“The sensation of being alive in the twenty-first century consists of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—is cracking and breaking.”
Johann Hari, Stolen Focus
The ability to focus on a single task or activity for a sustained period, and resist the pull of distractions, is a cornerstone of a good life. Fulfilling relationships, career success, building a business, cultivating skills and hobbies, and the development of personality, all require the capacity to focus. Unfortunately, most of us are experiencing a dramatic decline in our attentional capacities. In this video, drawing from Johann Hari’s best-selling book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, we explore the causes of this decline in focus and reveal how it is resulting in the dumbing down of humanity as well as creating fertile conditions for tyranny.
“…we are now developing “an attentional pathogenic culture”—an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it.”
Joel Nigg, Quoted in Stolen Focus
To get a sense of how serious the collective crisis of focus is, we can turn to studies which have investigated how long people sustain their attention while working or studying. One study found that the average American college student gets distracted, while studying, on average once every 65 seconds, and the median amount of time they sustain their focus on a single task is 19 seconds. A study by Gloria Mark at the University of California found that the average time an American office worker focuses on one thing before becoming distracted by something else, is 3 minutes. These studies point to a sobering conclusion; the average person’s mind is scrambled, fragmented and trapped in a perpetual state of distraction.
Many people are aware that smartphones and their ecosystem of apps are major drivers of the degeneration of focus. For many apps, especially social media apps, are built on a business model that profits from maximizing the screen time of the user. Because these companies make money selling ads, the more your eyes are glued to the app the more money they make; every time you look away, they lose potential earnings. These companies also make money by tracking online activity and building up a psychological profile of you that they then sell to advertisers who target you with personalized ads. In other words, the success of these companies depends on making people addicted to their products.
“Facebook makes more money for every extra second you are staring through a screen at their site, and they lose money every time you put the screen down.”
Johann Hari, Stolen Focus
To transform people into compulsive users of their apps, tech companies use sophisticated behavioral modification tactics that have been discovered and refined through years of psychological testing on both humans and animals. Hence why Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, refers to social media companies as “behavior modification empires. Or as he wrote in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Now:
“I am suggesting that you might be turning, just a little, into a well – trained dog, or something less pleasant, like a lab rat or a robot.”
Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Now
Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s earliest investors, revealed that from the very beginning the platform’s creators were asking themselves: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” (Sean Parker, Sean Parker on Facebook’s Brain Hacking)
One of the ways app companies consume as much of your time and attention as possible is through intermittent notifications, which condition people to pick up their phones much like Ivan Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Today, the average teenager receives 192 notifications a day, or one every five minutes, while the average adult receives 142 notifications every day.
Imagine you are deeply focused on a task – whether working, studying, or reading – when your device pings or buzzes you with a notification. Even if you don’t pick up your device, or just glance at the screen for a second, that tiny interruption produces what is known as a “switch cost effect”. This refers to the time it takes for you to bring your attention back to the task at hand. A study by Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are deeply focused on a task and get interrupted, even for a brief moment, it takes on average 23 minutes for you to get back the same degree of focus as before. And as Johann Hari writes:
“…your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another…You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it, and that takes a little bit of time…So if you check your texts often while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts—you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterward, which can be much longer.”
Johann Hari, Stolen Focus
But it’s not only time we lose when we get distracted by a notification or give into an urge to check our phone. Our cognitive performance also declines.
