Quotes from Johann Hari

Toda la lógica de nuestra cultura conspira para que se quede en la rueda consumista, que salga a comprar cuando se sienta mal, que persiga valores de usar y tirar.

When we narrow our attention down into a spotlight to focus on one thing, that takes 'a certain amount of bandwidth,' and when we turn off the spotlight, 'we still have the same bandwidth - it's just we can allocate more of those resources' towards other ways of thinking. 'So it's not like attention necessarily goes down - it just shifts,' to other, crucial forms of thinking.

If this drug war continues, Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years' time. He was right almost to the exact year.

The goal was to offer the patient two things at the same time. The first was an opportunity to describe the traumatic experience—to craft a story about it, so the patient could make sense of it. As this experiment began, one of the things they discovered almost immediately is that many of the patients had literally never before acknowledged what happened to them to another human being.

Depression is a kind of constricted consciousness," Bill Richards, who also led the experiments at Johns Hopkins, told me. "You could say people have forgotten who they are, what they're capable of, have gotten stuck … Many depressed people can only see their pains, and their hurts, and their resentments, and their failures. They can't see the blue sky and the yellow leaves, you know?

She explained to me that 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.

The pain caused by life going wrong can trigger a response that is "so powerful that [the brain] tends to stay there [in a pained response] for a while, until something pushes it out of that corner, into a more flexible place." And if the world keeps causing you deep pain, of course you'll stay trapped there for a long time, with the snowball growing.

It would be as if the Navy Seals defected from the U.S. Army to help the Crips take over Los Angeles--and succeeded.

I've made up my mind—don't confuse me with the facts.

The study found that "technological distraction"—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers' IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that's twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you'd be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages

Their business model," he says, "is screen time, not life time.

Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

when they had the financial security that came at the end of the harvest, they were on average thirteen IQ points smarter - an extraordinary gap. Why would that be? Anyone reading this who's ever been financial stressed knows part of the answer instinctively. When you are worried about how to survive financially, everything - from a broken washing machine to a child's lost shoe - becomes a threat to your ability to get through the week. You become more vigilant

This is called "publication bias."7 Of all the studies drug companies carry out, 40 percent are never released to the public, and lots more are only released selectively, with any negative findings left on the cutting room floor.

Very few scientists now defend the idea that depression is simply caused by low levels of serotonin, but the debate about whether chemical antidepressants work—for some other reason we don't fully understand—is still ongoing. There is no scientific consensus. Many distinguished scientists agree with Irving Kirsch; many agree with Peter Kramer.

The way we work seems fixed and unchangeable - until it changes, and then we realise it didn't have to be like that in the first place.

you don't need millions of people. You need a small group of people that get [what] the problems [are], and know about creative confrontation—to create drama around it, to begin the consciousness-raising…. You capture people's attention, and then enough people feel that it's a vital issue that they want to give their time and their energy [to], and that there's a clear direction.

Scientists measure the depth of someone's depression using something named the Hamilton scale, which was invented by a scientist named Max Hamilton in 1959. The Hamilton scale ranges from 0 (where you're skipping along merrily) to 51 (where you're jumping in front of trains). To give you a yardstick: you can get a six-point leap in your Hamilton score if you improve your sleeping patterns

Choosing to put a chemical into your body should not be a crime, and being addicted should not be a crime. Instead, all the money spent on arresting, trying, and punishing addicts should be transferred to educating kids and helping addicts to recover.

If it's more enraging, it's more engaging.

Our Western society is a bit ADHD-ish because we're all sleep-deprived…. It's huge.

Parents beware! Your children . . . are being introduced to a new danger in the form of a drugged cigarette, marijuana. Young [people] are slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, [and] turn to violent crime and murder.

Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society.

by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.