Sarah

“We can’t live like this!” I said. “You don’t know how to be present! You are missing your life! You’re afraid of missing out—that’s why you are checking your screen all the time! By doing that, you are guaranteeing you are missing out! You are missing your one and only life! You can’t see the things that are right in front of you, the things you have been longing to see since you were a little boy! None of these people can! Look at them!”
― 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

“the more a child is read storybooks—something the parents, more than the kid, choose—the better they are at reading other people’s emotions.”
― 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