This blogpost summarizes some of the main points from the book titled “Stolen Focus”, by Johann Hari

This book is very special to me as this is my first experience read-walking. I have managed to read this book cover to cover, during a long walk that spanned ~25 km. I was used to reading kindle over short walks but have never before read a single book cover to cover while walking. The book might have taken longer to read than while reading in a stationary state. Surprisingly I found that my attention never waned during read-walking. Instead I can vividly remember various ideas in the book and have a mapping of these ideas to various places in my long walk

A decade ago when I was living a solitary life, there were many instances that I could focus on something for long stretches of time. In my current situation as a father of two kids, it becomes difficult to carve out uninterrupted stretches of time for myself. More so, in this post Covid world, where working from home has become an accepted norm, I have become OK with interruptions from family members. On top of all of this, my nature of work has changed in the last 6 years where I am supposed to be ever present to help various teams in their sales efforts; this means that interruptions have become even more frequent. Added to this, there are work policies around internal communication tools that force me to be logged in, so as to respond to everyone quickly. What do all of these circumstances result in ? Doing something for a span of more than a couple of hours without a break of attention is almost impossible. All the situations listed above are external driven, but what about internal factors ? The way I am currently engaged with various activities such as interacting, coding, reading, comprehending have also contributing to my inattentiveness. Reading more online content means the tendency to shift around content or switching has increased. The consumption of videos as one of the ways to educate myself has also changed the way my brain accepts new material. I have started to prefer short videos as I find that my attention fritters away in watching a long video. Have found that short audio clips are better than longer duration audio content such as audible books. Byte sized information, be it in text or audio, is what I can focus my attention on. I was definitely a long form person. Still remember the times when I could spend a fortnight, slogging through ONE SINGLE book and soak up all the contents. I suppose I don’t have that luxury now. Or May be I do ? But somehow I have subconsciously allowed distractions in my life. I realized this change in my behavior a year ago and have made a few changes so as to focus on long form. This book appeared in my life at the right juncture and I am so glad that I have taken time out to read this book. I can already see the beneficial effects of this book in my life. Reading this book has made me more attentive to other aspects of my life that were causing distractions.

In this blogpost, I will try to summarize some of the main points from the book

Cause One: The Increase in Speed Switching and Filtering

One of the obvious trends that we have been seeing in the last decade or so, is the rate of increase of information around us. The world today has about 40 zettabytes of data and is estimated to have 160 zettabytes of data by 2025. Not only is the rate of information increasing, but also the way we consume. Data is now being live streamed to us, which makes all the more difficult to focus on any specific aspect. What does more information do to our brains ? We tend to focus less. We have tendency to speed up which kills comprehension in a way. Research has shown that the info overload is causing a rapid exhaustion of our attentive resources. Instead of pursuing desirable difficulties, we do the easiest task that we can think of - reach out to a cellphone, check email, check twitter feeds, check stuff on e-commerce sites, watch random video clippings, check Instagram etc. All these activities do not take a lot of effort and hence we are seeking distractions because our brains are increasingly finding it difficult to be attentive.

Switching from one task to another is also giving rise to attention problems. Humans are programmed to do one task after another. However when we do multiple things, we are under the assumption that humans are capable of doing multi-tasking. This is a myth. All we are doing is multi-switching which is not going to be helpful in doing any specific activity well. The downsides to switching are

1. It makes it difficult to restart the activity that has been stopped
2. Error creep in
3. Reduces creativity in the long run
4. Diminishes memory as you give your brain less time to encode

Attention issues are also arising because of increase in filtering activity. If we imagine a bouncer in our brain looking at all the information and filtering the incoming material, the increase of information around us in volume, variety and velocity has made the life difficult for the bouncer. We are having to devote more energy to the bouncer activities and hence we are sort of becoming less attentive to the task at hand.

Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States

Most of the early developments in Psychology revolved around manipulations of behaviors using various types of incentives. B.F.Skinner was a popular figure in the U.S who was instrumental in most of the research in this area. He believed that humans can be reprogrammed in any way that a clever designer wants to.

