Quotes from Johann Hari

The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.

Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

Depression isn't a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!

Harry Anslinger is our own darkest impulses, given a government department and a license to kill.

Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts" in your conscious mind at once. That's it. "We're very, very single-minded." We have "very limited cognitive capacity." This is because of the "fundamental structure of the brain," and it's not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.

I'm so patriotic, I think every British kid should have a chance to grow up to be our head of state.

The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

She had felt homesick. But she was at home.

To the prohibitionists, Hannah is a failure, because she continued using drugs. To the Portland, she was a success, because she knew she was loved. One day, a very senior government minister came to visit the safe injection rooms, and to meet the addicts. He asked Liz: "What percentage of people who use this place would you consider to be write-offs?" She paused and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell him that the answer is none.

Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.

The one exception, intriguingly, was Wikipedia, where the level of attention on topics has held steady.)

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

The truth is creepier. It's not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It's that their model of you is so accurate that it's making predictions about you that you think are magic.

It's always tempting to mistake your personal decline for the decline of the human species

If I have too much luggage, too much property, too many material goods, that makes me worry I have to defend this stuff—then in that case I will not have time left to take care of the things I really love, and then I lose my freedom.

if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.

Antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect, in clinical trials, as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain.

The United States now imprisons more people16 for drug offenses than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined. No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population.

We live in a gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do.

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about "social recovery.

Ço­ cuklar?n etrafta ko?turmaya dönük do?al arzular?n?n önüne geçildi?inde, dikkat becerileri ve beyinlerinin genel sa?l??? zarar görüyor.

seeing this as a debate between whether you are pro-tech or anti-tech is bogus and lets the people who stole your attention off the hook. The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?

If you take five milligrams of melatonin—which is often a standard dose that's sold over the counter in the U.S.—Roxanne said you risk "blowing out your melatonin receptors," which would make it harder to sleep without them.

It's that their model of you is so accurate that it's making predictions about you that you think are magic.