Stolen FocusWhy You Can’t Pay Attention—and
By Turbo-Learning
Release : 2023-01-14
Genre : Psychology, Books, Health, Mind & Body, Self-Improvement, Professional & Technical, Education, Language Arts & Disciplines, Reference, Study Aids, Nonfiction, Social Science, Sociology
Kind : ebook
A Comprehensive Book Guide of Stolen Focus
Walking in Memphis
Johann Heinz: My godson's obsession with Elvis Presley began when he was nine years old. He asked to know everything about Elvis, and so I jabbered out the rough outline of his inspiring, sad story. Without thinking, I agreed to take him to Graceland one day. When I met Adam, he had dropped out of school and spent almost all his waking hours in front of screens. He struggled to stay with a topic for more than a few minutes without jerking back to a screen or abruptly switching to another topic; he seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat.
I'll pay for us to go four thousand miles. But I can't do it if, when we get there, all you're going to do is stare at your phone, he says. "We have to reconnect with something that matters to us." "If you swipe left, you can see the Jungle Room to the left," I told a man and his wife as they looked at their iPads. There's no need for your screen. We're actually here.”
“You don't have to see it on your screen,” I said. I was fracturing like they were fracturing. I wondered how I was losing my ability to be present too. “And I hated it,” says author Roxanne Jones. In Paris, nobody looked at the Mona Lisa for more than a few seconds.
Activities that require longer forms of focus, like reading, have been in free fall for years. I wondered if the motto for our era should be: “I tried to live, but I got distracted.” Scientist Roy Baumeister says he is losing some of his ability to focus. He used to be able to sit for hours, reading and writing, but now "it seems like my mind jumps around a lot more.” The average American college student spends just 19 seconds a day focused on one thing, compared to an adult working in an office where the median stay-on-focus is three minutes.
The author traveled the world to find out how we can get our attention back. What's happening to our ability to pay attention is not just the fault of individuals, but of society as a whole. This is being done to us all by powerful forces, including Big Tech, and may be caused by an attentional "pathogenic culture.” There are twelve deep forces at work that are damaging our attention. We can only solve this problem in the long term if we understand them.
There are real steps you can take as an isolated individual to reduce this problem for yourself. But unless you are very lucky, they won't allow you to escape. It can take up to 23 minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus if you are focusing on something else. This fracturing of attention isn't just causing problems for us as individuals, it's causing crises in society. As a species, we are facing a slew of unprecedented tripwires and trapdoors.
Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems. If we lose that, we lose our ability to have a fully functioning society. Science is fallible and fragile and needs to be handled with care. This isn't because the science is rickety but because humans are extremely complex.
I'm not an expert on any of these questions; I'm a journalist, approaching experts, testing and explaining their knowledge. I abandoned the buzz in which I had vibrated for twenty years. I knew this ditching of the internet couldn't be a long-term solution for me. But I felt that if I stripped everything back for a time, I might start to glimpse the changes we could all make.
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Stolen FocusWhy You Can’t Pay Attention—and
By Turbo-Learning
Release : 2023-01-14
Genre : Psychology, Books, Health, Mind & Body, Self-Improvement, Professional & Technical, Education, Language Arts & Disciplines, Reference, Study Aids, Nonfiction, Social Science, Sociology
Kind : ebook
