Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because – Earl explained – ‘your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off’ – and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. ‘Instead of spendin

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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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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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