‘We are not machines… We are humans, and we work differently’ – Stolen Focus, Chapter 1 Notes

Posted on: June 1, 2022

Last Updated on: June 3rd, 2022

Post Category: Book Notes

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About #onepageonepoint

#onepageonepoint aims to summarise new ideas from books on personal and professional development – with (approximately) one point for each page. Read more about this project here.

Today for #onepageonepoint, we have summary notes for Stolen Focus – for the introduction and chapter 1: ‘Cause 1: The Increase in Speed, Switching and Filtering’.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learning more about the book, click here.

About the book

• Stolen Focus is a book written by Johann Hari, who is also the author of bestselling books Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections. In Stolen Focus, Hari discusses the many different external forces that are robbing us of our ability to effectively stay focussed. While we tend to believe that our lacking ability to stay focussed is a personal failing, Hari claims that there are other powerful forces affecting it – forces that we can not tackle alone.

Introduction

• Stolen Focus starts off with an anecdote, depicting the experiences of Hari and his godson “Adam”, who are both struggling to be present.

• At the young age of 9 years old, Adam had a freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley, but 10 years later, he alternated between different screens – switching between his computer and iPad, and switching between different platforms including Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube and porn sites – after dropping out of high school at only 15 years of age.

• Hari – hoping to escape the dread of low concentration and staring at screens – took Adam to Graceland, which was the home of Elvis Presley. However, upon arrival, all guests were given an iPad to guide them through the mansion, and all attendees were on their devices – not appreciating the Graceland that’s actually right in front of their eyes.

• During Hari’s other travels to the Blue Lagoon in Iceland and the Mona Lisa in Paris, people would wield selfie sticks and livestream at the Blue Lagoon, and people would approach the Mona Lisa only to turn their back, snap a selfie, then leave.

• Roy Baumeister, who studied the science of willpower and self-discipline at the University of Queensland, Australia, literally the author of a book named Willpower, ‘fe[lt] like [his] control over [his] attention is weaker than it used to be’ (Hari 2022, p. 7).

• From Johann’s pursuit for answers regarding this issue, he came across the following results from small studies in America: ‘They discovered that, on average, a student would switch task once every sixty-five seconds. The median amount of time they focused on any one thing was just nineteen seconds.’ (Hari 2022, p. 8)

• Furthermore, on a study by Gloria Mark, who was professor of infomatics at the University of California, observed that an adult working in an office would stay on one task at an average span of three minutes.

• From Hari’s findings, regarding the effect of obesity, Big Tech and other contributors on our crippling ability to focus, he deduced that the attention crisis was a ‘systematic [problem] requir[ing] systematic solutions’ (Hari 2022, p. 10).

• Hari encourages the reader to join him on his journey searching for the solution with three crucial reasons: (1) a life is full of distractions is, at an individual level, diminished, (2) this fracturing of attention is not causing problems for us as individuals, it is causing crises in our whole society, (3) if we can understand what is happening, we can begin to change it.

• ‘A different study of office workers in the US found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life’ (Hari 2022, p. 11).

• James William, who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University, suggests ‘if we want to do what matters in any domain – any context in life – we have to be able to give attention to the right things… if we can’t do that, it’s really hard to do anything’.

• It is a societal problem: if people cannot effectively focus, it becomes difficult for people to step up and take on the current challenges that are happening in the world.

• Stolen Focus is based on the strongest evidence available from thousands of studies and interviews with neuroscientists and social scientists; the book has more than 400 endnotes on its website, and more than 250 scienific studies referenced.

• After Hari’s trip to Memphis with Adam, he went on a digital detox out of desperation to escape from the distractions – isolating himself and going offline – for three months at Provincetown.

Chapter 1: ‘Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching and Filtering’

• A precommitment is a commitment made in advance, whereby a person restricts the number of choices available to them at a future point in time, by putting additional costs or obstacles to certain actions – ‘I had learned years before from social scientists that when it comes to beating any kind of destructive habit, one of the most effective tools we have is called ‘pre-commitment’… you know you’re fallible and likely to crack in the face of temptation… you narrow your choices.’ (Hari 2022, p. 19)

• Hari used precommitment in preparation for his detox at Provincetown; he bought an old phone and borrowed an old laptop that could not connect to the internet, bought a watch, got an alarm clock, used a map to navigate, and dug out an iPod, which he then loaded with audiobooks and podcasts.

• Hari also applied precommitment with the preparation of his rented-out house in Provincetown: removing the modem and cutting all cable packages on the television.

• Hari reflects on his Twitter usage prior to the detox: ‘For so long I have been fixing my gaze on things that were very fast and very temporary, like a Twitter feed… you feel pensive, amped up, liable to be washed away if you don’t move, wave, shout… 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‘ (Hari 2022, p. 23).

• Sune Lehmann, who is a trained physicist and a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark, had issues with his internet usage and ability to think like a scientist, he wanted to investigate if there was a collective decline in attention (that wasn’t related to ageing).

• For Lehmann’s first analysis, he used Twitter as the source of information to analyse – to answer questions like ‘How long do people talk about a topic on Twitter for? Has the length of time they focus, collectively, on any one time changed? Do people talk about the topics that obsess them – the trending hashtags – for more or less time now, compared to in the recent past?’ (Hari 2022, p. 27).

• Using the data between 2006 and 2014, they found out that in 2013, a topic would remain in the top fifty most-discussed subjects for 17.5 hours; this dropped off to 11.9 hours by 2016, indicating we are spending shorter periods of time on any one thing.

• Lehmann’s team also investigated other datasets/platforms – including Google search data, movie-ticket sales, Reddit topic data – and the results were consistent with the results from the Twitter analysis: we were focussing less on any one individual topic, reflected by an ‘accelerating trend… [where] it is faster to reach peak popularity and… drop again’ (Hari 2022, p. 28) (note: Wikipedia topic data was also analysed, but results showed the level of attention on topics was quite steady).

• Lehmann’s team wanted to extend this study further back in time (from the 1880s to present day), using data from Google books, which scanned the full text of millions of books. Using a mathematical method called ‘detecting n-grams’, the team could analyse the rise and fall of new phrases/topics in the text; they found that – over the time span of the data – that with each passing decade, topics have come and gone faster and faster – ‘This was the first proof gathered anywhere in the world that our collective attention spans have been shrinking’ (Hari 2022, p. 29).

• To understand the cause of this further, they developed a complex mathematical model. Using the model, they discovered one mechanism that can lead to the observed change in collective attention: flooding the system with more information – with more information, people get (and use) less time to focus on any individual piece of it.

• Analysis by Dr Martin Hilbert (University of Southern California) and Dr Priscilla Lopez (University of Catalonia) showed an increase in the volume of information, considering many forms of media (including TV, radio, reading), between 1986 and 2007 – from 40 newspapers worth of information per day to 174 newspapers worth of information per day.

• Lehmann explains the result by claiming that people are using less resources to consume more information at surface level, meaning people are sacrificing depth of knowledge, relationships, etc. which take effort to cultivate. One fear shared by Lehmann is that people are going to be manipulated more and be inside their computers more as a result.

• Other studies, on speed-reading, show speed-readers (even professional ones) comprehend less when they read faster (i.e. they recall less when they are tested) – indicating there is a maximum limit to how quickly people can absorb and understand information.

• Another study on speed-reading discovered that complex statements/concepts become harder to grapple with speed-reading and become easy to skim over. An example of this: often people, when they read the newspaper online, engage in speed-reading and tend to skim over each title/story.

• Robert Colville says we are living through ‘the Great Acceleration’: evidence shows that many important factors in our lives are speeding up: people are talking significantly faster than people in the 1950s, and people walked 10 percent faster in cities over the past 20 years.

• From an analysis by Guy Claxton (University of Winchester), slowing down through deliberate yoga, tai chi, meditation shrinks the world to fit our natural bandwidth, which nurtures our attention, whereas speed (i.e. working fast) overloads our abilities and thereby shatters our attention.

• Professor Earl Miller (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) states that information flow has increased with no pushback from humans because we believe this delusion that we can multitask and have 3 to 10 thoughts at one time when the fundamental structure of our brain only allows us to think of 1 or 2 things at a time.

• Multitasking means task switching, which degrades our performance and focus in four ways: (1) the switch cost effect (the time cost of reconfiguring – your brain has to reconfigure when moving from one task to another), (2) the screw-up effect (the time cost of correcting errors and backtracking), (3) creative drain (since the brain requires undistracted time to draw links between all information absorbed), and (4) diminished memory (learn and remember less).

• Studies regarding the switch cost effect compared workers taking an IQ test without and with (email and phone call) distractions, and it showed that technological distractions lead to a 10 point IQ decrease. Another similar study at the Carnegie Mellon University showed students who received text messages during a test performed 20% worse than those who were not distracted, and a study at the University of Utah discovered that a driver who received text messages is as impaired as a drunk driver.

• Other studies have shown that the average American worker gets distracted about once every three minutes, and that workers of all levels get average less than hour of uninterrupted time a day.

• We need to focus carefully on one thing at a time; the best thing to do is to get rid of distractions and practice monotasking by starting slow and small and building our way up.

• Brains can be overloaded with filtering information as much as switching.

• Hari, during his detox, after taking deliberate yoga classes and disconnecting from the internet, felt like he ‘finally stepped out of the madness’ (Hari 2022, p. 41).

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Interested in reading more? See my notes for Chapter 2.