Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again
McCoy Tyner / Naima
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John Fraim
One’s path down the road of life today seems more and more like dodging info barkers in all directions. For me, books have been something I didn’t have to be “barked” into along the way.
I loved books from the start. Before I could write.
But when I was old enough to learn writing, I also loved writing.
They sometimes didn’t get along very well.
As I got older, writing won out.
But I still loved books. Perhaps the subjects of books that interested me the most were in symbolism, psychology, philosophy, media and screenwriting. Also, in the fiction category, Ray Chandler was my favorite. Yeah, I know a strange mix.
I learned that one could spend a lot of time caught up in one book. Sometimes, it is a good thing. Some important morsels of truth are gained from the book. But often, one can be led astray by the arguments of authors. One can follow the advice of the argument and not see other viewpoints out there. I guess you could call this reader of the particular author an entrapped “groupie” of the author.
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During my youth, I usually consumed the entire book. Usually it was a few genres like science fiction and adventure stories and astronomy that I read books in. But as the years progressed, I learned to pick out used books from the old bookshops of Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco and learned quickly the ones I wanted. There were signs that the author was talking about key issues of our times. That is, the key issues in my opinion.
In my opinion, the key issues of our times today is in the area of psychology (and inner understanding) far more than anyone suspects today. If they suspect it at all today as psychology seems such a silent discipline these days. Where are the great books that have come out of the pandemic? What are the key books of our times? The key focus of our times?
I think that the key books of our times are books about perception, or how this new world has changed us and our way of seeing it. The increasing world seeming more like carnival info barkers coming from all directions. I think there is far too little research into areas about changing perceptions of the world and psychology.
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Last night I woke up around 2:00 am. I had gone to sleep with the little bluetooth earphone in my ear and Coast to Coast and George was talking to a man about depression that I learned was Johann Hari. He was fascinating and I laid in bed listing to him and then checking him out the next morning on Google.
The next morning I found out that he was Scottish and a best-selling New York Times author of a number of books. The more I read and looked into the books the he had written, the more respect I gained about him as an author writing on things that are the most important today. Yet things one hears almost nothing about. The less one hears about something, the more important one can assume that it is.
But as I read about Johann Hari and his incredible reinvention of himself after some trouble lying to Wikipedia which consumed him up until around 2011. One can read about it in the Wikipedia entry on him. It includes the following books in the entry. He had some trouble in his life. Up until 2015 when Johann seemed to reinvent himself by turning out four power non-fiction books about key areas of importance in the world.
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His reinvention came with his first book Chasing the Scream (2015). Hari’s book about drugs, Hari’s Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, was published in 2015. Hari also gave a TED Talk on the subject that same year. Hari claims that most addictions are functional responses to experiences and a lack of healthy supportive relationships, rather than a simple biological need for a particular substance.
In January of 2018, he published Lost Connections (2018). It dealt with depression and anxiety with Hari citing his childhood issues, career crisis, and experiences with antidepressants and psychotherapy as fuelling his curiosity in the subject. Kirkus Reviews praised the book.
Four year later, in January of 2022, in the middle of the pandemic, came his Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. It argued elements of modern lifestyles, including social media, are “destroying our ability to concentrate.” The book debuted at number seven on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending 12 February 2022.
Now, in 2024 there is his current Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs, his first-person account of taking the weight loss drug semaglutide.
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I went to Amazon to the book Stolen Focus because its subject was most interesting to me. The praise for it was pretty overwhelming. So, I decided it warranted a download into my Kindle. But I noticed that the Amazon page on the book published the first chapter of the book Stolen Focus. So, I good way to get introduced to this amazing Scottish writer in his early 40s. Reading the first chapter of Stolen Focus.
Perhaps most interesting is that Stolen Focus is about one of the great problems (psychological, social) of our time. Everyone living in the info culture world today, really everyone in the world, is subject to the causes below. The first is listed in the first chapter below.
The book is a reminder of an important book for today from the field of media ecology. Not a bad position/discipline to view the world from today.This important book is called Context Blindness. I wrote a review of the book for the media ecology journal Ect. Cetera. The book Context Blindness also discussed the lack of attention today. I look forward to reading Stolen Focus and hope readers get something from this post.
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Stolen Focus
Johann Hari
Chapter One
Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering
I don’t understand what you’re asking for,” the man in Target in Boston kept saying to me. “These are the cheapest phones we got. They have super-slow internet. That’s what you want, right?” No, I said. I want a phone that can’t access the internet at all. He studied the back of the box, looking confused. “This would be really slow. You could probably get your email but you wouldn’t—” Email is still the internet, I said. I am going away for three months, specifically so I can be totally offline.
My friend Imtiaz had already given me his old, broken laptop, one that had lost the ability to get online years before. It looked like it came from the set of the original Star Trek, a remnant from some aborted vision of the future. I was going to use it, I had resolved, to finally write the novel I had been planning for years. Now what I needed was a phone where I could be called in emergencies by the six people I was going to give the number to. I needed it to have no internet option of any kind, so that if I woke up at 3 a.m. and my resolve cracked and I tried to get online, I wouldn’t be able to do it, no matter how hard I tried.
