Books/Stolen Focus
Subtitle: Why you can't pay attention -- and How to think deeply again
Author: Johann Hari
How I found this book
I have personally come to the realization that my most scarce resource is not time, but attention. All of the time management books I could get my hands on weren't helping with the attention crisis we are all going through. Books on habit-forming like Atomic Habits are getting popular, but they shift the blame for the attention crisis to the individual, much like the carbon footprint narrative. Since I was subsconsciously on the search for a fix for my attention problem, I was quickly attracted to this book. I discovered this book because of the author's appearance on the Upstream podcast.
Summary
The author has interviewed 250 experts over the course of writing this book. I will mention the names of only a few of them in this summary. Also, some experts disagree with each other.
The Attention Crisis
In the introduction, the author addresses the attention crisis facing everybody in our time. He has a personal anecdote about a trip he makes with his godson from the UK to the US to go to Graceland (related to the popstar Elvis Presley). Ten years pass between the time the author makes his promise and they actually make the trip. Graceland itself has changed meanwhile, with digital technology taking over the very experience. People go through the trip using an iPad app. The author is annoyed to find that people are more obsessed with the digital toy than with experiencing Elvis's house. Meanwhile, his godson can't get over his addiction to the four apps he keeps switching between.
The author starts interviewing leading authorities on various attention-related things over the course of a few years (about 250 experts in total). Much like climate scientists, he starts discovering that the attention crisis is getting worse over time and its worst effects were in the past few decades.
Roy Baumeister —the author of Will Power— remarked that his own attention is not as good as it used to be. He admits to playing Candy Crush Saga on his phone before going to bed.
I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.
There are three reasons why we need to focus on attention:
- A life full of distractions is a diminished life. We can't achieve much.
- The attention crisis is a crisis for the whole society. We can't solve problems.
- If we understand what's going on, we can begin work on undoing this human-made crisis.
The attention crisis is similar to the obesity crisis. It isn't a personal failing but a social epidemic. This is a systemic problem. Big Tech carries some of the blame for it, but not entirely.
The author identifies 12 systemic causes for our attention deprivation:
- The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering
- The Crippling of Our Flow States
- The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion
- The Collapse of Sustained Reading
- The Disruption of Mind-Wandering
- The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You
- The Surge in Stress and How It Is Triggering Vigilance
- Our Deteriorating Diets
- Rising Pollution
- The Rise of ADHD and How We Are Responding to It
- The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically
Digital detox phase
The author starts his journey with a digital detox, by going completely offline. It is worth mentioning at this point that the author is/was a journalist. He gets a laptop that can't go online, an iPod loaded with songs, a feature phone and a watch. He is like Ulysses tying himself to the ship's mast to avoid the sirens. He moves to a tiny town called Provincetown near Boston for a month. At this stage, the author still believes that this is an individual problem that he can find an individual solution for.
Though the author brought some books with him, he needs to chill a little bit before he can get any reading done, because his attention needs some time to recover from all the wreckage inflicted on it by Twitter and breaking news.
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.
The amount of information that the average person is exposed to is going up. It's like the equivalent of 174 newspapers now. Even the author, a journalist, found himself reading only about 3 newspapers a day when in Provincetown. We are sacrificing depth in this process. We are also constantly bombarded with easy distractions instead of focusing on the difficult things that are actually worth doing.
Everything's getting faster, not just the technology. We are literally walking 10% faster than before, at least in cities. We also learned the myth of multi-tasking —juggling too many tasks— with our single-minded brains from our exposure to computers which made our attention worse. Deliberately slowing down using practices like yoga or meditation, seems to improve our attention span. Multi-tasking drops your IQ level by 10 points. Being stoned is better than this because it only drops your IQ by half of that. Modern knowledge workers aren't getting a single hour of uninterrupted time per day.
Getting rid of distractions and mono-tasking seems to be the way forward, but how much individual control do we have over this systemic problem? Do we all convince our governments to pass a law like France did, to not disturb workers after they go home?
We can't just monotask by force of will. We are all distracted by noisy open-plan offices and classrooms, crowded cities and an unhealthy addiction to sugar and stimulants.
Relapse phase
Half-way through the digital detox program, the author starts missing his digital devices and their distractions. Instead of reading, he finds himself skimming through books like they're articles on the web. He realized that people around him are broadcasting themselves to each other instead of having a conversation. He wondered if social media increased narcissism in people. He then finds himself struggling to focus on reading his books.
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.
