Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

For many of us, the pandemic didn’t create new factors that ruined our attention – it supercharged the factors that had already been corroding our attention for years. I saw this when I talked with my godson Adam, who I had taken to Memphis. His attention, which had been deteriorating for some time, was now shattered. He was on his phone almost eve

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Professor Barbara Demeneix – a prestigious scientist in France who has won several major awards, including the Légion d’honneur, the country’s highest civilian prize – explained to me: ‘At every stage of your life, different forms of pollution will affect your attention span,’ and she has concluded this is a factor in why ‘we’ve got neurodevelopmen

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The internet arrived for most of us in the late 1990s, into a society where the middle class was starting to crumble, and where financial insecurity was rising, and we were sleeping an hour less than people did in 1945. A more stressed society will be less able to resist distractions. It would always have been hard to resist the sophisticated human

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For example, a small study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that ‘technological distraction’ – just getting emails an

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The British writer Robert Colville says we are living through ‘the Great Acceleration’, and like Sune, he argues it’s not simply our tech that’s getting faster – it’s almost everything. There’s evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and i

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