The key ideas

Stolen Focus. Why You Can’t Pay Attention

Johann Hari, 2022

Why is concentrating so difficult even when you really want to? Journalist Johann Hari spent three years interviewing scientists and identified twelve reasons our attention is falling apart. You will discover what switching, sleep deprivation, and stress do to the brain, how apps make money, and what you can reclaim right now.

Who it is for

For anyone finding it harder to finish a page without reaching for a phone. And for everyone tired of blaming their own weak willpower.

Your attention has not collapsed. It has been stolen by large and powerful forces.

The Graceland nobody saw

When Johann Hari’s godson was nine, the boy the author calls Adam in the book fell head over heels for Elvis Presley. He sang “Jailhouse Rock,” copied the famous hip movements, and once asked very seriously whether Hari would someday take him to Graceland, Elvis’s home in Memphis. Hari promised almost without thinking.

Years passed, and the promise had to be kept. Adam had grown up and was almost inseparable from his phone. Hari hoped the trip would bring him back into the real world, at least briefly. But at Graceland, everyone was given an iPad and headphones instead of a guide. People from around the world walked through the rooms looking at screens. In the famous Jungle Room, one visitor excitedly showed his wife that he could swipe the room’s view left and right on the iPad. Hari lost patience and told him he could simply turn his head.

He was angry with himself as well as others. He too was finding it harder to read for more than a few minutes. So he went to Provincetown, a coastal town in Massachusetts, for three months, taking a basic phone without internet access and a paper map. Anxiety ate away at him during the first few days. Then concentrating on one activity gradually became easier.

But few people can drop everything for three months. So Hari set out to discover where our attention goes. For three years, he traveled between countries, from Denmark to New Zealand, interviewing researchers of the brain, sleep, nutrition, childhood, and technology. Eventually he identified twelve causes, ranging from the frantic pace of life to environmental pollution. His central idea: an inability to concentrate is not a personal failure, because powerful forces put pressure on attention, and many can be changed. We should add an honest caveat: scientists disagree about whether people’s attention is declining year by year, and critics accuse Hari of excessive confidence. Yet the causes themselves are immediately recognizable. Let us explore the main ones.

The juggler who only thinks every ball is in the air

Imagine answering an email, glancing at the work chat, and listening to a call with one ear. You seem to be doing three things at once. Neuroscientist Earl Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained to Hari that this is an illusion. Consciousness can hold one or two thoughts at a time. Everything else consists of rapid switches we simply fail to notice, rather than multitasking.

Every switch carries a cost, which researchers call the switching effect. The brain needs to readjust and remember where the work stopped, and performance suffers during those moments. According to Miller, we lose time, accuracy, creative ideas, and memory of what we have done. It resembles a juggler who thinks he has five balls in the air while constantly bending down to pick up fallen ones.

Hari went to Copenhagen to meet Danish scientist Sune Lehmann, who had measured changes in collective attention. His team worked out how long a topic remained among the most discussed on Twitter. In 2013, the average was around seventeen and a half hours; by 2016, it was under twelve. They saw a similar pattern in other sources, including books published long before the internet. Lehmann’s explanation is simple: the more information pours over people, the less time each topic receives. It is like trying to drink from a fire hose: more and more water, yet less and less makes it down your throat. You never finish thinking through one topic before the next displaces it.

Hari’s conclusion is to slow down and do one thing at a time. This is a matter of how the brain works rather than willpower. When writing an important text, close email and chat for that period instead of leaving them open just in case. When talking to someone close to you, put your phone in your bag. Half an hour without switching will offer more than an hour of fragmented work across three tabs.

A common mistake is treating an instant response to everything as a sign of good work. Quick reactions and deep thought pull in different directions, and every day requires choosing between them.

Read in Livria

About the author

Johann Hari is a British journalist and writer, and the author of books about the war on drugs and depression. For this book, he traveled to several countries and spoke with researchers studying attention, sleep, childhood, and technology.

All books by this author: Johann Hari

Terms from the book

  • Flow
  • Adam
  • Miller
  • Williams
  • Csikszentmihalyi
  • Cerebrospinal fluid
  • Harris
  • Skenazy
  • Let Grow
  • Presley: Elvis Presley, the American singer known as the “King of Rock and Roll.”
  • Graceland: Elvis Presley’s estate in Memphis, Tennessee. It is now a museum visited each year by fans from around the world.
  • Provincetown: A small town at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, USA. Hari spent three months here without the internet.
  • Switching effect: The loss of speed and accuracy when a person moves from one task to another: the brain needs time to readjust.
  • Lehmann: Sune Lehmann, a Danish scientist at the Technical University of Denmark who studies human behavior through large datasets.
  • Prichard: Roxanne Prichard, an American sleep researcher and professor of psychology who studies how sleep affects attention and learning.
  • Nutritional psychiatry: An emerging field studying how food affects mental health and brain function. Its conclusions remain tentative.
  • Default mode network: A group of connected brain regions that become more active when a person is unoccupied and their thoughts wander freely.
  • Mar: Raymond Mar, a Canadian psychologist who studies the relationship between reading fiction and understanding other people.
  • Surveillance capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff’s term for a business model that makes money by collecting data about people’s behavior and using it to hold their attention and sell advertising.
  • Zuboff: Shoshana Zuboff, an American scholar, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
  • kSafe: A plastic container with a timer: once you put an object inside, you cannot retrieve it until the set time has elapsed.
  • Hypervigilance: A state in which the mind is constantly on alert and searching for threats. Hari uses it to explain why concentrating is difficult under severe stress.
  • Cruel optimism: A phrase from cultural theorist Lauren Berlant that Hari uses for situations where a small personal technique is presented as the answer to a large problem and failure is blamed on the individual.

All terms

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