Driven to distraction
Read time for this story? About 16 minutes. Less if you are practised in the imperfect art of skim-reading. More if you attend to the ping or glow of a text, email, Twitter feed or Instagram post then take a few minutes to regather your thoughts and pick up the thread of … yes, an article on our plummeting ability to pay attention.
As London-based author and journalist Johann Hari writes in his new book, Stolen Focus, we are living in a haze of distractions. Our ability to focus is no longer screwed to the sticking place. We read books less, we scan stories, switch from one media platform to another, sift through a daily avalanche of news feeds, messages and posts, fall down rabbit holes of increasingly unrelated links, get outraged, forget what we were working on, lose the thread.
Danish computer scientist Professor Sune Lehmann likens it to drinking from a fire hose: “What we are sacrificing,” he tells Hari in the book, “is depth in all sorts of dimensions.”
Why have we lost the plot? In Stolen Focus, Hari ticks off the list: high-sugar and processed diets cause regular energy highs and lows and play havoc with our ability to stay focused; lack of sleep leaves adults drowsy and kids hyperactive; pollution – at every stage of your life, French scientist Professor Barbara Demeneix tells Hari, “different forms of pollution will affect your attention span”. Meanwhile, we work ever longer hours in ever noisier workplaces, leaving us stressed and exhausted.
But worst of all, in Hari’s view, are the “pings and paranoias” of social media and the constant lure of the phone or laptop screen that continue to drill into our attention span. Through no fault of our own, he argues, there never seems to be enough stillness – enough cool, clear space – to stop and think.
“If we continue to be a