It was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who made a case of ‘positive psychology’ and introduced flow state in a human being. A flow state is achieved by

• Monotasking - choose to set everything else and do one thing
• make sure that it is meaningful to you
• stretch yourself to the edge while doing the activity

The author somehow seemed to have missed one of the most important aspects in sustaining flow; clear and immediate feedback.

It is likely that you would have experienced a flow state at various points in time, in your life. If you pay enough attention to those states, you will start to see the pattern that most of the flow states comprise the above three components mentioned by Mihaly. Of course, any type of distraction or interruption hinders attaining flow state.

Life time of research in flow seems to be summarized by Mihaly when he says:

The best experiences in life that I had, when I thought back on it, came from times when I had been in the mountains climbing … climbing and doing something really kind of difficult and dangerous - but within the scope of what I could do. When you are approaching death, I thought to myself, you won’t think about your reinforcements - the likes and retweets; you will think about your moments in flow

Here is a TED Talk by Mihaly

Cause Three: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion

Lack of Sleep is a massive contributor to inattentiveness. When we find it hard to sleep, we usually give in to screens and assume that somehow the screen time will help us fall asleep. On the contrary, any artificial light will create a spike of energy that makes it difficult for one to sleep. Why does this spike happen ? It is how our brains have been structured. Before the light was invented, as sunset approaches, a surge of waking up drive happens in us, so that we can finish the pending activities of the day and retire to bed.

But now we control light. We decide when sunset happens. So, if we keep bright lights switched on right until the moment we decide to go to sleep, or we watch TV on our phones in bed, when we switch them off we accidentally trigger a physical process - out bodies think this sudden waning of the light is the arrival of sunset, so they release a rush of fresh energy to help you get back to your cave.

We might think that a few hours of sleep deprivation is OK but research has shown that it all adds up and it creates all sorts of problems that involve physical and psychological damage.

Our brain is usually in two states, awake-aware and sleep-cleanse. By prolonging the former activity, we are not allowing our brains to clear the toxins. A great analogy is of a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, bu you can’t really do two things at once.

What happens when you become tired in waking hours ?

Even if you are awake and you are looking around you, you can lapse - without knowing it - into a state called ‘local sleep’. This is where part of the brain is awake, and part of the brain is asleep. In this sates, you believe you are alert and mentally competent - but you aren’t. You are sitting at your desk and you look awake, but parts of your brain are asleep, and you are not able to think in a sustained way.

Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading

A few years ago, I had shifted to reading books on iPad. Stopped buying physical copies of any books. Well, one reason being that I was running out of space as the space was taking up by our kids toys, kids clothes etc. One thing I relished about the books on iPad was that I could carry any number of books and read away to glory. However once in a while, I used to long for days when I could read a physical copy of book with no distractions.

Research in the differences between online and offline reading are pretty interesting and they highlight the behavioral differences it induces in us. By nature, reading books is sequential. There is less scope for jumping around. You read the book page after page, focused one thing after another. Reading online content is different. It is designed in such a way that it makes you switch, jump around and read stuff. One can compare the activity to shopping in a super market. You tend to pick up items from a super market in a bit of hurry. You are not going to saunter and examine each item, learn something about them etc. The supermarket is designed to increase the product of footfalls and revenue per customer. In the same way, online be it You Tube, Twitter, Instagram - they are likely to drain you than energize you.

As Nicholas Carr says in his book, Shallows, Medium becomes the message. Whatever medium you use to consume information, the medium has a big say in the way it is consumed.

What is the message buried in the message of a printed book ?

Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.

Research shows that one of the simplest and common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book - and like, other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture by constant distraction.

Cause Five: The Disruption of Mind-Wandering

How many of us let our mind wander freely after a focused work session ? My guess is very few. We want some relaxation after the hectic activity. It could be a random browse of an article, a random video, a random twitter check, go out for exercise, play an instrument, read a relaxing book, listen to an audio book etc. But do we really allow our mind to just wander ? I am guilty of not allowing this to happen as I frantically fill activities one after another, under some pretext or the other. Sometimes I call it “audio learning”, Sometimes I call it “video learnings”, or whatever stuff that I can justify to keep the information flowing in. However this cannot go on, as constant info in to our brains, will make us exhausted. In a fit of exhaustion, I move to writing as it is a way of dumping all my thoughts. Why do I resist the thought of idleness ?

