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

“when we sleep better, a lot of problems get less—like mood disorders, like obesity, like concentration problems…. It repairs a lot of damage.”

“aliveness”—it’s how you learn to experience joy and pleasure.

After investing all this time in creating their paintings, when they were finished, the artists didn’t triumphantly gaze at what they had made and show it off and seek out praise for it. Almost all of them simply put the painting away and started working on another

she had noticed that the kids there were being diagnosed as having attention problems at a staggering rate—dramatically higher than in wealthier neighborhoods—and

What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.”

In the first book, he describes big and powerful forces used to hook us; in the second, he describes fragile little personal interventions that he says will get us out. “I see exactly the opposite, in fact,” he said in response. “Everything I talked about in Hooked, you can turn off with the tap of one thumb. Fuck them.”

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.”

So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Once you have created these conditions, and you hit flow, you can recognize it because it’s a distinctive mental state. You feel you are purely present in the moment. You experience a loss of self-c

Sometimes, hackers decide to attack a website in a very specific way. They get an enormous number of computers to try to connect to a website all at once—and by doing this, they “overwhelm its capacity for managing traffic, to the point where it can’t be accessed by anyone else, and it goes down.” It crashes. This is called a “denial-of-service att