Speaker 1: It's great to welcome back to the program, Johann Hari, who is a writer and
journalist whose latest book is stolen Focus Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think
Deeply Again. Johann, always great speaking with you.
Speaker 4: Hey, David, I was saying to you before we went on air, it's really weird whenever
I talk to you because you're like a voice in my head, I listen to so much that it was
still slightly surreal when I'm then interacting with that voice. But it's lovely to be with
you. Speaker 1: Always, always good to talk to
you, and this is a really timely book. We first should start with what is the case to
be made for this lack of attention and lack of focus, because there are some who say this
is a very popular story to talk about, but there's really no evidence that there is a
focus our attention problem at this point in time. So first question is how do we quantify
that? This really is a problem? Speaker 4: I used to say exactly what those
people say that, you know, every generation struggles with attention and nothing unusual
is happening now. And I started to write stolen focus because I noticed something really weird
seems to be happening to my own attention with each year that past things that require
deep focus, like reading a book, having deep conversations, watching a long movie, things
that are very deep to my sense of self were getting harder and harder. They were getting
more and more like running up and down escalator. You know what I mean? I could still do them,
but they were getting harder. Mm-Hmm. And I told myself, Well, this is just aging, right?
But then I was particularly worried about a lot of the young people in my life. A lot
of whom seem to be kind of whirring at the speed of Snapchat, where nothing still or
serious could touch them. And I decided, I'm going to look into the science of this. I'm
going to use my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to investigate this,
to see what's happening and even very early on. Some of the facts about this were quite
startling. The typical American office worker now focuses on any one task, but only three
minutes for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was
seven. There's now 100 children who've been identified with that problem. So want to understand,
of course, as many complicating factors going on there? I want to understand, well, what
could be happening. So I went on a really big journey all over the world. I researched
this for three years into the leading experts on focus and attention. From Moscow to Miami
to Melbourne, over 200 of them and did a really deep dove into their research. And what I
learned from them is that there's scientific evidence the 12 factors that can make your
attention better or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention
worse have been significantly rising in recent years. Let's give a real no shit Sherlock
obvious example. We sleep 20 percent less than we did a century ago, and sleep is essential
for focus and attention when you're sleeping. Your brain is repairing, it's cleaning itself.
It's healing. If you don't do that, your brain is literally clogged up and it's harder to
pay attention. Dr. Charles Seidler, arguably the leading expert on sleep in the world he's
at Harvard Medical School, said to me even if nothing else had changed, even if the only
thing that had changed is that we sleep so much less than we did in the recent past.
That alone would be causing a very serious attention crisis. But actually, there's many
factors beyond that. And what I learned is when you look at these bigger factors, what
you realize is your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by
these very big and powerful forces. And once you understand that opens up a very different
set of ways that together we can begin to get our brains back.
Speaker 1: One of the ones that's often mentioned is very generally social media, and I think
that that's just not really precise enough from the research I've done and tell me if
this coincides with the research you did. Really, what's at issue in a lot of these
things, and it's particularly notable with social media is rapidly changing focus from
one topic to another, rapid fire and that that creates the expectation of that continuing.
And it makes it it's sort of like you're not exercising the muscle of thinking and focusing
on one thing for an extended period of time is that the underlying reason why the social
media piece is often mentioned? Speaker 4: I think as you so often do, David,
you brilliantly homed in on a more complex and nuanced thing. You're absolutely right.
We tend to think of it as, Oh, it's just social media. Do this to us. The answer is much more
complicated, and you've gone to one aspect of the complication. So to talk first about
that one that you've just raised, which is really important. They started to become clear
to me when I went to MIT to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world,
a man named Professor Miller. And he said to me, Look, there's one thing you've got
to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think
about one or two things at the same time. That's it. This is a fundamental limitation
of the human brain. It has not changed in 40000 years. It's not going to change on any
timescale any of us are going to say. You can only think about one or two things at
a time. But what's happened is we've fallen from mass delusion. The average American teenager.
Now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what scientists
do in this, an enormous amount of research on this is they get people into labs, younger
and older people and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time.
And what they discover is invariably you're not doing more than one thing at a time. What
you're doing is you're juggling very rapidly between task juggling, for one thing, to another
to another. And it turns out when you do that, it always incurs a cost, a psychological cost.
