Stolen Focus : Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again.

"Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, in 2022" -- title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [293]-331) and index.

Introduction: Walking in Memphis -- Cause one : the increase in speed, switching, and filtering -- Cause two : the crippling of our flow states -- Cause three : the rise of physical and mental exhaustion -- Cause four : the collapse of sustained reading -- Cause five : the disruption of mind-wandering -- Cause six : the rise of technology that can track and manipulate you (part one) -- Cause six : the rise of technology that can track and manipulate you (part two) -- Cause seven : the rise of cruel optimism -- The first glimpses of the deeper solution -- Cause eight : the surge in stress and how it is triggering vigilance -- The places that figured out how to reverse the surge in speed and exhaustion -- Causes nine and ten : our deteriorating diets and rising pollution -- Cause eleven : the rise of ADHD and how we are responding to it -- Cause twelve : the confinement of our children, both physically and psychologically -- Conclusion : attention rebellion.

Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. Here, the author offers an examination of why this is happening - and how to get our attention back. Like so many of us, the author was finding it much harder to focus than he used to. He found that a life of constantly switching from device to device, from tab to tab, is diminishing and depressing. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions - even abandoning his phone for three months - but in the long-term, nothing seemed to work. So he went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings - and he learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. In the U.S., teenagers now focus on a task for only sixty-five seconds on average, and office workers manage only three minutes. We think this inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces, and the science shows that these forces have been ramping up for decades, leaving us uniquely vulnerable - particularly when social media arrived - to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. These forces have been so successful that our collapse in attention is behind many of the wider problems society faces. In this book, the author embarks on a thrilling journey, taking readers from veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD, to Silicon Valley dissidents who exposed social media companies' furtive attempts to hack our focus; from a favela in Rio where everyone lost their attention in a particularly catastrophic way, to an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore their workers' attention. In this urgent, deeply researched book, the author shows readers that if we understand the twelve true causes of this crisis - from the collapse of sustained reading to the disruption of boredom to rising pollution - we, as individuals and as a society, can finally begin to solve it by staging an "attention rebellion." Finally, we have a way to get our focus back. -- Adapted from publisher's description.