Sarah

“simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“The writer James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“It’s one thing to have a hunch that there’s a crisis. It’s another thing to hear one of the leading neuroscientists in the world tell you we are living in a “perfect storm” that’s degrading your capacity to think. “The best we can do now,” Earl told me, is “try to get rid of the distractions as much as possible.” At one point in our conversation, he sounded quite optimistic, suggesting that we can all achieve progress on this, starting today. He said: “The brain is like a muscle. The more you use certain things, the stronger the connection’s getting, and the better things work.” If you are struggling to focus, he said, just try monotasking for ten minutes, and then allow yourself to be distracted for a minute, then monotask for another ten minutes, and so on. “As you do it, it becomes more familiar, your brain gets better and better at it, because you’re strengthening the [neural] connections involved in that behavior. And pretty soon you can do it for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, you know?…Just do it. Practice at it…. Start slow, but practice, and you’ll get there.” To achieve this, he said you have to separate yourself—for increasing periods of time—from the sources of your distraction. It’s a mistake, he said, to “try to monotask by force of will—because it’s too hard to resist that informational tap on the shoulder.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again

“Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again