Alex Goswami's Key Ideas from Stolen Focus
by Johann Hari

we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion: ‘It becomes exhausting.’ More importantly, Sune said, ‘What we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions … Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth. Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes long timespans. And it takes commitment. It takes attention, right? All of these things that require depth are suffering.

Sune had seen a photo of Mark Zuckerberg standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual-reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, he fears we are headed towards a world where ‘there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware’ of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with ‘fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more inside their computers.

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 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

A team at UCLA got people to do two tasks at once, and tracked them to see the effects. It turned out that afterwards they couldn’t remember what they had done as well as people who did just one thing at a time. This seems to be because it takes mental space and energy to convert your experiences into memories, and if you are spending your energy instead on switching very fast, you’ll remember and learn less.

One rock climber told him later: ‘The mystique of rock-climbing is climbing; you get to the top of a rock glad it’s over but really wish it could go on forever. The justification of climbing is climbing, like the justification of poetry is writing. You don’t conquer anything except things in yourself … The act of writing justifies poetry. Climbing is the same: recognising you are a flow. The purpose of flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move up to keep the flow going.’