Cite
Hari, Johann. Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again. New York: Crown, 2022.
Jeremy
Synth
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FirstAuthor:: Hari, Johann
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Title:: Stolen focus: why you can’t pay attention—and how to think deeply again
Year:: 2022
Citekey:: hariStolenFocusWhy2022
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Crown
Location:: New York
ISBN:: 978-0-593-13851-9
LINK
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Abstract
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 .
Notes
Jeremy’s Review
This author’s book is in search for the answer of why society as a whole is losing focus. The section on ADHD in particular leaned heavily into presenting opinions of doctors that believe there external factors at play. He was also presented the opinions of many doctors that looked at stimulants as simply a temporary fix and compared taking ADHD medicine to methamphetamine.
# Reading Notes
“When it comes to our own attention problems as adults, we often readily acknowledge a whole range of influence on us – the rise of invasive technologies, stress, lack of sleep, and so on. But when our children face the same challenges, over the past 20 years we’ve been drawn to respectfully simple story: this problem is larger the result of a biological disorder.” (Hari, 2022, p.214)
“On one side, there are people seeing ADHD is a disorder caused overwhelmingly by something going wrong with the individual’s genes and brain, and that very large numbers of children and adults should be taking these stimulants to treat it. This side has largely prevailed in the U.S. On the other side, there are people saying that attention problems are real and painful, but it is incorrect and harmful to see them as a biological disorder that requires the mass prescription of drugs, and we should be offering different forms of help. This side has largely prevailed in places like Finland.” (Hari, 2022, p. 215)
Dr. Sammi Timi
- “ADHD is not a diagnosis. It’s not a diagnosis. It’s just a description of certain behaviors that sometimes occur together. That’s all is it.” All you are saying, when a child has been diagnosed with ADHD, is that a child is struggling to focus. “It doesn’t tell you anything about the ‘why’ question.” It’s like being told that a child has a cough, listening to the cough, and then saying “yes, the child has a cough. “If a doctor identifies a child with attention problems, that should be the first step in the process - not the last.” (Hari, 2022, p. 224)
“There is no question that when you give a child a stimulant like Adderall or Ritalin, their attention will significantly improve in the short term. All the experts I interviewed, wherever they stand on this debate, agreed with this, and I’ve seen it for myself.” (Hari, 2022, p. 227)
“Nadine Ezard, who is the clinical director of alcohol and drug services at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. She’s a doctor who works with people who have addiction problems, and by the time we met in 2015, Aussies were in the middle of a severe spike in methamphetamine addiction. For a while, doctors weren’t sure how to respond. With heroin, there is a drug they could legally prescribe to addicted people that’s a reasonable substitute, methadone-but with meth, there didn’t seem to be one. So Nadine-along with a group of other doctors-was part of a crucial experiment, licensed by the government. They started to give people addicted to meth a stimulant that is prescribed over a million times a year in the U.S. for kids with ADHD-dextroamphetamine.” (Hari, 2022, p. 228)
“Nadine’s program is a thoughtful, compassionate way to treat people with meth addictions—but I felt unsettled to learn that the drugs we give kids turn out to be a reasonable proxy for meth. Sami told me: “It’s a bit bizarre when you start realizing that we are prescribing legally the same substances that you are saying on the other hand are very dangerous to take if you take them illicitly. … They’re chemically similar. They work in a similar way. They work on very similar neurotransmitters.” But—as Nadine stressed to me-there are some important differences. They give higher doses to people recovering from meth addiction than children are given for ADHD.
They give them as pills, which releases them more slowly into your brain than smoking or injecting. And street drugs—because they are banned and have to be sold by criminals-contain all sorts of contaminants that aren’t in the pills you get from a pharmacist.” (Hari, 2022, p. 228-229)
- Fear mongering at it’s worst
“Most of the scientists I interviewed in the U.S.-and I talked with a lot of the most prestigious experts on ADHD-told me that they believe prescribing stimulants is safe and provides a lot of benefits that outweigh the risks. Indeed, many U.S. scientists argue that presenting the counterarguments—as I am doing here—is actively dangerous; it will, they say, make parents less likely to bring their kids forward to be prescribed stimulants, and as a result, those children will needlessly suffer and do worse in their lives. They also believe it may make some people quit these drugs abruptly, which is dangerous—they could go through a horrible physical withdrawal. But in the rest of the world, scientific opinion is more divided, and it’s more common to hear skepticism or outright opposition to this approach.” (Hari, 2022, p. 231-232)
“When you set aside these twin studies, Professor James Li told me, “time after time, every single study” looking at the role any individual gene plays in causing ADHD finds that “no matter how you measure (it, it is always small. The effect of the environment is always bigger.” So as I absorbed all this, I began to ask myself: Does this mean genes play no role in ADHD? There are some people who get close to arguing this—and that is where I think the ADHD skeptics go too far.
James explained to me that although the twin studies overestimate the role of genes, there’s a new technique called SNP herita-bility, which figures out how much of a characteristic is genetically driven by using a different method from twin studies. Instead of comparing types of twins, these studies compare the genetic makeup of two totally unrelated people. It could pluck, say, you and me, and see whether matchups in genes between us correlate with a problem we might both have-like (say) depression or obesity or ADHD. These studies currently find that around 20 to 30 percent of attention problems relate to your genes. James told me that this is a new way of studying the question and it only looks at common variation genes, so in the end the proportion caused by our genetics might end up being somewhat more than that. So it’s wrong, he explained, to dismiss a genetic component—but it’s also wrong to say it’s all or most of the problem.” (Hari, 2022, p. 234-235)
“One of the people who most helped me to understand some aspects of these questions was Professor Joel Nigg, who I interviewed at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. He is the former president of the International Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, and a leading figure in this field.
He told me it used to be thought that some kids were simply wired by their genes to be different and to develop different brains.
But, as he has written, now “the science has moved on.” The latest research shows that “genes aren’t destiny; rather they affect prob-ability.” Alan Sroufe, who did the long-term study into what factors cause ADHD, said the same: “Genes don’t operate in a vacuum.
That’s the main thing we’ve learned from gene studies… Genes are turned on and off in response to environmental input.” As Joel puts it, “our experiences literally get under our skin” and change how our genes are expressed.” (Hari, 2022, p. 235)
“Joel believes there is some role for stimulants. He says that in a bad situation, he believes they are better than nothing, and can give kids and parents some real relief. “I’m splinting a broken bone in a battlefield. I’m not healing it, you know? But at least the guy can walk off, even if he might have a crooked leg the rest of his life.”
But if we are going to do that, he said, we crucially also need to ask: “Where is the problem located? Do we need to look at what our kids are facing?” He says that kids at the moment face many large forces that we know harm their attention-stress, poor nutrition, pollution-all things I was going to investigate more after learning about them from him. “I would say we should not accept those things. We should not accept that our kids have to grow up in a chemical soup [of pollutants], for example. We shouldn’t accept that they have to grow up with grocery stores that hardly have any food in them that’s really food… That should change… For some kids, there’s actually something wrong with them because their environment has injured them. In that case, it’s a bit criminal to say nothing more than, in effect, ‘Let’s placate them with medications so that they can cope with this damaging environment we’ve created. How is that different from giving sedatives to prisoners so they can handle being in prison?” He believes you can only ethically give out drugs if you are also at the same time trying to solve the deeper problem.” (Hari, 2022, p. 236)
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how temporary is temporary? Adjusting an entire culture will go beyond a lifetime of many kids.