The technical term for is the switch cost effect. So when you try and do more than one
thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do less competently. You'll
make more mistakes. You'll remember less of what you do. You'll be less creative. And
remember when Professor Miller first explained that to me. OK, so then there's a huge amount
of research into the literature on this thinking, OK, I sort of get that, but this must be a
small effect. The evidence is quite shocking on this. I'll give you an example of one very
small study that's backed by a wider body of evidence. Hewlett-Packard, the printer
company, got a scientist in to study that workforce, and this scientists split some
of their workers into two groups. One group was told Just get on with your task, whatever
it is, and you won't be interrupted. And the second group was told Go on with your task,
whatever it is, and you're going to have to also answer a heavy load of email and phone
calls. So basically the way most of us live now and at the end of it, they gave an IQ
test to both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points
higher than the group had been interrupted. Give you a sense of how big that is if you
and me got stoned together now, David, if we smoked, if that split arrow keys would
go down in the short term by five points, right? I think chronically interrupted is
twice as bad, at least in the short term. This debate about the longer term, the cannabis
and then being chronically distracted. Let's give you another study. There's one study
that found just receiving eight text messages in an hour reduces your brainpower for the
main thing you're trying to focus on by 30 percent. I would argue most of us are losing
that 30 percent most of the time. That's why Professor Miller said to me at the moment,
we're living in what he called a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of all
these interruptions. Speaker 1: To what degree is this sort of
like? You know, you stop lifting weights for a while and you lose the muscle, but then
you can pick it back, you know, assuming your health is suitable for it, you pick the weights
back up and you get the muscle back. To what degree is all of this? A question of the right
habits and practices that can be regained? And to what degree does it not seem that way?
Speaker 4: So the evidence on this is pretty clear. You can get a little bit better at
it, but not much right now. There's just a limit to what your brain can do. Like Professor
Miller said, this is just a fundamental limitation. Some people are slightly better at than others
if you really fit in. You can get slightly better. But the switch cost effect is, you
know, as Professor Miller puts it, a textbook level truism.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no. So I don't mean the switch. I mean, developing the focus again,
developing the focus again. Speaker 4: Yeah, sorry. I misunderstood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, your answer is more scary in that context.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm sorry. I think about that. There is a huge number of things we
can do to get our focus, OK. And I think we got to tackle this at two levels, right, with
all of the 12 causes that damaging our attention of focus, which includes some aspects about
technology, but go way beyond it from the food we eat to the hours we work, there's
a huge array of factors pouring acid on our attention. But in terms, weather can get better,
I think, for all of these factors. With one exception, there's two levels in which we
go to respond. So the first is personal. There are all I think of it as sort of defense and
offense, right? There are all sorts of things we can do to defend ourselves and our children
from these factors that are invading our attention, and I go through dozens of them. If you think
about switching switching, which is one of the causes and give you an example, you can't
see this because it's behind my laptop. But in the corner over there, I have something
called a k safe. I promise you, I'm not getting commercial sponsorship for these guys. I keep
plugging them. Okay, so safe is a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your
phone, you put on the lid, you turn the dial and it will lock away your phone between between
five minutes and a whole day. Yes. Sit down and watch a film with my partner unless we
both imprison our phones are going to have dinner with my friends unless we will imprison
our phones. So that's one example of dozens that I gave of a personal intervention. But
I want to be really honest with people, and I think your audience is unusually well fit
fitted to understand this point. These individual tweaks are hugely important. I'm passionately
in favor of them. They will really help, but they will only get you so far because this
is a systemic problem right at the moment. It's like someone is pouring itching powder
over us all day and then they're leaning forward and going, Hey buddy, you might want to learn
how to meditate, then you wouldn't scratch so much. So it's a logical response is screw
you. I'll learn to meditate, but we need to stop you destroying my, you know, pouring
this itching powder. Speaker 2: Right, right, right.
Speaker 4: Swipe the way. Professor Joel Nigg, one of the leading experts on children's intention
problem is put it to me, is we're currently living, he said. We need to ask if we're currently
living in what we call an attentional. The gennych environment and environment in which
everyone's attention is being degraded or pretty much everyone's. And if that's the
case, then the primary set of solutions we have to pursue are environmental. We have
to together as a movement, take on the forces that are doing this to us.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When I've spoken to Cal Newport about this and you know, his his concept is
that of deep work and, you know, he talks about at the individual level, maybe when
you're actually doing work that's not email based, you don't have your email open in another
window. That's like that. That's one thing. But if your employer expects that you're responding
to emails within ten minutes, then it's not really something that at the personal level
is going to set you up for success. Speaker 4: Now you've put that brilliantly,
and there is a collective solution to this that I've seen in practice. This is why I'm
profound. Although County is a good writer, it gives good advice. I'm very uncomfortable
with a lot of this because a lot of it like my case. I write. I mentioned the thing that
imprisons my phone. I use that for four hours a day. And I'm conscious that what a lot of
people hear that they're going to go, well, screw you, I can't do that right? How could
I possibly do that? That's not unkind liberating piece of self-help advice. That's a taunt
to people. There's a solution to this in France in 2018. They had a big crisis of what they
called le burnout, which I don't think I need to translate. And the French government under
pressure from labor unions, and they would never have done it without pressure from organized
labor. Set up a government inquiry to figure out what the hell's going on. Why is everyone
so burned out?