| Format: | 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." |
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01. English Non Fiction