While reading these pages, I was nodding in agreement, knowing that I too was one of those who, for instance, skims articles on the internet rather than absorbing them. He gives example after example of our vanished talent for deep reading, of being unable to stick with tasks for more than a few minutes, of children lacking the power to apply themselves to their school lessons.

Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.For nearly the entire book, Johann Hari focuses our attention on our inability to pay attention. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity.Ĭrucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus-as individuals, and as a society-if we are determined to fight for it. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention-and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

He tried all sorts of self-help solutions-even abandoning his phone for three months-but nothing seemed to work. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes.

“Read this book to save your mind.”-Susan Cain, author of Quiet “The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”-Adam Grant, author of Think Again From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening-and how to get our attention back. Our ability to pay attention is collapsing.

Stolen focus book