Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-330) and index.

Walking in Memphis -- Cause one: the increase in speed, switching and filtering -- Cause two: the crippling of our flow states -- Cause three: the rise of physical and mental exhaustion -- Cause four: the collapse of sustained reading -- Cause five: the disruption of mind-wandering -- Cause six: the rise of technology that can track and manipulate you (Part one) -- Cause six: the rise of technology that can track and manipulate you (Part two) -- Cause seven: the rise of cruel optimism -- The first glimpses of the deeper solution -- Cause eight: the surge in stress and how it is triggering vigilance -- The places that figured out how to reverse the surge in speed and exhaustion -- Causes nine and ten: our deteriorating diets and rising pollution -- Cause eleven: the rise of ADHD and how we are responding to it -- Cause twelve: the confinement of our children, both physically and psychologically -- Attention rebellion.

Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. Johann Hari 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 Hari went on a journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings-and learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. 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, 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. Hari shows 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."