to spread your vigilant view to scan for cues for danger. To dissolve your attention.
• This could be why some children have a hard time focusing; they’re stressed (for reasons expounded upon in later chapters), and their attention is thus diffuse

  Causes 9 & 10: Deteriorating diets and rising pollution

• The fuel we give to our brains, food, has lowered in quality as profit motives have transformed food. Preserved, high refined sugars and fats, nutrition-less foods are pervasive, and are degrading attention. It’s like putting corn syrup in an engine, it’s bound to putter out
• A return to whole foods is the answer to our attention—and overall health—qualms, as supported by a litany of research. We need to feed our engines petrol, not syrup.
• A study in Canada found those living within 50 meters of a busy road were 15% more likely to develop dementia than those who didn’t. Is this due to air pollution? Noise pollution affecting rest?

  Cause 11: The rise of ADHD and our response to it

• The medication approach to alleviating ADHD symptoms only addresses the proximate causes of the illness. It should be treated as a Band-Aid fix, allowing for normal functioning as the ultimate cause is investigated and addressed
• The ultimate cause for ADHD is, according to a Minnesota study that tracked 200 participants across their lives, the circumstances in which the child is brought up in. A stressful environment makes it more difficult to tend to a child’s needs, and children develop coping mechanisms accordingly. “The strongest predictor of positive change [to ADHD symptoms] was an increase in social support available to the parents during the intervening years.”
• “…people who snort a line of stimulants then become very boring and go off on long monologues—they become very focused on their own train of thought and filter out the bored-to-tears look on your face.”
• Twin studies had inflated the genetic influence on ADHD. While twin studies are great, it’s challenging to disentangle the environmental influence with the genetic. Even if identical twins have the same genetics, their dispositions also influence how the environment responds to them.

  Cause 12: The confinement of our children, both physically and psychologically

• The major impacts that free play has on child development: creativity and imagination, social bonding and socializing, and aliveness (joy and pleasure) from engaging with biologically congruent activities
• In free play, children must negotiate with one another, and police rules to games themselves. Increased reliance on adult supervision is troubling, because it reinforces dependence on authority to sort things out rather than working things out among themselves.
  • The young adult consequence of this may be increased reliance of university students on administrators to address their qualms (microagressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings)
  • The adult consequence of this may be increased reliance on governmental authority, police intervention to punish those who make them uncomfortable (this is probably what ended up justifying the historical prevalence of racial prejudices such as antisemitism). The decrease of play can cause fragmentation long term
  • Expecting authority figures to solve your problems may work when you’re a child, but when you’re an adult your submission to authority occurs in lieu of complex issues, and the authority (whether it be campus administrators or the government) consists of fallible humans. We need to learn to talk to one another, to solve and negotiate issues together
• We’re more focused when our actions are intrinsically motivated, rather than extrinsically. Kids with their schedules set out by parents are robbed of doing what they find important, they instead do what their parents find important. They’re not given any time to find meaning.
• “Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.” - Neale Walsch
• The No Child Left Behind Act, introduced in 2002, massively increased standardized testing across the United States. In the four years that followed, severe attention problems in children rose by 22%.
  • While standardized testing offers disadvantaged, yet intelligent, kids some class mobility, it also introduces constraints that counteract freedom and creativity. The constraints from college admission informed standardized testing reverberate to early childhood education.

    Conclusion

• Three forms of attention: spotlight (what’s in our immediate focus), starlight (what we’re working towards), and daylight (what allows us to find our longer-term goals in the first place—requires reflection, mindwandering, and deep thought)
• The author’s three big bold goals to fight against attention decline: ban surveillance capitalism (companies financially incentivized to exploit attention), introduce a four-day work week (needlessly exhausting people dwindles ability to focus), and encourage free play for children
• The root of many issues is that the quality of a country tends to be based upon economic growth: GDP. Politicians stay in power if the economy grows, CEOs are celebrated if the companies see increased profits.
• Much of current economic growth depends on attention exploitation. If we were to somehow regain control over our attention, and sleep a few more hours each night, the economic system would be hit with a substantial shockwave. There will be subtle yet significant forces that resist our deep desire to regain control of our lives, because economic growth depends on controlling our behaviour