”…a life full of distractions is, at an individual level, diminished. When you are unable to pay sustained attention, you can’t achieve the things you want to achieve.” p13
”A study by professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus.” switch cost effect - Every interruption lasts at least 23 minutes
Definition of the word wired:
making use of computers to transfer or receive information, especially by means of the internet.
Make it harder to do the bad thing than it is to do the good thing. Tie yourself to the mast.
We’re sacrificing depth of attention for amount of information. We’re increasing the density of our information load. More info, same brain.
Prof Earl Miller from MIT said “‘Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts’ in your conscious mind at once.” “We have ‘very limited cognitive capacity.‘”
The term multitasking was coined for computers, not people.
Creates “creativity drain.” New ideas come from the subconscious having time to process information. Multitasking doesn’t allow that.
Multitasking hurts our memory.
”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.”
In a study at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab, 136 students were tested for performance based on whether or not a phone was interrupting them.
With phone interruptions, 20-30% worse performance.
”This is when you are so absorbed by what you are doing that you lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to fall away, and you are flowing into the experience itself. It is the deepest form of focus and attention we know of.”
Sounds a lot like presence to me.
”Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere what we might have been.”
Everything you do makes you move towards fragmentation of attention or flow. It’s always a choice. This is the continuum we live in regarding attention.
Three: Exhaustion
40% of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived.
Parts of your brain can fall asleep on their own, called local sleep. One of the first parts of the brain to succumb to this is the part that recognizes that you’re tired. This is why we get a ‘second wind.’ You just stop getting the tired signal. (story of falling while running as a teen)
“‘part of the brain is awake, and part of the brain is asleep.‘” - Charles Czeisler
”In this state, you believe you are alert and mentally competent - but you aren’t.”
The effects of sleep deprivation: Adults become drowsy, children become hyperactive.
When sleep deprived, the sympathetic nervous system jumps into high gear, because it thinks there’s an emergency.
Higher BP
Craving foods like sugar for quick energy
HR goes up
Your brain can’t understand what’s happening
Brain stops recognizing connections and patterns
The less you sleep, the worse your long term memory consolidation.
Four: Sustained Reading
Reading books trains us to to focus on something specific for an extended period of time.
Internet reading, on the other hand, trains us to skim things and move quickly.
The medium is the message:
Facebook: life is to be displayed to others
IG: what matters is how you look on the outside
Twitter: the world should be simplified and condensed.
Book: life is complex, we need to slow down.
Fiction books increase empathy - Raymond Mar, study at University of Toronto
Empathy makes progress possibly for humanity
Viewing the world through news or social media only provides fragments, and “if you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.”
Five: Mind Wandering
”Attention is usually defined as a person’s ability to selectively attend to something in the environment.”
Different types of focus
Spotlight. Focusing on something selective and specific.
The more your mind gets to wander, the better you are at organizing personal goals. being creative, and making long-term decisions.
We have to let our subconscious do some of the work.
If we’re always frantic and being exposed to new stimulus, our brains don’t get the time to wander.
In our current state, most of us don’t spotlight focus or mind wander. We’re just not focusing at all.
Mind wandering is best experienced in low stress environments. If high stress or dangerous environment, this leads to anxiety.
kSafe, Freedom app.
Six and Seven: Technology That Tracks You
”He told me a digital detox is ‘not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution.‘” (James Williams)
We make different decisions when we are given a moment to pause and consider. We should build this into our habits with tech.
The business model of tech companies is incentivized to hold onto our attention as long as possible.
The real purpose of tech is to make us better versions of ourselves, not change who we are.
Surveillance capitalism is the term describing the tracking and advertising we see today.
Most social media train us to
Crave frequent rewards
Switch tasks often
Distract by understanding what excites, angers, etc. Learns triggers.
Eight: Cruel Optimism
Cruel optimism “is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail."
"The people who say stress is just a matter of changing your thoughts are, he says, talking ‘from a privileged position. It’s easy for them to say that.” (Talking to Ronald Purser.)
People that say that often have no real externally imposed stressors.
”It’s the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, ‘Let them eat cake.’ Let them be present.”
I have slight problem with that, because then there are people like Thich Nhat Hanh
Cruel optimist denies the reality of most people’s lives. Not everyone knows how to set things up in a way that are better for them, and more importantly, they shouldn’t have to. Our purchases should come default in a way that doesn’t significantly ruin our attention.
We need a change to the default lifestyle of our culture.
Most of the individual tweaks we can make are the equivalent of “digital diet books. But diet books didn’t solve the obesity crisis and digital die books won’t solve the attention crisis.”
The individual solutions are helpful and important, but focusing only on those denies the greater problem that exists.
Nine: First Glimpses of the Deeper Solution
When lead paint was found to cause brain damage, we eventually banned the lead in paint. We didn’t get rid of paint. We just got rid of the bad part.
Same with hairspray and CFCs harming the ozone. Now the ozone is healing.
Banning surveillance capitalism.
Possible business models
Subscription rather than ads.
Government / public ownership, like BBC (Would have to be run independent of the gov)
Personally, I like the way YouTube has the option of subscription for no ads. I think that might be the best direction
Ten: Surge in Stress
Financial security makes people smarter (a study on Universal Basic Income)
Eleven: Reversing the Surge in Speed and Exhaustion
Four day work wee at Perpetual Guardian resulted in 30-40% higher engagement, teamwork, as well as a 15% drop in self reported stress levels.
Work hours went up during COVID, which is unfortunate because this could’ve been a great time to test.
The French have the “right to disconnect.”
Must have clearly defined work hours. When those are over, you have to right to completely unplug. There is a formal negotiation of hours they can be contacted. Clearly defined boundaries.
Twelve: Diets and Pollution
Healthy eating is too hard. It takes a lot of effort to do what should be the default. This is a structural problem.
With pollutants, it is often the case that it is innocent until proven guilty. It should be the opposite.
Main pollutant culprits are pesticides, plasticizers, flame-retardants, and cosmetics, according to Prof Barbara Demeneix.
Trying to escape pollutants is basically useless because our environment is so full of them. To make any real progress, we have to change our environment.
Thirteen: ADHD
ADHD has skyrocketed throughout the past few decades.
Science can’t really agree on much regarding ADHD, probably because it’s mostly a comparatively new area of study.
One thing is for sure: People diagnosed ADHD are experiencing a real issue. They’re not faking it or making it up. It’s just we don’t know exactly what’s causing it, or how to fix it.
And if you do experience these issues, it’s not your fault.
Nicholas Dodman, vet. Horses suffering from an issue due to domestication. They suffer from “frustrated biological objectives.” So are we.
These animals are drugged to ease the pain caused by their dysfunctional environment rather than managing the environmental conditions.
Children are fed a “diet lacking nutrients”, and are put in an environment “preparing them for high-stress testing, with very little space for nurturing their curiosity.” No wonder we’re seeing issues. They have a dysfunctional environment.
Drugs should be prescribed only as a worst case scenario, and they should be temporary as the greater issue is dealt with.
ADHD drugs cause lack of sleep, perpetuating the problem.
”genes aren’t destiny; rather they affect probability” - Alan Sroufe
Fourteen: Confinement of Children
Childhood autonomy has been diminished, resulting in lack of exploration.
City design matters here.
Play teaches meta-skills, like negotiation and coping with disappointment.