Highlighting the parts that highly resonated with me of Ezra Klein’s podcast with Johann Hari discussing Johann’s book “Stolen Focus”.
Checking Twitter, playing a game of rapid chess online, going down a youtube rabbit hole, the opportunities are endless and attractive compared to the actual work I should be doing - for example, writing this article. My relationship with attention has been difficult for a long time. And I do blame myself for my lack of attention and the resulting struggle to commit to my goals.
In his podcast with Ezra Klein, Johann Hari talks about how, on an individual level, we all struggle to pay attention and blame ourselves for it. But he sees deep social problems as the roots of our failure to pay attention. This results in a severe crisis of attention which affects our whole society.
This deeply resonates with me. Sure, we all have agency over our actions. But Johann made it very clear during this podcast that multiple forces fight for our attention and actively undermine our capability to pay attention. In the following, I am breaking down the most important insights about attention research and how it can help you to improve your focus.
Definition of attention
Johann quotes Dr James Williams, who worked at Google for years, for a definition of attention. It is: "Our ability to selectively attend to things in our environment."
There are three types of attention:
Spotlight:
The first layer of attention is the narrowing down of focus by shifting your focus to an immediate action, like deciding to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water or choosing to read a book. If your spotlight focus gets distracted, you cannot execute short-term actions.
Starlight: The second layer is the kind of attention you can apply to your longer-term goals—these a projects like writing a book, starting a business or being a good parent. If you are too distracted to pay attention to your starlight, you lose sense of your long-term goals.
Daylight: This is the type of focus which enables you to even know what your long-term goals are in the first place. How to write a book, how to be a good parent, etc. Without the capability to reflect deeply on these long-term goals, you won't be able to figure out how to achieve them.
I personally struggle the most with the starlight type of attention. The day-to-day of work and running errands soak up energy like a malicious sponge, making it hard to zoom out and focus on the longer-term goals. These types of goals usually require deep focus, which I find hard to obtain.
Mind-Wandering:
We have lost the ability of mind-wandering. Now we have access to new mental inputs at all times. Podcasts, news, etc. Mind-wandering is a true moment of absence of new mental input. And in these moments of mind-wandering, research has shown we actually make connections between ideas and are most creative.
Demand and Supply Side of attention
Johann distinguished between the Demand and Supply side of attention.
The Demand Side is our natural craving for input. Our curiosity, our urge to get distracted. This is what industries have reacted to and why we have smartphones and television. It caters to our demands. For me, it might be online chess to distract me from another task I should be working on; for others, it could be Instagram or binging a Netflix show. It is undeniable that a demand exists, and to a reasonable extent, there is
The Supply Side deals with factors which increase or decrease our ability to pay attention.
The main factors are:
Sleep: We sleep significantly less now. Reasons for the sleep deficit are artificial light originating from screens, air pollution and increased stress caused by overwork.
Nutrition:
The way we eat food: Sugar, carbs or caffeine puts us on a roller coaster of energy spikes and energy crashes, which cause patches of brain fog throughout the day. If you eat food that releases energy at a steadier level, which most humans have in the past, you will not experience so much brain fog.
Food lacks the nutrients we need: For our brain to function fully, we need various nutrients in our diet. Research shows that we can't compensate for this lack with supplements. Our body doesn’t absorb nutrients from supplements in the way it does from food.
Food contains chemicals which actively harm our attention.
Bottom-up and Top-Down attention
Bottom-up attention is when something happens, and you don't have any control over whether you pay attention to it or not. A thunder, a fire alarm or a car honking. It is involuntary. You can't decide if you pay attention to the stimulus.
Top-Down attention is when we exert control over what we pay attention to. A movie, a book or observing the colours of a flower.
Our prefrontal cortex acts as a bouncer for external, bottom-up stimuli. It can fight off a certain amount of stimuli, but if it gets overloaded, it fundamentally weakens our capability to pay top-down attention.
In the current environment we live in, the "bouncer" gets attacked from two sides. There are more external stimuli in the form of technology - the demand side of attention, and the defence system gets increasingly weakened by less sleep and bad nutrition - the supply-demand side of attention.
Systematic changes for a more focused society
We can choose to design a society that prioritises the well-being of its citizens. Johann gives the example of the Netherlands, which has implemented policies that subsidise healthy foods and have given way for urban structures which allow for other means of transport other than cars.
The USA has not done this and is now living through an obesity crisis.
To avoid an attention crisis, Johann argues for an alternative business model for attention. A business model which is not based on grabbing the most attention from its users and tying them to their screens as long as possible.
He also advocates for protecting children who easily fall prey to invasive tech. Firstly, schools should do more to protect them from attention-grabbing influences; secondly, we should rebuild our school system in a way that infuses it with meaning. Since our ability to pay attention is inextricably linked to meaning, the most significant change we can make to channel our children's attention away from distraction and towards a top-down style attention is to make learning more meaningful.