“Stolen Focus:” Are You Having Trouble Paying Attention?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Next, how long can you focus on a thought or anything for that matter without being interrupted by your flashing phone with such a powerful distraction always inches away? Some people’s ability for focus has dwindled to a matter of minutes, according our next guest. New York Times bestselling author Johann Hari explores the importance of attention and how it has been stolen in this latest book. He joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss those findings.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Johann Hari, thank you so much for joining us. First of all, great last name. Second, we just got through this holiday season, and almost everywhere we go, we see people doing this, right? Right in front of them. And I wonder, it’s like we are not really paying attention to the thing that’s right in front of us. So, what is it that’s causing this collective inability to focus, this distracted state of being that we find ourselves in?

JOHANN HARI, AUTHOR, “STOLEN FOCUS: WHY YOU CAN’T PAY ATTENTION”: So, to understand this, I use my training in the social sciences at Cambridge University to go on a really big journey all over the world from Moscow to Miami to Melbourne to interview over 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus and do a really deep dive into their science. And what I learned really surprised me. Their scientific evidence that 12 factors that can boost your attention or can make your attention worse. And the evidence is clear, loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely increasing in recent years and they’re really broad. There are some aspects about technology. it’s not all our technology, we can put this right. And many factors I had never even thought of. You know, the way we eat is profoundly affecting our ability to focus and pay attention. The way we work, is profoundly affecting our ability to focus and pay attention. The way our kids’ schools work, is really affecting our ability to focus and pay attention. The book is called “Stolen Focus” because your attention didn’t collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some really big forces. But once we understand those forces, we can begin to put this right together.

SREENIVASAN: What is the cost here? Because people often have a tendency to say, well, you know, you’re saying that this is a problem. Why is it a problem?

HARI: Well, I would say two things. The first thing I would say to everyone watching, think about anything you have ever achieved in your life that you are proud of. Whether it’s starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is. That thing that you’re proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And the evidence is very clear, when your ability to pay attention breaks down, as it is for most of us right now, your ability to solve your problems diminishes. Your ability to achieve your goals diminishes. Attention is our superpower. And when you lose it, you suffer in all sorts of ways. But you’re totally right, if we think about costs, so one of them became — one of the 12 that I wrote about in “Stolen Focus” became really clear to me when I went to MIT to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. An amazing man named Professor Earl Miller. And he said to me, look, you got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time, that is it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. But what’s happened is we’ve fallen for a huge delusion. The average teenager now believe they can follow six of seven folks (ph) of media at the same time and the rest of us are not far behind. So, what happens is scientists like Professor Miller get people into labs and they get them to think they’re doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover is always the same, you are juggling very quickly, you are like, what did Hari just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp? What did it say on CNN just happened? Oh, my God. Wait. What was your question again, Hari? So, we’re constantly juggling. And that juggling comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you do all the things you are trying to do much less competently. You remember less of what you do, you make more mistakes, you’re much less creative. So, it feels like a small thing, but it actually comes with a really big cost. You know, if you’re interrupted by something as simple as a text message it takes you, on average, 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted. But most of us never get 23 minutes without being interrupted. So, as Professor Miller put it to me, we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted of the many other factors I wrote back in the book.

SREENIVASAN: We have been socialized to think about multitasking as a superpower. We have been taught that, oh, look at this person. They accomplished this and this at the same time. This person is, sort of, better than us.

HARI: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: But you are saying that that’s not necessarily — we’ve been, kind of, misguided in those perceptions.

HARI: It’s an incredible delusion. You know, Hewlett-Packard the printer company, did a small study backed by a wider body of evidence. They got a scientist in to study their work which then split them into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is, and you’re not going to be interrupted. The second group is told, get on with their task, whatever it is, but at the same time you got to answer a heavy load of e-mails and phone calls. So pretty much, how most of us live, right?

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

HARI: And at the end of it, the scientists did both tested the IQ of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored on average 10 IQ points higher than the other group perhaps. I’ll give you a sense of how big that is. If you and me get stoned together now, if we smoked a fat spliff, our IQs would go down by five points. So, in the short term, and I’m stretching this is in the short term, being chronically interrupted in the way we are is twice as bad for your intelligence as getting stoned. You’d be better off sitting at your desk, smoking a spliff and doing one thing at a time than you would sitting at your desk, not smoking a split then being constantly interrupted. Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Obviously, you would be better off neither smoking a spliff nor being interrupted. But one of the fascinating things about when you look at the science of attention, as a I did in so much depth for the book is so many things that we take for granted on this question, which is so important. Your attention is your life, right? What you pay attention to is your life. So, many things we take for granted. The way we raise our kids, The way our offices work are undermining our ability to focus and pay attention. But once you understand this science, you can begin to fix it all sorts of very practical ways that I saw being put into practice all over the world.