Research has shown that doing any activity in a deliberate manner is like focusing spotlight on something. Like symphony, it is important to have the spotlight on the main instruments, but it is the collection of other instruments that makes it a memorable performance. By moving away from spotlight and having the attention on other instruments is what makes the symphony in to a sweet music.

Mind-wandering has three advantages

• You are able to make sense slowly as time goes, by allowing your mind to wander
• Helps form associations between main focus of attention and related items.
• It helps you do a mental time travel in to the past and the future

Should one capture the thoughts when mind wanders ? Should one just observe the thoughts, feelings while our mind wanders ? Most often, I get so many thoughts that I feel guilty of not doing anything about it, like writing down somewhere, recording it for later reference etc. One of suggestions from Anne Lamont is to carry index cards and note down whenever you realize that something important crosses your mind. It is easier said than done as sometimes I get interesting thoughts while I am running or spending time with my kids. Stopping the activity to note down on an index card appears to me like an interruption that I am resistant to.

In any case, the content of this chapter makes a very persuasive argument that one must unplug and do nothing from time to time.

Cause Six: The Rise of Technology that can track and Manipulate you.

The first five causes mentioned in the book put the responsibility squarely on individuals and gives prescriptions that help individuals gain more attention in one’s life. The second part of the book deals with a much more broader issue where systems are being designed that make it difficult for an individual to get back attention. The story behind the mechanisms used by Silicon valley firms who are trying to make ever more pervasive and distractive technologies is made more readable by highlighting the work being done by Triston Harris and Aza Razkin. As much as we like to think that we can get back to our attention by merely working on ourselves, there are thousands of brilliant engineers and marketing experts who are out to make us more distracted, more plugged in to apps etc.

You don’t need much evidence but look at your behavior to see the pervasive systems that make us more distracted, more edgy and less attentive. Look at the notifications on your phone, desktop notifications, alerts from various apps, YouTube video jumping, Twitter feed handle chases, fixated with more extreme content, be it violence or comedy or dark forms. We as humans naturally get attracted to negative events.

One can breakdown the machinery by which the big firms are using to harm our attention

• Sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards
• Sites push you to switch tasks more frequently than you normally would
• Sites learn about you
• Sites make you angry a lot of time
• Sites make you feel that you are surrounded by other people’s anger
• Set society on fire

If one starts analyzing our environment as an interplay between us and apps, one starts to realize that may be, we might not be solve the problem merely be by changing the way we behave. We are constantly being tracked, manipulated and made to behave in such a way that it makes economic sense for firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagrams of the world.

Cause Seven: The Rise of Cruel Optimism

Cruel optimism, a term used in this chapter makes the reader realize that the common simplistic solutions offered to take charge of our attention do not work when there are wider systemic issues present. Facebook knows that its business model is based on users sticking to the site. It will never offer a feature that enables users to meet offline, though it could do it with a few lines of code. Same goes with all the social media sites that benefit from you being on their site, so that they can track you better, they can train the algo that represents you and offer more ways to monetize from your activity. Left it to their own devices, these firms are not going to change ways. The author suggests a more community based activist movement to make sure that these firms act responsibly. I am not so sure whether such an activist movement will ever be successful. It is similar to saying - All junk foods are making us obese and causing health problems - let us create a movement to cut junk food around the world where the McDonald’s of the world will create less sugary stuff for us crave. Will it happen in the near future? I doubt.

Cause Eight: The Surge in Stress and How it is triggering vigilance?

The author cites research studies that show that stress in the environment is triggering vigilance, which in turn is one of the main causes for losing focus. Indeed if you are stressed out about your job, your child’s health, your parents illness etc. , it is unlikely that you will be able to focus on something and get it done. There are also interesting examples mentioned in the book where firms have created an environment that allows its employees to lead a more stress-free life.

Causes Nine and Ten: Our Deteriorating Diets and Rising Pollution

The author delves in the dietary changes that we have made over the last few decades. Some of these changes are imposed upon us by external circumstances and some of the them are a result of our own internal triggers. Needless to say, significant amount of city population consume processed foods that are devoid of key nutrients. The lack of key nutrients in our foods is detrimental to our mental and physical states. Add to this, the increasing pollutants in the air, the environment is primed to make us inattentive

Cause Eleven: The Rise of ADHD and How we are responding to it

With the rise in ADHD cases around the world, we are quick to jump to the conclusion that it is genetic and put the patients under medication. The author digs in to the details.

