Read a Q&A with Johann Hari! | Stolen Focus

Johann Hari is a British journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, and other leading newspapers. He graduated from Cambridge University with a Double First in Social Sciences. He has written two New York Times bestselling books – Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, and Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions. They have been translated into 34 languages, and have been praised by a very broad range of people, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky. His first book was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film The United States vs Billie Holiday, for which he was Executive Producer, and separately into an eight-part TV series presented by Samuel L. Jackson named The Fix. His TED talks about depression and addiction have been viewed more than 80 million times. He divides his time between Britain and the United States.

Today, Johann Hari is on the blog to answer a few of our questions about his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. Read on …

Johann Hari

Please tell us about your book, Stolen Focus.

JH: Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. The average teenager only focuses on a task for 65 seconds, and the average officer worker now manages only 3 minutes. Every year, it’s getting worse. I interviewed the leading scientists investigating this all over the world, to find out: why is this happening, and what can we do about it? I discovered the reasons are more complex than we think. There are twelve forces that are wrecking our ability to focus and to think deeply. But once we understand the science of why this is happening to all of us, we can actually deal with it. I learned we need to radically change how we think about this problem. We’ve been told it’s just a personal failing – when I struggled to focus, I said to myself: you’re weak. You’re lazy. You’re undisciplined. In fact, our focus is being stolen from us by twelve big forces – which include some aspects of Big Tech, but also go far beyond it. Stolen Focus is the story of how we take our attention back from the forces that have broken and burned it.

Do you think the influence of social media on our attention span has been exaggerated or is there legitimate cause for concern?

JH: The effect is very real but it needs to be understood in a more sophisticated way than just saying “the smartphone wrecked my attention and I need to break up with my phone.”

The average social media user in the world now spends two hours and twenty-four minutes on it a day. I interviewed many people in Silicon Valley who have been at the heart of designing these products, and they said that to understand these sites’ effects on our attention, you first have to understand the business model that currently drives all the main social media companies. Every minute you spend scrolling through their feeds, the companies make more money – by monitoring you, learning your tastes, and selling that information about you to advertisers. Every time you put down your phone, they lose money. So their products are designed, quite deliberately, to maximally capture and hold your attention. They learn what most engages you, and they target it ruthlessly. They train you to crave the rewards their sites offer, and their algorithms feed you just the right mixture of tantalising and enraging content to keep you glued. Your distraction is their fuel.

We can try all sorts of techniques, at an individual level, to protect ourselves from this machinery – I learned them in detail, and over time, I’d say they improved my attention by about 20 percent. But as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris, who I interviewed over several years, said when he testified before the Senate: “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.” There are solutions to this that are absolutely achievable – I talk about them in the book – but they require us to first acknowledge the scale of the challenge.

Why do you think that common problems faced by humankind are so often framed in individualistic terms, rather than as the result of larger social forces?

JH: This is a big and deep question, and there’s a huge range of forces at work here. It would take reams of books to answer it – anyone who wants to explore this more deeply might want to check out the excellent book The Weirdest People in the World by Joseph Henrich.

Some individualism is healthy – totally collectivist societies, like the Amish (or indeed the Swiss village where my dad grew up), are pretty stifling. So to some degree, our extreme individualism is the result of taking a good thing too far.

But it’s much more than that. It’s very convenient for power if we all think the problems they cause are just due to individual failings. Think about the obesity crisis. In the 1950s, there was almost no obesity in the United States. Today, most adults are overweight or obese. Every time obesity rose, people were taught to see it as an individual failing – you were greedy, you were lazy, you should get moving and discipline yourself. But obesity didn’t rise because we all suddenly got greedy or lazy. It rose because of deep structural forces – the food industry pumped us full of sugar and salts and made fresh food hard to get, and we built cities it’s very hard to walk or bike around. When this made us fatter, we told people to seek an individual solution to this social problem – and it produced a disaster. If all the energy we have put into trying to starve and shame ourselves had been put into tackling the real causes of obesity right at the start, we could have prevented the whole crisis. Instead, we made it much worse – by offering the wrong solution.

That’s very convenient for the food industry, and the people who designed our cities – to make us all think it’s our fault, not theirs. We are heavily propagandised to see everything as an individual failing. Mark Zuckerberg desperately wants you to think your attention problems are your fault.

What’s the most interesting thing you learnt while writing this book?

JH: Oh god there’s so many! Rather than choose the most interesting – that’s too hard a choice! – I will choose the one that led to the largest personal changes in my own life if that’s okay?

