Quotes About Attention

Reading books trains us to read in a particular way—in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way—in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another.

The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that "every status update is a just a variation on a single request: 'Would someone please acknowledge me?

James Williams was right: our attention is a kind of light, one that clarifies the world and makes it visible to us. In Provincetown I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life - my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I want to live in that light - the light of knowing, of achieving our ambitions, of being fully alive - and not in the menacing orange light of it all burning down.

If it's more enraging, it's more engaging. If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture. As Tristan told me, that turns hate into a habit.

In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being - TV, radio, reading - it amounted to forty newspapers-worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day. (I'd be amazed if it hadn't gone up further since then.) The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.

Flow can only come when you are monotasking—when you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing.

I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention - it's where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego.

We can't live like this!" I said. "You don't know how to be present! You are missing your life! You're afraid of missing out—that's why you are checking your screen all the time! By doing that, you are guaranteeing you are missing out! You are missing your one and only life! You can't see the things that are right in front of you, the things you have been longing to see since you were a little boy! None of these people can! Look at them!

More speed means less comprehension.

I realized that the collapse in reading books is in some ways a symptom of our atrophying attention, and in some ways a cause of it. It's a spiral – as we began to move from books to screens, we started to lose some of the capacity for the deeper reading that comes from books, and that in turn, made us less likely to read books.

What we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions … Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there's no time to reach depth. Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes long timespans. 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.

I felt in that moment that 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?

to focusing carefully on one thing at a time. As I learned all this, I realized that my desire to absorb a tsunami of information without losing my ability to focus was like my desire to eat at McDonald's every day and stay trim—an impossible dream.

Reading is a unique form of consciousness, while we read we direct attention outward to the page but also at the same time inwards as we imagine and mentally stimulate.

A rainbow which lasts for a quarter of an hour is looked at no longer.

Life is a publicity stunt. A shill. You've been had.

Life is like Twitter: nobody wants to sign off.

Sometimes people don't notice the things others do for them until they stop doing them.

There have been times when I have deliberately tried to take my life... I think I must have been crying for some attention.

I never knew the media would be so interested in my personal life.

Your life follows your attention. Wherever you look, you end up going.

When I was young, all I wanted and expected from life was to sit quietly in some corner doing my work without the public paying attention to me. And now see what has become of me.

The correct word is like any small detail - it enhances life.