Reinforcements vs. Flow
To get himself out of his misery, the author decides to interview Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow. He was one of the early psychologists who focused on positive psychology instead of the focus on psychiatric disorders or manipulating people. B.F. Skinner, the most prominent psychologist of that time, popularized the concept of effecting habit change through reinforcement which helped sociopathic Silicon Valley founders decades later to create addictive, attention-wrecking apps. Mihaly first discovered flow in his study of artists and then correlated it to his own childhood experiences. He found that people find that the process is reward itself, not the end result. True happiness is in the flow state.
There are three things to do to get into flow:
- Choose a clearly defined goal
- The task should be meaningful to you
- The task that you do should be at the edge of your abilities
Tasks that produce flow inherently require mono-tasking. They should be meaningful and test our abilities. Mihaly's brother Moricz was a self-taught geologist who could stare at a crystal for ten hours in his flow state.
“To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it,” Mihaly explained. “We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?”
The way out of distraction is to find flow. In a flow state we forget ourselves, we lose track of time and have a sense of doing something bigger than ourselves. Removing our distractions is not enough. The purpose should be flow. The author started writing his novel to fill his undistracted time with a meaningful pursuit and to experience flow states.
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.
We can either fragment our attention over trivial re-inforcing rewards or experience flow states. The former seems to be our society's default now. The latter is intentional and highly rewarding.
Sleep and Stimulants
When the author was a teenager he took caffeine to stay awake and melatonin gummies to fall asleep. He was always near exhaustion. He only slept properly in Provincetown. He talks about some early research in the eighties which proved that being sleep-deprived is equivalent to being drunk when it comes to our ability to focus. It also wrecks memory and reaction speed.
our 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].’
The brain tries to consolidate the day's memories into long-term storage during sleep, which it is being deprived of. This leads to inability to recall things and serious attention problems in children. In the longer term, sleep deprivation can lead to dementia. The most intense REM sleep happens during the seventh or eight hour of our sleep. We need to sleep that long to have healthy brain function.
Chemically induced sleep knocks out certain neurotransmitters that sense melatonin levels which upsets their delicate balance with the other neurotransmitters. Hence sleeping pills are a stop-gap solution and not meant to be taken over the long term.
Artificial light has broken our adaptation to the cycles of the sun and moon. Our sleep times are being pushed to later and later in the night. In a consumer culture, being awake for longer means consuming for longer and probably consuming more. At an individual level, we can avoid the blue light of screens a couple of hours before bed and also keep the bedroom somewhat cold.
We need to slow down to have flow and sleep more for proper brain function. But the system seems to be pushing us in the opposite direction.
We live in a gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do.
Collapse of reading
The amount of linear reading people do in the form of books has come down in the past few decades. People are more used to skimming and skipping content on the web, and jumping to other content. Reading books is the most accessible form of flow for most people. As our attention degrades, we read fewer books and the attention degrades further.
With social media, just like with television, the medium becomes the message ("the medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan). Social media favors shallow content which enables quick reactions. Books on the other hand, enable depth of understanding. Books are deep and nourishing, corporate social media sites are shallow and draining. Reading fiction books builds our empathy to understand the complex social lives of other people; Twitter is optimized for quick judgement and rage.
Disruption of mind wandering
It is important to let our minder wander in order for it to make connections between things which is the basis of creativity. It is also important for long-term thinking and clear goal setting.
Mind-wandering is a different kind of attention, different from the commonly known spotlight attention. We are jumping from one distraction to the next allowing for neither form of attention.
{{ |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. }}
Back to normal life
The author comes back to normal life. He expects 35 hours of email, considering he spend an hour per day on email, but to his pleasant surprise, goes through it all in only two hours. He then theorizes that email breeds more email. He then proceeds to buy some quick fix solutions for his phone and laptop to keep the distractions away. However, he relapses into his old lifestyle and social media behaviors quickly. He realizes that the problem is beyond his individual capability to solve and proceeds to Silicon Valley to interview the two best apologists that the Valley has to offer for all of its misdeeds over decades.
