Johann Hari | Contemplative Inquiry

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Highly recommended to anyone interested in states of attention, how culture shapes them, and the implications of this shaping. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: How You Can’t Pay Attention (1) shows that our diminished capacity to focus is a collective cultural issue and not just a matter of individual willpower. In this book, Hari identifies 12 causes of ‘stolen focus’, developing these themes partly through telling his personal story and partly through conversations with experts in the relevant areas of knowledge. The causes are:

1: Increase in Speed, Switching and Filtering. If we go too fast, and switch between tasks to rapidly, we overload our abilities, and they degrade.

2: Crippling of Flow States Fragmented focus interrupts flow. “Fragmentation makes you … shallower, angrier”, whereas “Flow makes you deeper … calmer”.

3: Rise in Physical and Mental Exhaustion The average amount of time a person sleeps is reducing, damaging our focus. If we stay awake for 19 hours straight we become as cognitively impaired as if drunk.

4: Collapse of Sustained Reading Fewer people are reading books, especially novels. Yet they train focus and encourage empathy. “Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.”

5: Disruption of Mind-Wandering, seen here not as a form of distraction but as a way of slowly making sense of the world that supports creativity and long-term decisions. Distractions undermine this process.

6: Tec That Can Trap and Manipulate You Big Tec’s business model depends on ‘engagement’ (eyes on screen) to facilitate exposure to advertising and the harvesting of personal data, to be used by the Tec companies themselves and also sold on to other would-be persuaders. Internet services are designed specifically to serve ‘engagement’ in this sense. Traffic is more readily stimulated by exposure to angry rather than calm content. Hence ‘surveillance capitalism’ engineers reactivity, anger and division.

7: Rise of ‘Cruel Optimism‘, a term for offering, in upbeat language, simplistic individual solutions to major social problems – like obesity and addiction. Internet addiction agitation and associated cognitive decline are looked at in the same way.

8: Surge in Stress and Triggering of Vigilance Research shows the top causes of stress for the working population of the USA to be “a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organisational justice and unrealistic demands”. A cause of stolen focus is again linked to powerful external conditions..

9: Deteriorating Diets A widespread switch to supermarket bought processed foods has been “bad for our waistlines and our hearts” and is also “stealing large parts of our ability to pay attention”.

10 Rising Pollution We know that air pollution causes asthma and other breathing problems. There is also “growing evidence to suggest that this pollution is seriously damaging our ability to focus”.

11 ADHD and Our Response to It There has been a huge rise in diagnosed ADHD in school students in the last 30 years. It has been treated largely as a biological disorder, though this is now contested. Personal experiences and environmental conditions are being considered more seriously.

12 Confinement of Children – Physical and Psychological In the western world, children no longer roam free in their own world. Play is indoors and either supervised by adults or located on screens. Schools are largely concerned with preparing and drilling children for tests. This has serious consequences for both learning and focus.

In exploring ‘stolen focus’ and its causes, Johann Hari casts his net wide. In his conclusion, he talks about four levels of now-weakening attention: spotlight, when we focus on immediate actions; starlight, when we focus on projects and longer-term goals; daylight, which makes it possible to know what our longer-term goals are in the first place; and stadium lights, that let us see each other, hear each other, and work together to formulate and fight for common goals. Hari sees all of these lights being dimmed by stolen focus.

Hari advocates for an ‘attention rebellion’ in the manner of XR. Its three main demands would be: to ban surveillance capitalism, because people being “hacked and hooked” can’t focus’; to introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention; rebuild childhood around “letting kids play freely – in their neighbourhoods and at school” to promote a healthy ability to pay attention. He understands that this will be uphill work – the logic of economic growth demands more and more of our time devoted to producing and purchasing. Yet given the crises facing us, especially the climate crisis, we cannot afford the destruction of our attention and ability to think clearly.

This book is not just about big tec and social media. I like the range and quality of the information that Stolen Focus brings to the description and analysis of stolen focus. Hari is clear that self-help solutions – though they may help some people – are not enough. I believe that communities informed by deep ecology, spiritual and therapeutic insights can be oases of sanity and contribute to solutions. But without their being able to influence the mainstream, their impact is bound to be limited. Stolen Focus raises awareness very effectively. Whether or not an ‘attention rebellion’ is the right way forward,, Hari’s recommendations deserve to be taken seriously.

(1) Johann Hari Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022 (Kindle edition 2023)

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June 13, 2024

STOLEN FOCUS: SPEED, SWITCHING AND FILTERING

“I went to see the Mona Lisa in Paris, only to find that she is now permanently hidden behind a rugby scrum of people from everywhere on earth, all jostling their way to the front, only for them to immediately turn their backs on her, snap a selfie, and fight their way out again. On the day I was there, I watched the crowd from the side for more than an hour. Nobody – not one person – looked at the Mona Lisa for more than a few seconds.”

Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (1) explores states of attention, how culture shapes them, and the implications of this shaping. I like Hari’s insistence that this is a collective issue and not just a matter of individual willpower. In this book, Hari identifies 12 causes of ‘stolen focus’. I plan to write a review of Stolen Focus soon. This post is about the first cause, which he describes as an increase in speed, switching and filtering.

Speed

According to Hari, modern culture overvalues speed. “People talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950’s, and in just 20 years, people have started to walk 20% faster in cities” and “the original Blackberry advertising slogan was ‘anything worth doing is worth doing faster'”. But, argues Hari, “if you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade”. He reminds us that if we engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, or tai chi, or meditation … they improve our ability to pay attention by a significant amount.

Switching

Cognitive speeding has been made worse by the myth of multitasking, a term taken from 1960’s computing, when machines began to have more than one processor and could literally do two or more things at once. The human brain doesn’t have that capacity. It is naturally single-minded and isn’t going to change. So when we ‘multitask’, we are actually switching between different tasks, though we may not notice our switching.

The cost of switching is a degradation of our ability to focus, and a decline in our performance. Hewlett- Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. “The study found that ‘technological distraction’ – just getting email and calls – caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of 10 points … twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis”. Overall, if you spend your time switching a lot, the evidence suggests “you’ll be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do”.

Filtering

“Think of your brain as a nightclub where, standing at the front of that club, there’s a bouncer. The bouncer’s job is to filter out most of the stimuli that are hitting you at any given moment – the traffic noise, the couple having an argument across the street, the cellphone ringing in the pocket of the person next to you – so that you can think coherently about one thing at a time.” The bouncer in our brain is the pre-frontal cortex, and it is becoming overwhelmed. There are too many stimuli and in many environments noise pollution in particular is interfering more insistently with the flow of our thoughts.

The crisis in attention that Hari outlines is a threat to our quality of life. It weakens our ability to think creatively or deeply. It tends to make us agitated as well as distracted. This is not a good place from which to build healthy relationships or solve complex problems at either the personal or the public level. I experience my contemplative inquiry as a valuable antidote to ‘stolen focus’. But it doesn’t get me everywhere, because loss of focus is a pervasive cultural problem. Beyond writing a review of the whole book, I intend to delve more deeply into the questions that Stolen Focus raises from a personal and a collective point of view.

(1) Johann Hari Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022 (Kindle edition 2023)

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Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Johann Hari

June 17, 2024

BOOK REVIEW: STOLEN FOCUS

June 13, 2024

STOLEN FOCUS: SPEED, SWITCHING AND FILTERING