SREENIVASAN: So, let’s talk about — a little bit about the, kind of — the practical. What is something that I actually do have control over to try to regain focus?

HARI: So, for all of the 12 factors that are harming our focus on attention, I think there’s two levels of which we got to deal with them. I think of them as defense and offense. There are loads of things that we can do to defend ourselves and our children, obviously about a lot because of our kids, to protect them from the forces that are degrading our attention. I’ll give you an example, I own something called a K-safe. I do not have any shares in this company, I promise you, I should have bought some when it came out. It’s a plastic safe. It’s got a lid on it. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you pop on the lid, you turn the dial, push the button down and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I went and sat down to watch a film with my partner, and I said, we both put our phones in the phone jail and we’ll have my friends around for dinner. Unless, we both put — imprison our phones. And you know, it is really stressful for people at first. It was stressful for me. But the pleasures of focus are so much greater than the pleasures of distraction. Once you get over that hump, it is such a joy to be back in the power of attention again.

SREENIVASAN: So, you’re also talking about sleep. And obviously, you know, for someone who doesn’t get a lot of sleep, I feel like it’s underrated. But what is the connection between how we sleep and how focused we are during the day?

HARI: Yes, this was one of the — there’s a lot of factors that really shocked me like the way we eat, but sleep is one of the ones that really blew my mind. I went to Harvard Medical School and interviewed Dr. Charles Czeisler, who is arguably the leading sleep expert in the world. And he explained to me that we sleep about 20 percent less than we did a century ago. Children sleep 85 minutes less than they did in 1945 per day. And he said to me, even nothing else would change, even if that was the only difference, that alone would be causing a huge attention crisis. There’s lots of reasons why, but one really helped me to understand it, the whole time you’re awake, your brain is generating something called metabolic waste. It’s what one scientist called brain cell poop, which helped me to understand it. And when you go to sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up and a watery fluid rinses through your brain and takes all of that brain cell poop down, out of your brain, down into your kidneys, and eventually, out of your body. If you don’t get any hours sleep at night, most of us don’t know, you’re in an unusual hurry and that metabolic waste remains in your brain. It clogs up and slows down your brain. It’s why your attention will be worse. You know, if you stay awake for 19 hours, which doesn’t sound like very much to me, well, I guess to most people watching, your attention deteriorates as much as if you got legally drunk, right? So, we are talking about a huge effect, which is happening to, again, almost everyone. So, talking about why that’s happened and practical steps we can take to put that right.

SREENIVASAN: I read your book electronically, and one of the ironies is that you point out that I might have focused better if I read the paper back, the physical hard copy. Why is that?

HARI: Yes. There’s really interesting evidence about this, Anthony Bird (ph), one of the leading experts in the world in Norway and we don’t — the reason that we don’t entirely know, but it seems to be when you read on paper, your eyes, in English, scan left to right. You know, left to right, left to right, left to right. When you read on the screen, it seems that — and they do this — we know this by monitoring people’s eyes when they read, when you read on a screen, you don’t read left to right entirely, you read in a Z shape. So, you read the first line left to right and then, you skim ahead, and then, if you are interested, you go back, right? And that’s just — you just retain less information from that different way of reading. And there is lots of evidence on this now. There’s really good research on it, but mostly emerging out of Norway where — so, there is lots of experiments. What you can do is you get a bunch of kids, you split them into two groups, you give them exactly the same information, or book, some of them are given it as a physical book, some of them are given it on a screen. And then, you go back to them a week later, a month later, a year later and just ask them about what they read. And the kids who read it on paper — and there’s different experiments with adults — remember it much better, absorbed much more than the people who read it on a screen.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that a lot of people are starting to have some second thoughts about is the impact of the algorithms and social media and really just this computer that we have in our hands now and how companies and the products that they are designing are squarely aimed at our attention, which is the one thing that we seem to be giving up.

