Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

I found it startling to discover that you can throw out almost everything we regard as schooling—all the testing, all the assessments, even formal teaching—and still produce people who can read, write, and function in society. This tells you how much of what we are neurotically putting our kids through is pointless (at best).

The first layer of your attention, he said, is your spotlight. This is when you focus on “immediate actions,” like, “I’m going to walk into the kitchen and make a coffee.”

realized that I agree with the messages in the medium of the book. I think they are true. I think they encourage the best parts of human nature—that a life with lots of episodes of deep focus is a good life. It is why reading books nourishes me.

Your ability to develop deep focus is, I have come to believe, like a plant. To grow and flourish to its full potential, your focus needs certain things to be present: play for children and flow states for adults, to read books, to discover meaningful activities that you want to focus on, to have space to let your mind wander so you can make sense

I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind’s own ability to focus deeply?

It’s a sign of how dysfunctional we have become when it comes to sleep that the people who should be warning us most about this crisis—doctors—are in fact required to become sleep-deprived to get their qualifications. As part of their medical training, doctors have to do grueling twenty-four-hour shifts on call—they nickname it “doing a Jack Bauer,

As I learned about several of the things we need to do to improve our focus, I realized that we live in an apparent paradox. Many of the things we need to do are so obvious they are banal: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more. But even though at some level we all know them to be true, we are in fact moving in the opposite direction: toward

As I reflected on this, I started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis. He warned that the way we are reading seems to be changing as we migrate to the internet—so

If you take five milligrams of melatonin—which is often a standard dose that’s sold over the counter in the U.S.—Roxanne said you risk “blowing out your melatonin receptors,” which would make it harder to sleep without them.

TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it’s about surfaces and appearances; that everything in the world is happening all at once.