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

“All of these bad things come bubbling up when I’m writing.” When that happened, it would trigger something inside him. To get away from these uncomfortable feelings, he would tell himself there was something else he had to do, for just a moment. “The easiest thing to do would be—let me just check email real quick. Let me just open my phone real qu

three crucial things that are happening during mind-wandering.

We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B. F. Skinner’s vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment.

if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus.

We have, he believes, created in our culture “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation, as a result of distraction.”

Fifth, in addition to making you angry, these sites make you feel that you are surrounded by other people’s anger.

Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. If the goal you choose is too easy, you’ll go into autopilot—but if it’s too hard, you’ll start to feel anxious and off-kilter and you won’t flow either.

Do you want to be one of Skinner’s pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards, or Mihaly’s painters, able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters?

What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?