Home › Books › Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and Ho…
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again
by
34/99
Critics
88/99
Readers
n/a
Scholars
15/99
Rating
52/99
Volume
77/99
Rating
98/99
Volume
—
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back. In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention--and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers' productivity. Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus--as individuals, and as a society--if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.
Preview
Reviews
"And it certainly attracts, well, attention."
"Where other books about our relationship to technology tend to focus on personal responsibility, stressing the importance of self-control, Stolen Focus takes a step back and examines the ecosystem that created the problem ..."
"Some of the chapters are inspiring, such as the one that focuses on the concept of flow, the type of concentration that leads to an almost hypnotic state, where time melts away and thought is inhabited."
"Although Hari addresses some actions that readers can take (such as locking phones up in a safe and taking six months off social media), he concludes that the issue is beyond individuals and is a regulatory problem—but his call that people need to band together to build 'a movement to reclaim our attention' feels somewhat nebulous."
"In one of the few cases in which he pits two expert views against one another, he looks at the role social media plays in radicalization."
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!