Regaining Focus by Enlarging Context – Part 1

Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again.

We all stare at our phones and often scroll through endless distractions provided to us by various social media apps.  We check emails and text messages that are announced by sounds and vibrations pinging us throughout the day.  To what extent have these myriad pulls on our attention hurt our ability to think clearly, and to think in context?

That’s the subject of Johann Hari’s book Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – and How to Think Deeply Again.  Hari recounts how, when we switch our attention from one thing to another, we lose more brain processing power than just the time it takes us to switch gears:

I thought, yes, [switching one’s attention from one thing to another] must be a small effect, a tiny drag on your attention. But when I went and read the relevant research, I learned there is some science suggesting the effect can be surprisingly large. 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 and calls— caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot. Then there’s [another] cost to believing you can multitask, one that you’ll only notice in the medium or longer term— which we might call the “creativity drain.” You’re likely to be significantly less creative. Why? “Because where do new thoughts [and] innovation come from?” Earl asked. They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard and learned. Your mind, given free undistracted time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes place beneath the level of your conscious mind, but this process is how “new ideas pop together, and suddenly, two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship.” A new idea is born. But if you “spend a lot of this brain- processing time switching and error- correcting,” Earl explained, 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 if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do … One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day. I had to look again at that figure several times before I really absorbed it: most office workers never get an hour to themselves without being interrupted. This is happening at every level of businesses— the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company, for example, gets just twenty- eight uninterrupted minutes a day … One study at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to take a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse. Other studies in similar scenarios have found even worse outcomes of 30 percent. It seems to me that almost all of us with a smartphone are losing that 20 to 30 percent, almost all the time. That’s a lot of brainpower for a species to lose.

In every era of human history, multiple things have competed for our attention.  But now it seems things are qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different.  Hari writes:

Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, discovered that the average teen and young adult genuinely believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at once. We are not machines. We cannot live by the logic of machines. We are humans, and we work differently. I asked Earl [Miller, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] if, given what we know about the brain, it was fair to conclude that attention problems today really are worse than at some points in the past. He replied: “Absolutely.” We have, he believes, created in our culture “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation, as a result of distraction.” … There’s broad scientific evidence that if you are sitting in a noisy room, your ability to pay attention deteriorates, and your work gets worse. For example, children in noisy classrooms have worse attention than kids in quiet classrooms. Yet many of us are surrounded by high levels of noise, working in open-plan offices, sleeping in crowded cities, and tapping away on our laps in crammed coffee shops like the one we were sitting in at that moment. Rising noise pollution is just one example — we live surrounded by shrieking distractions calling for our attention, and the attention of others … The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Survey— which studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americans— found that between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40 percent, while for women, it was down by 29 percent. The opinion- poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book— and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience— you dedicate many hours of your life, coolly, calmly, to one topic, and allow it to marinate in your mind. This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past four hundred years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in free fall … When I was at Harvard conducting interviews, one professor told me that he struggled to get his students there to read even quite short books, and he increasingly offered them podcasts and YouTube clips they could watch instead. And that’s Harvard. I started to wonder what happens to a world where this form of deep focus shrinks so far and so fast. What happens when that deepest layer of thinking becomes available to fewer and fewer people, until it is a small minority interest, like opera, or volleyball? … I found myself thinking back over a famous idea that I now realized I had never really understood before— one that was also mulled, in a different way, by Nicholas Carr in his book. In the 1960s, the Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan talked a lot about how the arrival of television was transforming the way we see the world. He said these changes were so deep and so profound that it was hard to really see them. When he tried to distill this down into a phrase, he explained that “the medium is the message.” What he meant, I think, was that when a new technology comes along, you think of it as like a pipe— somebody pours in information at one end, and you receive it unfiltered at the other. But it’s not like that. Every time a new medium comes along— whether it’s the invention of the printed book, or TV, or Twitter— and you start to use it, it’s like you are putting on a new kind of goggles, with their own special colors and lenses. Each set of goggles you put on makes you see things differently. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself. TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it’s about surfaces and appearances; that everything in the world is happening all at once. This made me wonder what the message is that we absorb from social media, and how it compares to the message that we absorb from printed books. I thought first of Twitter. What is that message? First: you shouldn’t focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn. When you tweet, before you say anything else, you are saying that at some level you agree with these three premises. You are putting on those goggles and seeing the world through them. How about Facebook? What’s the message in that medium? It seems to be first: your life exists to be displayed to other people, and you should be aiming every day to show your friends edited highlights of your life. Second: what matters is whether people immediately like these edited and carefully selected highlights that you spend your life crafting. Third: somebody is your “friend” if you regularly look at their edited highlight reels, and they look at yours— this is what friendship means. How about Instagram? First: what matters is how you look on the outside. Second: what matters is how you look on the outside. Third: what matters is how you look on the outside. Fourth: what matters is whether people like how you look on the outside.