The prodigal sons of Silicon Valley
At this point, the author decides to take a break from interviewing actual scientists and experts. He decides that the biggest surveillance capitalists of our time must have the solution to the problem they caused - fragmenting our attention and selling the attention fragments to advertisers. <sarcasm>Surely, someone who worked worked on such surveillance advertising tech at Google or Facebook must have the best answers. It's like being shot with a gun and going to the gun factory for a solution instead of going to a doctor.</sarcasm>
The author does several interviews with Tristan Harris, Silicon Valley's most popular prodigal tech bro and discovers that the dude did university courses in behavioral manipulation, all descended from B.F. Skinner. He is the "inventor" of pop-up previews which lets people spend more time on the same site without going away. He then goes to work at Google on GMail and finds that the app itself is wrecking their employees' attention, because of all the "engagement" features built into the app. Mindfulness apps are getting popular with Googlers. He makes a slide-deck for Google employees on how to be less attention-grabbing, gets lots of push back and then dropped into a made-up role called "design ethicist" at Google. It takes him a few well-paid years to realize that it's a bullshit job. So, he quits and finds another tech bro to join him - Aza Raskin, the inventor of infinite scroll.
The tech bros in Silicon Valley wouldn't let their own children use the products that they made. Well, neither do drug lords and cigarette manufacturers.
Tristan uses the metaphor of a voodoo doll to explain the digital doubles aka advertising profiles that these companies create for their users. The author also stumbles upon Prof. Shoshana Zuboff's book on surveillance capitalism, but doesn't read it. Instead, he does more interviews with the apologetic prodigal sons. <sarcasm> I am looking forward to this guy's book on the climate crisis so that I can read all the interesting interviews he does with Enron, BP and Shell execs, while ignoring the climate scientists. </sarcasm>
More than half the users on social media don't know that their new feeds are algorithmically sorted and filtered. It's hard to believe that the world isn't full of rage when your Twitter feed is full of rage and you don't know that Twitter is selectively showing you only those things that maximize your engagement on their site.
The 6 ways in which corporate social media apps are destroying our attention:
- they are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards
- they push us to switch tasks more frequently than we normally would
- they track and build profiles of you and present content accordingly
- they prioritize negative emotions like anger
- they make you feel like you are surrounded by other people's anger
- they set society on fire (deprivation of societal attention on major issues)
At this point, the author is back to interviewing actual experts. Big tech media sites isolate us as individuals due to their personalizaiton algorithms and make it difficult for us to come together as a society. For example, we got the world to successfully ban CFCs because of their harm to the ozone layer in the time before social media. Now, the YouTube algorithm would prioritize videos that deny that the ozone layer event exists over the videos featuring scientists, making it much harder to draw societal attention to this issue. He then describes the story of how Jair Bolsonaro got elected in Brazil by intentionally spreading misinformation on Facebook.
We cannot make good decisions or solve problems as a society if Big Tech continues to keep us in a state of hypervigilance. We cannot solve major problems like the climate crisis when our attention is kidnapped by conspiracy theorists and the algorithms that prioritize their content.
Cruel Optimism
The author meets yet another tech bro called Nir Eyal, who strongly believes that individual changes are the first line of defense against the assault Big Tech's apps. He blames individuals for not messing with the default notifications on their smartphones. Yes, exactly like how BP put the blame for climate crisis on individuals for not regulating their carbon footprint properly.
Nir Eyal is the author of "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" - a guide to Silicon Valley companies on how to get people addicted to their tech. The same guy then proceeds to write a book called "Indistractible" to help people make small tweaks to their life and overcome the effects of tech companies using the tactics outlined in his first book on them. After reading this, I opened the website of Tristan and Aza's "Center for Humane Technology" and found similar tweaks which do nothing to solve the problem. Their site suggests Signal as a replacement for Facebook! 🤦
The author correctly realizes at this point that this guy has a toxic attitude. He discovers that there's a term for this - "cruel optimism".
[Prof. Ronald Purser] introduced me to an idea I hadn’t heard before—a concept named “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.
^ This description applies very well to most TED talks.
The author gives the example of books written on stress which frame it as an individual problem with simple individualistic solutions like meditation which worked for the author of the book in their privileged position. It's a form of "victim blaming". Obesity is another common example where the industry recasts a systemic problem as an individual personality flaw.
This is one of the problems with cruel optimism—it takes exceptional cases, usually achieved in exceptional circumstances, and acts as if they can be commonplace.
The author then contemplates a complete ban on surveillance capitalism. He offers the banning of CFCs across the industry as a precedent for this. The prodigal sons believe that companies like Facebook will turn benevolent overnight and work for your welfare after such a ban. Nir Eyal dismisses the idea. (Why is he still talking to the tech bros?) The author is still hopeful that we have defeated bigger forces than the tech companies in the past, considering the social change brought about by feminists in the recent past. The entire ninth chapter of this book can be skipped, since it's mostly tech bros arguing with each other.