HARI: I have spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley with people who design the world in which we now live. And it was fascinating to me to see how sick with guilt and shame they feel. You know, there’s a guy called Dr. James Williams (ph), is a wonderful person, it was at the heart of Google. And one day he spoke at a tech conference where the audience was literally everyone watching the stuff your kids are using today. And he said to them, if there is anyone here who wants to live in the world that we are creating, please put up your hand. And nobody put up their hand. And I think we have to understand which aspects of our technology are doing this because it actually made me more optimistic than I was before. The way big tech want us to think about this debate is, are you pro tech or are you anti tech? And when you hear that, you’re like, well, I’m not going to give up my laptop and my phone. I guess I must be pro tech. But actually, that is not the debate. The debate is now, are you pro tech or anti tech. The debate is what tech do we want and designed in whose interests, right? So, the way this is explained to me by people who — what the heart of the machine is, anyone watching, if you now — please don’t — but if you open TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, those companies begin to make money out of you immediately in two ways. The first way is obvious, you see ads, everyone knows how that works. The second way is much more important. Everything you do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and crucially what will keep you scrolling, they are learning what you like, they’re learning what you tell people in private messages you like. They are constantly scanning and learning your behavior, and they are doing that for one reason and one reason only, the longer you scroll, the more money they make. The longer your kids scroll, the more money they make because you see more ads. And every time you and your kids close the app, that revenue stream disappears. So, all of this AI, all of these algorithms, all of this genius in Silicon Valley when applied to social media is geared towards one thing and one thing only, figuring out how do we get you and your kids to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible. That’s it. That’s their business model. But the key thing to understand — and this is the thing when I learned that I thought, it geez, it feels like we are just trapped in the matrix then. I felt hopeless. But they explained to me, no, on the contrary, this is very optimistic. We can have all the technology we currently have but have it not designed to work that way. All of these 12 factors we’ve got that are harming our attention, we got to have two ways of dealing with it, defense, loads of things we can do as individuals. But I want to be really honest with people because I don’t feel most folks about attention are leveling with people, I am passionately in favor of these individual changes, they have enriched my life and they will enrich yours. On their own, they won’t solve the problem. Because at the moment, it’s like someone is pouring itching powder over us all day and then, leaning forward and going, hey, buddy, you should learn to meditate, then you wouldn’t scratch so much. And you want to go, well, to hell with you. I’ll learn to meditate, that’s hugely valuable, but you need to stop pouring this damn itching powder on me. We have to actually deal with the factors that are doing to us. It’s not a coincidence that we are all struggling to pay attention at precisely the time when we are using technology that is explicitly designed to hack and invade our attention. That is not a coincidence, right? It requires a big shift in psychology, we need to stop blaming ourselves. You know, I wrote the book in part because I was struggling to focus and pay attention and I was blaming myself. I was like, there is something wrong with you, you are weak, you are not good enough. It is not your fault. This is happening to almost everyone. The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. This is the air we are breathing, but it doesn’t have to be this way. And it requires us to really shift our psychology as well in terms of solutions. We need to stop only asking for small little tiny fixes because this is a big problem that has to be dealt with in society as well. And together, we have to realize, we — you know, we are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg and King Musk for a few little crumbs of attention from their table. We are the free citizens of democracies and we own our own minds. And if we learn the science of the forces that are invading our minds, we can take our minds back from them. It doesn’t have to be this way. If we fight for it, we can get it back.

SREENIVASAN: In the book, you talk about kind your own process of sitting down and trying to write this, and you had the privilege of having — being able to take some time off, literally, put yourself on an island, get yourself an old-fashioned, you know, flip phone, if you will. But how did you get into that state, that creative people would call the flow state, athletes would call the zone? How did you get into that? What is something I can do to get into that flow state on a daily basis?

HARI: Everyone listening and watching will have experienced a flow state even if they don’t know the term. A flow state is when you are doing something and you really get into it. You get into the zone and it’s like time falls away, it’s like your sense of ego falls away. And when it’s over, you are like, whoa, that went quickly. Wow. I got a lot done there, right? And different people get into flow doing different things. For some people it’s brain surgery, for some people it’s bagels, it can be anything, right? Climbing mountains, whatever it might be. And Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered both that flow states are the most precious form of attention we have because they are the deepest form of attention. But also, once you are in a flow state, it’s the easiest form of attention you can provide, it’s not actually difficult once you get into flow to carry on doing it. So, obviously, he wanted to figure out, OK, how do we do it? Exactly your question, Hari. And he discovered, there’s three things you can do, it’s no guaranty, but will hugely maximize your ability to get it to flow. The first thing is you have to choose one goal and set aside a significant amount of time to achieve that goal. I want to paint this canvas, I want to climb that rock, whatever it might be. You have to choose one goal. If you are trying to do two, three, four things at a time, you’ll never get into the flow. Secondly, you have to choose a goal that is meaningful to you. If you’re trying to get into flow for something you don’t care about, it just won’t work. Thirdly — and this one was bit counterintuitive to me, it will help if you choose something that is at the edge of your abilities but not beyond it. So, let’s say you are medium talent rock climber, right? You don’t want to just try and climb over your garden wall. It’s too easy. You won’t get into flow. Equally, you don’t want to suddenly climb Mount Everest. That would be too overwhelming, you won’t get into flow. You want to find a slightly higher and harder rock face than the one you climbed last time, right? If you do those three things, narrowed down to one goal, make sure it’s a meaningful goal, push yourself to the edge of your abilities, flow begins at the edge of your comfort zone, you maximize your chances of getting this kind of deep gusher of attention that exists in all of us.

SREENIVASAN: And the book is called “Stolen Focus.” Author Johann Hari, thank you so much for joining us.

HARI: What a pleasure. Thanks for great questions. Thanks so much, Hari. I appreciate it. And it’s good to speak to my namesake as well. I’m thrilled.