The workings of the human brain have fascinated scientists and
psychologists for centuries.
And if there was one brain I bet they'd love to take a look inside,
I reckon it would be this guy.
We know a lot about Mozart and his life, but I bet one thing you didn't
know, was that he loved playing...
pool.
He was obsessed by it!
He spent hours and hours in the public pool halls in Vienna, and amazingly, he
would bring folders of sheet music with him and compose music in between shots.
Part of the secret to Mozart's genius was an incredible ability to concentrate.
He could sit down in the morning and be focused on his work in seconds,
even in the middle of a pool hall.
Nothing could break his concentration and the result?
He was one of the most prolific artists ever.
He's credited with more than 600 different pieces of music, almost
all of them timeless and original.
And he did all of this before the age of 35, when he passed
away from an unknown illness.
What about you?
When was the last time you could really concentrate like Mozart on something?
That's a line the media loves to say about us, isn't it?
They love to remind us our generation can't concentrate on anything
for more than a few minutes.
Like if it's not in a one minute video or a list, then somehow we can't handle it.
The problem, of course, is that this whole idea is a lie.
Look at this.
While millennial attention spans have supposedly been getting
shorter, movies have been getting longer during our lifetime.
Some of the most popular TV shows and podcasts today ask us to concentrate
for at least an hour or more.
We manage that just fine.
No, it's not like our generation was born with uniquely distractible brains
or something, but there is something going on and it turns out the answer
is staring us right in the face.
Scientists and the media often like to point a finger at technology.
They say computers, laptops, smartphones all make it harder to concentrate.
But if you take a step back, you see that scientists in the media have worried
about pretty much every new technology.
They said the same thing about TV back in the 1950s and about radio before that.
A hundred years ago, people were scared movies would stop
people being able to read books.
And that's another thing people like to say about our generation too, isn't it?
That we don't read books.
Reading a book requires focus and concentration, and
apparently we can't do that.
Which if you think about it, is kind of ironic.
You see when Gutenberg perfected the printing press back in the 1440s, it
led to this explosion in publishing, but most of it was low rate journalism,
propaganda, and of course bucket loads and bucket loads of porn.
Sound familiar?
For a long time, people were really worried that books would
ruin our ability to concentrate.
The Renaissance thinker Erasmus complained about the "swarms of new books" and the
mathematician Liebnitz worried books would bring on "a return to barbarism."
And we can keep going back even further!
Long before printing was invented some of the great philosophers in
ancient Greece thought even writing something down was bad for the brain.
Socrates once claimed that it would "weaken men's minds and bring
forgetfulness into their souls".
Ironically, we wouldn't know he'd said that unless someone had written it down.
And seeing as we're on a roll\ why not keep going?
Because you can argue that actually our brains have
evolved to be easily distracted.
They kept our ancestors alive.
That's the easy answer, anyway, it kind of lets us off the hook.
The truth is a bit more complicated and a lot less comfortable.
Let's back up to 1997, right when the internet was starting to pick up.
A guy called Jacob Nielsen carried out some research into how people read online.
His conclusion?
They don't.
Like I said, the answer's been staring us in the face this whole time.
Rather we've been staring at it.
It's got a lot to do with this thing.
The link.
The hyperlink is one of the fundamental mechanisms of the internet, and
it's inherently distracting.
Every new link, every new button is a decision, a temptation, a distraction.
Take a look at this article on the website for The Atlantic magazine.
It has more than 75 links in it.
75 little decisions to make 75 interruptions to our concentration,
and it's on an article warning us about the problem!
You see, we're not a distracted generation, but we are distracted
when we're using a web browser.
And when more and more of us do our work inside a web
browser, that's a big problem.
But it doesn't really make sense for browsers to be
distracting though, does it?
Until, that is, you follow the money.
Here's Google's increasing revenue for the last six years.
In 2014, they made 66 billion, and almost all of it comes from advertising.
Think about it, if you spend 30 minutes browsing the web, it's a lot
better for big internet companies if you scan 30 different web pages
than if you spend that 30 minutes engaged and focused on just one.
In his 2009 book, The Shallows, the technology writer Nicholas Carr
says "Google is quite literally in the business of distraction".
The more distracted we all are, the more profits these big companies make.
It's a strange thought, but if you haven't been able to concentrate
for a while, maybe it's because someone doesn't want you to.
You know what?
Mozart had it easy.