Firstly, ADHD is not some obscure condition limited to a few people. ADHD institute reports that

A mean worldwide prevalence of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or hyperkinetic disorder (HKD), of ~2.2% overall (range, 0.1–8.1%) has been estimated in children and adolescents (aged <18 years). The mean prevalence of ADHD in adults (aged 18–44 years) from a range of countries in Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East was reported as ~2.8% overall (range, 0.6–7.3%).

So, it is indeed a serious problem. Recognizing it is the first thing that we all should be doing.

Author presents the story of a vet who treats animals with human anti-depressants and finds that the anxious animals become tame after the treatment. However the vet has a different point of view; he says the animals in the zoo are put in a drastically different environment than what they are naturally meant to be. This environmental change creates problems that are then being treated by drugs. Extending this to humans, could we be treating the patient with a medication when the actual problem lies in the environment.

There are a lot of open ended research areas that are mentioned in this chapter that it is obvious that we have still not conclusively cracked the ADHD problem

Cause Twelve: The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically

This is one of the best chapters in the book where the author tries to look at fixing the attention issue in schools. He outlines the following factors that are causing and aggravating the problem:

1. Lack of exercise amongst kids is one of the reasons their brains are not attentive enough for the tasks
2. Lack of play opportunities in every day learning. Play here is used broadly to mean having agency in various activities they do
3. Anxiety levels among kids have grown to such an extent that they are not unable to focus and be attentive
4. Unable to find intrinsic motivation at work
5. Unable to spend time in mastering something

Key attention skills are learned while playfully interacting with others. By not providing these environments, we are robbing kids of their physical and psychological development.

Attention Rebellion

The last chapter of the book has a fantastic metaphor to view attention at an individual and at a society level. One can think of layers of attention comprising

• spotlight: the one activity that you focus on
• starlight: once in a while you have look up in to the sky and reorient yourself from various distractions
• daylight: In the broad daylight, you need to think about why you are doing something in the first place
• stadium light : While you are busing doing some activity, you should also think about how it connects to other people who are living around your

Even though the title of the chapter of the book is about creating an attention rebellion at a society level, I feel it is easier to at least try to hack at an individual level first and then probably join forces that are addressing systemic level issues. From that perspective, it is useful to see what the author has done to be more attentive in his life. The author says that he has implemented the following changes in his life:

1. Pre-commitment to stop switching tasks
2. Seek out flow states
3. 6 months free of social media
4. Walk without any devices
5. Sleep for 8 hours in a day
6. Unsupervised play with children

Another interesting point mentioned in this chapter is about the impact of Covid. One of the benefits of the pandemic is that it has given us a glimpse in our future if we go along this path of massive digital indulgence. By suddenly being forced to remain indoors, we have increased screen time, got more caught up with our devices that has lead to more stress, more anxiety and less attention. When was the last time you watched a Netflix series and walked away with peace, calm and a feeling that you could focus on a task ? My guess is almost never because the platforms have all the features that the author mentions in one of the chapters, i.e.

• they make you crave for additional rewards
• they make you browse other content on the site
• they make you angry
• they make you feel that people around you are angry or violent
• they are constantly modeling your behavior so that they can serve more content so that you spend more time on the site

I think active disengagement is the only way forward for now, until the firms reorient themselves and try to seek less attention form us.

Takeaway

I loved this book in many ways as it has shown some of my own behaviors that are crippling my ability to focus. At the same time, it shows that it is only a part of the problem. A significant part is played by the environment we are living in, that is primed to make us inattentive. This idea is reinforced in the book by citing the work of many researchers around the world, by giving examples of various situations. Distractive technologies are hacking our GPS; they make a small deviation from the path ever so often that we end up in a completely different place; we wonder what went wrong. This book provides a dozen reasons and they are all well-worth reading and reflecting upon. I have an inkling that I will read this book again a year from now and reflect on the effect it has had on me.