Summary of Johann Hari's Stolen Focus

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I was planning on going offline for three months. I was going to use my friend’s old, broken laptop to write the novel I had been planning for years. I needed a phone that could not access the internet of any kind.
#2 The most effective way to beat any destructive habit is through pre-commitment. You bind the future version of you so that you don’t have to commit to the temptation of your current state.
#3 I had been working nonstop since I was twenty-one. I had taken almost no holidays. I had felt tired for so long that all I knew was how to outrun it. As people began to disembark, I heard the ping of an incoming text message.
#4 I wrote my first email in 1993, when I was 19 years old. I didn’t feel any excitement or joy when I sent it, and I didn’t understand why there was such a big deal about this new email thing. I wanted a place that would not stimulate my journalistic curiosity.

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669357193
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Johann Hari's Stolen Focus
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I was planning on going offline for three months. I was going to use my friend’s old, broken laptop to write the novel I had been planning for years. I needed a phone that could not access the internet of any kind.

#2

The most effective way to beat any destructive habit is through pre-commitment. You bind the future version of you so that you don’t have to commit to the temptation of your current state.

#3

I had been working nonstop since I was twenty-one. I had taken almost no holidays. I had felt tired for so long that all I knew was how to outrun it. As people began to disembark, I heard the ping of an incoming text message.

#4

I wrote my first email in 1993, when I was 19 years old. I didn’t feel any excitement or joy when I sent it, and I didn’t understand why there was such a big deal about this new email thing. I wanted a place that would not stimulate my journalistic curiosity.

#5

I had done the right thing by moving to Provincetown. The ocean was old and permanent, unlike Twitter, which was temporary and fast. It was never going to argue back, no matter how loud I yelled.

#6

I spent a week in decompression, feeling almost stoned with exhaustion and stillness. I sat in cafés and talked to strangers. I ate enough lobsters that, if that species ever evolves consciousness, I will be remembered as its Stalin figure.

#7

Sune Lehmann, a physicist, experienced a change in his focus when he went to visit his son in Provincetown. He would reach over and grab his phone to check his email, even though his sons were crawling all over him. He realized that his job was to think differently from everyone else.

#8

Sune, who was in his late thirties at the time, asked himself: Am I a grumpy old man, or is the world really changing. So with scientists across Europe, he launched the largest scientific study yet conducted to answer a key question: is our collective attention span shrinking.

#9

The more information you pump into a system, the less time people are able to focus on any single piece of it. This is what the scientists found, and it explains why our attention spans have been declining.

#10

We are constantly being bombarded with information, and the faster it comes, the more we believe we can handle it. But we are sacrificing depth in all aspects of our lives, and this is becoming increasingly clear.

#11

Sune’s study is the first of its kind, and it only provides us with a small base of evidence. But two related areas of scientific investigation helped me to understand this more. The first is studies investigating if we can really learn how to speed-read. It has been proven that humans can read things much faster than they ordinarily would, but it always comes at a cost.

#12

The scientists investigating this also found that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements.

#13

We have created a myth that we can think about multiple things at the same time. In reality, we are very single-minded. We have very limited cognitive capacity because of the fundamental structure of the brain.

#14

The first effect of constant switching is the switch cost effect. When you are trying to do several things at once, your brain has to reconfigure between tasks, which takes time. This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.

#15

The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the screw-up effect. When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in because your brain is error-prone.

#16

The fact that we are unable to multitask is clear, as we are constantly being killed or injured due to distracted driving. We are not machines, and we cannot live by the logic of machines.

#17

The brain is like a muscle that gets stronger as you use certain things.