One of the goals of this Substack, called The Big Picture, is to present a wider and more informative context within which decisions about life and public policy can be made.  But that’s the opposite of the goal of social media companies.  As Hari explains:

I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world, and with myself. I think all of these ideas— the messages implicit in these mediums— are wrong. Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s most likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right— you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated. I realized that the times in my own life when I’ve been most successful on Twitter— in terms of followers and retweets— are the times when I have been least useful as a human being: when I’ve been attention- deprived, simplistic, vituperative. Of course there are occasional nuggets of insight on the site— but if this becomes your dominant mode of absorbing information, I believe the quality of your thinking will rapidly degrade.

It's not only the quality of thinking that can degrade when one stops reading long-form written pieces.  Empathy for others, and an appreciation of the views of others, can also degrade.  As Hari writes:

I went to York University in Toronto to interview Raymond Mar, who is a professor of psychology there. Raymond is one of the social scientists who has done most in the world to study the effects that reading books has on our consciousness, and his research has helped to open up a distinctive way of thinking about this question. With his colleagues he came up with a clever three-stage experiment designed to see if this longer-term effect existed. If you took part in the test, you were brought into a lab and you were shown a list of names. Some were famous novelists; some were famous nonfiction writers; and some were random people who weren’t writers at all. You were asked to circle the names of the novelists, and then, separately, you were asked to circle the names of the nonfiction writers. Raymond reasoned that people who had read more novels over their lifetime would be able to recognize the names of more fiction writers. He also now had an interesting comparison group— people who had read a lot of nonfiction books. Then he gave everyone two tests. The first used a technique that’s sometimes used to diagnose autism. You are shown lots of pictures of people’s eye areas, and you are asked: What is this person thinking? It’s a way of measuring how good you are at reading the subtle signals that reveal the emotional state of another person. In the second test, you sat down and watched several videos of real people in real situations like, for example, two men who had just played a squash game talking to each other. You had to figure out: What’s going on here? Who won the game? What’s the relationship between them? How do they feel? Raymond and the experimenters knew the real answers— and so they could see who, in the test, was best at reading the social signals and figuring them out. When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated— because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy. I asked Raymond why. Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.” It’s different from if you just close your eyes and try to imagine something off the top of your head. “It’s being structured— but our attention is in a very unique place, fluctuating both out toward the page, toward the words, and then inward, toward what those words represent.” It’s a way of combining “outwardly directed attention and inwardly directed attention.” When you read fiction in particular, you imagine what it is like to be another person. You find yourself, he says, “trying to understand the different characters, their motivations, their goals, tracking those different things. It’s a form of practice. We’re probably using the same kinds of cognitive processes that we would use to understand our real peers in the real world.” You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name. Each of us can only ever experience a small sliver of what it’s like to be a human being alive today, Raymond told me, but as you read fiction, you see inside other people’s experiences. That doesn’t vanish when you put down the novel. When you later meet a person in the real world, you’ll be better able to imagine what it’s like to be them. Reading a factual account may make you more knowledgeable, but it doesn’t have this empathy- expanding effect. There have now been dozens of other studies replicating the core effect that Raymond discovered. The more I talked with him, the more I reflected that empathy is one of the most complex forms of attention we have— and the most precious. Many of the most important advances in human history have been advances in empathy … Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more. But— as Raymond is the first to point out— these results can be interpreted in a very different way. It could be that reading fiction, over time, boosts your empathy. But it could also be that people who are already empathetic are simply more drawn to reading novels. This makes his research controversial, and contested. He told me that it’s likely that both are true— that reading fiction boosts your empathy, and that empathetic people are more drawn to reading fiction. One of his studies showed that children are more empathetic if they read storybooks or watch movies, but not if they watch shorter shows. This appears to fit, it seemed to me, with what we see on social media— if you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way. As I talked with him, I thought: We internalize the texture of the voices we’re exposed to. When you expose yourself to complex stories about the inner lives of other people over long periods of time, that will repattern your consciousness. You too will become more perceptive, open, and empathetic. If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that. Your internal voices will become cruder, louder, less able to hear more tender and gentle thoughts. Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll look at how social media applications are designed to distract.