Talal Khalid > Talal's Quotes

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“The more people stared at their phones, the more money these companies made. Period. The people in Silicon Valley did not want to design gadgets and websites that would dissolve people’s attention spans. They’re not the Joker, trying to sow chaos and make us dumb. They spend a lot of their own time meditating and doing yoga. They often ban their own kids from using the sites and gadgets they design, and send them instead to tech-free Montessori schools. But their business model can only succeed if they take steps to dominate the attention spans of the wider society. It’s not their goal, any more than ExxonMobil deliberately wants to melt the Arctic. But it’s an inescapable effect of their current business model.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. 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.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"--which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain,” Nathan told me. “It’s a new association between two things that were already there.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“We live in a culture that is constantly amping us up with stress and stimulation.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“There’s this thing about speed that feels great…. Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it’s awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out about it and learn about it.” But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion: “It becomes exhausting.” More importantly, Sune said, “what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“He has analyzed what happens to a person’s focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, or tai chi, or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies, and he has shown they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount. I asked him why. He said that “we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.” If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. “That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. It’s not about humming or wearing orange robes.” Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure of the brain,” and it’s not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“I now had a sense of what a movement to reclaim our attention might look like. I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can't focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can't pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely--in their neighborhoods and at school--because children who are imprisoned in their homes won't be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention. If we achieve these goals, the ability of people to pay attention would, over time, dramatically improve. Then we will have a solid core of focus that we could use to take the fight further and deeper.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a little bit difficult. What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Survey--which studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americans--found that between 2004 and 2017, the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40 percent, while for women, it was down by 29 percent. The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“seeing this as a debate between whether you are pro-tech or anti-tech is bogus and lets the people who stole your attention off the hook. The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked; who switch tasks every three minutes; who are tracked and monitored by social-media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll; who are so stressed that we become hypervigilant; who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash; who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day—then, yes, we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Some scientists used to side with my initial gut instinct—they believed it was possible for people to do several complex tasks at once. So they started to get people into labs, and they told them to do lots of things at the same time, and they monitored how well it went. What the scientists discovered is that, in fact, when people think they’re doing several things at once, they’re actually—as Earl explained—“juggling. They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.” There are three ways, he explained, in which this constant switching degrades your ability to focus. The first is called the “switch cost effect.” There is broad scientific evidence for this. Imagine you are doing your tax return and you receive a text, and you look at it—it’s only a glance, taking five seconds—and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another,” he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it, “and that takes a little bit of time.” When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“As you become tired, your attention will indeed blink out, for a simple reason. People think you’re either awake or asleep, he told me, but he found that even if your eyes are open 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.” (It’s called local sleep because the sleep is local to one part of the brain.) In this state, 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. When he studied people in this state, he found “amazingly, sometimes their eyes were open, but they couldn’t see what was in front of them.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego-- it loves you, it hates you, it's talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It's never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

“Supporters of Bolsonaro had created a video warning that his main rival, Fernando Haddad, wanted to turn all the children of Brazil into homosexuals, and that he had developed a cunning technique to do it. The video showed a baby sucking a bottle, only there was something peculiar about it—the teat of the bottle had been painted to look like a penis. This, the story that circulated said, is what Haddad will distribute to every kindergarten in Brazil. This became one of the most-shared news stories in the entire election. People in the favelas explained indignantly that they couldn’t possibly vote for somebody who wanted to get babies to suck these penis-teats, and so they would have to vote for Bolsonaro instead. On these algorithm-pumped absurdities, the fate of the whole country turned. When Bolsonaro unexpectedly won the presidency, his supporters chanted “Facebook! Facebook! Facebook!” They knew what the algorithms had done for them.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: “If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can’t do that, it’s really hard to do anything.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that’s emerged from your brain,” Nathan told me. “It’s a new association between two things that were already there.” Mind-wandering allows “more extended trains of thought to unfold, which allows for more associations to be made.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“The science is so clear on this that a recent summary explained: “It is now obvious that stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long-term effects.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“we need to move beyond the idea of growth, to something called a “steady-state economy.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“If life has accelerated, and we have become overwhelmed by information to the point that we are less and less able to focus on any of it, why has there been so little pushback? Why haven’t we tried to slow things down to a pace where we can think clearly? I was able to find the first part of an answer to this—and it’s only the first part—when I went to interview Professor Earl Miller. He has won some of the top awards in neuroscience in the world, and he was working at the cutting edge of brain research when I went to see him in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He told me bluntly that instead of acknowledging our limitations and trying to live within them, we have—en masse—fallen for an enormous delusion. There’s one key fact, he said, that every human being needs to understand—and everything else he was going to explain flows from that. “Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure of the brain,” and it’s not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time. To pretend this was the case, we took a term that was never meant to be applied to human beings at all. In the 1960s, computer scientists invented machines with more than one processor, so they really could do two things (or more) simultaneously. They called this machine-power “multitasking.” Then we took the concept and applied it to ourselves.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again