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

Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse. Other studies in similar scenarios have found even worse outcomes of 30 percent.

Polar bears in nature will walk for miles across the Arctic tundra. They look for seal places, and they swim, and they eat seals. The exhibit [the cage where this polar bear was trapped] is nothing like real life. So, just like the guy in jail, they pace to appease the inner pain of being denied a real life…. They’ve got all these instincts that ar

Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly.

This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon—but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering

You can only find your starlight and your daylight if you have sustained periods of reflection, mind-wandering, and deep thought. James has come to believe that our attention crisis is depriving us of all three of these forms of focus. We are losing our light.

Socrates said writing things down would ruin people’s memories. We were told that everything from the printed book to television would trash the minds of the young, but here we are, and the world survived.

He could see that a whole city, and a whole generation of children, had been poisoned, and the families had been told it was on them because they weren’t clean enough.

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.

they systematically promote doubt about the possible harms;

This is where “part of the brain is awake, and part of the brain is asleep.”