Quotes About Attention

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.

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.

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

American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

Flow can only come when you are monotasking

There's no point giving people sweet self-help lectures about the benefits of unplugging unless you give them a legal right to do it. In fact... [it] becomes a kind of maddening taunt... If you have an independent fortune and you don't need to work, then you can probably make these changes now. But for the rest of us, we need to be part of a collective struggle in order to reclaim the time and space that has been taken from us - so we can finally rest, and sleep, and restore our attention.

I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can't focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can't pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won't be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention.

Up until I met these scientists, I thought that mind-wandering—what I was doing in Provincetown so much, and so pleasurably—was the opposite of attention, and that's why I felt guilty about doing it. I realized I was wrong. It is actually a different form of attention—and a necessary one.

It's when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from.

they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world—and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.

Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes long time spans. And it takes commitment. It takes attention, right? All of these things that require depth are suffering. It's pulling us more and more up onto the surface.

But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. "That's why those disciplines make you smarter.

James thinks we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds. "We're that server, and there's all these things trying to grab our attention by throwing information at us…. It undermines our capacity for responding to anything. It leaves us in a state of either distraction, or paralysis.

we all have a choice now between two profound forces - fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us. I asked myself - do you want to be one of Skinner's pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards, or Mihaly's painters, able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters?

You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.

more free play they get, the more sound a foundation they will have for their focus and attention.

Standardized schooling too often drains learning of meaning, while progressive schooling tries to infuse it into everything. This is why the best research on this question shows that kids at more progressive schools are more likely to retain what they've learned in the long run, more likely to want to carry on learning, and more likely to be able to apply what they've learned to new problems. These, it seems to me, are among the most precious forms of attention.

Cruel optimism takes it for granted that we can't significantly change the systems that are wrecking our attention, so we have to mainly focus on changing our isolated selves. But why should we accept these systems as a given?

wondered if in some ways we are increasingly speed-reading life, skimming hurriedly from one thing to another, absorbing less and less.

The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

Focus, damn you. I thought back to this moment when, over a year later, I interviewed Professor Gloria Mark, who has spent years studying the science of interruptions. 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.

Once the financial incentives are changed - through subscription, or public ownership, or another model - then the nature of these sites can change, in ways we can actually begin to envision already. Aza [Raskin] told me that 'it's actually technically not hard' to redesign the major social-media sites so that, instead of trashing your attention span and our societies, they world be designed to heal them

People were, [Tristan Harris] warned, living 'on a treadmill of continuous checking.