Quotes About Attention

The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world's attention burns.

The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.

Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention

So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you'll make more mistakes, you'll be less creative, and you'll remember less of what you do.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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?

started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis.

I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention's resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.

Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: "If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can't do that, it's really hard to do anything.

I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.

derinlemesine odaklanma biçiminin böyle bir h?zla ve bu ölçüde azald??? bir dünyan?n ba??na neler gelece?ini merak etmeye ba?lad?m. Dü?ünmenin en derin tabakas? gitgide daha az insan?n eri?ebil­di?i, opera veya voleybol gibi sadece ufak bir az?nl???n ilgisini çeken bir ?ey haline geldi?inde neler olacak acaba?

If we don't change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where "there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware" of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with "fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.

It said that we are, collectively, experiencing "a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.

A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine—who I interviewed—observed how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes.

the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.

After studying all the hidden data—the stuff that Facebook doesn't release to the public—the company's scientists reached a definite conclusion. They wrote: "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," and "if left unchecked," the site would continue to pump its users with "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.

Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego-- it loves you, it hates you, it's talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It's never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.

It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

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.