The Thirty Second Mind

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

these tools fragment our time and reduce our ability to concentrate.

Instead, we grind on a near-constant flood of social media and emails. This leaves little space for thinking, let alone thinking about thinking.

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.

The nonstop onslaught of email, texts, bills to pay—life’s “full catastrophe”—throws us into a brain state antithetical to the open focus where serendipitous discoveries thrive. In the tumult of our daily distractions and to-do lists, innovation dead-ends; in open times it flourishes. That’s why the annals of discovery are rife with tales of a bril

To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplat