Sublime

wants us to understand that this design is not inevitable.

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

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

All over the world I interviewed experts who said that we all know this change has been bad for our waistlines and our hearts, but we have been neglecting another key effect: it is stealing large parts of our ability to pay attention.

I found it startling to discover that you can throw out almost everything we regard as schooling—all the testing, all the assessments, even formal teaching—and still produce people who can read, write, and function in society. This tells you how much of what we are neurotically putting our kids through is pointless (at best).

interviewed Johann Hari, bestselling author of Stolen Focus, a book about dwindling human attention spans, and he said to me:

there is evidence that these sites are now severely harming our ability to come together as a society to identify our problems and to find solutions in ways like this.

If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and

According to Oxford University Professor of Physiology John Stein, ‘The lack of omega-3s in our diet is going to change the human brain in ways that are as serious as climate change.’