When I explained to people what I was planning, I would get one of three responses. The first was just like that of this man in Target: they couldn’t seem to process what I was saying. They thought I was saying that I was going to cut back on my internet use. The idea of going offline completely seemed to them so bizarre that I had to explain it again and again. “So you want a phone that can’t go online at all?” he said. “Why would you want that?”
The second response—which this man offered next—was a kind of low-level panic on my behalf. “What will you do in an emergency?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem right.” I asked—what emergency will require me to get online? What’s going to happen? I’m not the president of the United States—I don’t have to issue orders if Russia invades Ukraine. “Anything,” he said. “Anything could happen.” I kept explaining to the people my age—I was thirty-nine at the time—that we had spent half our lives without phones, so it shouldn’t be so hard to picture returning to the way we had lived for so long. Nobody seemed to find this persuasive.
And the third response was envy. People began to fantasize about what they would do with all the time they spent on their phones if it was all suddenly freed up. They started by listing the number of hours that Apple’s Screen Time option told them they spent on their phones every day. For the average American, it’s three hours and fifteen minutes. We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours. Sometimes they would wistfully mention something they loved and had abandoned—playing the piano, say—and stare off into the distance.
Target had nothing for me. Ironically, I had to go online to order what seemed to be the last remaining cellphone in the United States that can’t access the web. It’s called the Jitterbug. It’s designed for extremely old people, and it doubles as a medical emergency device. I opened the box and smiled at its giant buttons and told myself that there’s an added bonus: if I fall over, it will automatically connect me to the nearest hospital.
I laid out on the hotel bed everything I was taking with me. I had gone through all the routine things I normally use my iPhone for, and bought objects to replace each one. So for the first time since I was a teenager, I bought a watch. I got an alarm clock. I dug out my old iPod and loaded it with audiobooks and podcasts, and I ran my finger along its screen, thinking about how futuristic this gadget seemed to me when I bought it twelve years ago; now it looked like something that Noah might have carried onto the Ark. I had Imtiaz’s broken laptop—now rendered, effectively, into a 1990s-style word processor—and next to it I had a pile of classic novels I had been meaning to read for decades, with War and Peace at the top.
I took an Uber so I could hand over my iPhone and my MacBook to a friend who lived in Boston. I hesitated before putting them on the table in her house. Quickly, I pushed a button on my phone to summon a car to take me to the ferry terminal, and then I switched it off and walked away from it fast, like it might come running after me. I felt a twinge of panic. I’m not ready for this, I thought. Then somewhere, from the back of my mind, I remembered something the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset said: “We cannot put off living until we are ready . . . Life is fired at us point-blank.” If you don’t do this now, I told myself, you’ll never do it, and you’ll be lying on your deathbed seeing how many likes you got on Instagram. I climbed into the car and refused to look back.
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.” It’s right there in one of the oldest surviving human stories, Homer’s Odyssey. Homer tells of how there was once a patch of sea that sailors would always die in, for a strange reason: living in the ocean, there were two sirens—a uniquely hot blend of woman and fish—who would sing to the sailors to join them in the ocean. Then, when they clambered in for some sexy fish-based action, they’d drown. But then, one day, the hero of the story—Ulysses—figured out how to beat these temptresses. Before the ship approached the sirens’ stretch of sea, he got his crew members to tie him to the mast, hard, hand and foot. He couldn’t move. When he heard the sirens, no matter how much Ulysses yearned to dive in, he couldn’t.
I had used this technique before when I was trying to lose weight. I used to buy loads of carbs and tell myself I would be strong enough to eat them slowly and in moderation, but then I would guzzle them at 2 a.m. So I stopped buying them. At 2 a.m., I wasn’t going to haul myself to a store to buy Pringles. The you that exists in the present—right now—wants to pursue your deeper goals, and wants to be a better person. But you know you’re fallible and likely to crack in the face of temptation. So you bind the future version of you. You narrow your choices. You tie yourself to the mast.
There has been a small range of scientific experiments to see if this really works, at least in the short term. For example, in 2013 a professor of psychology named Molly Crockett—who I interviewed at Yale—got a bunch of men into a lab and split them into two groups. All of them were going to face a challenge. They were told that they could see a slightly sexy picture right away if they wanted to, but if they were able to wait and do nothing for a little while, they would get to see a super-sexy picture. The first group was told to use their willpower, and discipline themselves in the moment. But the second group was given a chance, before they went into the lab, to “pre-commit”—to resolve, out loud, that they were going to stop and wait so they could see the sexier picture. The scientists wanted to know—would the men who made a pre-commitment hold out more often, and longer, than the men who didn’t? It turned out pre-commitment was strikingly successful—resolving clearly to do something, and making a pledge that they’d stick to it, made the men significantly better at holding out. In the years since, scientists have shown the same effect in a broad range of experiments.