But if you then test them on what they read, you’ll discover that the faster you make them go, the less they will understand. More speed means less comprehension.

The tech companies were planning for us to be immersed in their world to such an extreme extent in a decade’s time, not now. “The plan was not for it to leap in this way,”

I would call it our stadium lights—it’s our ability to see each other, to hear each other, and to work together to formulate and fight for collective goals.

Finland showed that a universal basic income—enough to give a baseline of security, but not so much that it disincentivizes work—improves people’s focus by dealing with one of the causes of our hypervigilance.

but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen. That’s it.

At New York University, Xavier Castellanos, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, explained to me that the best research on the effects of stimulants found something important. They improve a child’s behavior on tasks that require repetition, but they do not improve their learning.

you are simply giving your brain less opportunity to “follow your associative links down to new places and really [have] truly original and creative thoughts.”

“If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted brain-processing time.” This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.

discovered that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material.