As I write in the book, Professor Earl Miller, one of the leading neuroscientists at M.I.T., explained to me: “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.” But we believe that we can do several things at once – that we can (say) write an article, while being interrupted by texts. But when neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people do this, they are actually – as Earl explained – “juggling. They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.”

This constant switching degrades your ability to focus. Imagine you are doing your tax return, and you receive a text, and you look at it – it’s only a glance, taking five seconds – and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another,” he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it, “and that takes a little bit of time.” When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.” So if you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts – you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which can be much longer. This means that if your screentime shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing more time than that in lost focus.

I asked Earl if, given what we know about the brain, it was fair to conclude that attention problems today really are worse than at some points in the past. He replied: “Absolutely.” We have, he believes, created in our culture “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation, as a result of distraction.” So I have made sure that I have hours built into my day where I do just one thing. As I answer your questions, my laptop is cut off from the internet, and my phone is locked away in a timed safe. I am only focusing on these questions – and I know as a result my answers are better.

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey towards becoming a writer?

JH: There’s a deep emotional answer, and a prosaic practical answer.

I grew up in a violent, chaotic and literally insane environment – one that was not safe for a child – and the way I survived was by reading and writing all the time. I was able to extract myself from the madness, to a significant degree, by being present with writing, from when I was very young. So now I have a slightly obsessive relationship with reading and writing. It’s not the route I would recommend to being a writer, but at least I got something useful out of it.

The more prosaic answer is that I became a magazine and newspaper journalist when I left university at the age of 22, and I did that for nearly ten years, and then I started writing books. I absolutely love the depth of working on a book – of being able to deeply explore one subject for years, and approach it from lots of different angles, and try to really deeply understand it.

What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever received?

JH: I’ve had a lot. The one that has most boosted my sanity is something my incredibly wise friend V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) told me years ago: it’s not your job to worry about how people respond to your books. Your job is to write the best book you can, and then let it go out into the world. If people want to misunderstand you, that’s not your problem. You did your job. You wrote it as clearly as possible.

What is the last book you read and loved?

JH: I read obsessively and love recommending books to people, so I am always agonised when I am asked to recommend just one. For that reason I am going to cheat and recommend one novel and one non-fiction book.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh is a staggering novel. It starts in a familiar almost P.G. Woodhouse tone of English social comedy – then goes in a series of breathtaking and startling directions, and becomes deeply weird and troubling. I keep thinking about it. It’s so strange. It was published in 1934 and feels totally contemporary and wild.

Return to Uluru by Mark McKenna is an incredible work of historical research, where he in fact definitively uncovers the circumstances of a murder that – at the start of the book – you are sure will be left unsolved. In 1934 (by coincidence the year A Handful of Dust was published), an Aboriginal man named Yokunna was shot by a white policeman. What McKenna uncovers about that event is remarkable. It’s a beautiful and profound book, enraging in the injustice it describes. If I could get every Australian to read one thing, this would be close to the top of the list.

What do you hope readers will discover in Stolen Focus?

JH: That if you are struggling to focus and pay attention, it’s not your fault. It’s happening to all of us. And – even more importantly – there are solutions waiting for us, that will make it possible for us to get our brains back. To get to those solutions, we need to understand what’s really happening – and start to fight for our focus.

And finally, what’s up next for you?

JH: I am working on a few things. The expensive part of writing my books is the travel, so I usually research a few projects over really long periods of time. For ten years now I’ve been researching a series of crimes in Las Vegas – my publishers will tase me if I say any more – and a biography of Noam Chomsky that I am writing with his co-operation. I’m writing the Vegas book next. Chomsky’s life is so fascinating and so complex that I’ll probably be older than Chomsky is now (he’s 93) by the time that book comes out …

Thanks Johann!

I really enjoyed these questions – thank you!

How did you first become interested in this topic and know you wanted to write about it?

We also asked Johann how he first became interested in the topic of attention and technology, and he had a fascinating story as his response. Read it below …

I had been worried about this subject for a while, but there was one moment when it really fell into place for me.

When he was fifteen, my godson Adam (not his real name – I have changed it to protect his privacy) dropped out of school and spent literally almost all his waking hours at home alternating blankly between screens – his phone, an infinite scroll of Whatsapp and Facebook messages, and his iPad, on which he watched a blur of YouTube and porn. He struggled to stay with a topic of conversation for more than a few minutes without jerking back to a screen or jerkily switching to another topic. He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, somewhere where nothing still or serious could reach him. He was intelligent, decent, kind – but it was like nothing could gain any traction in his mind.

I couldn’t bear to see this happen to him – and I couldn’t bear to feel my own ability to pay attention fracturing. I decided to do something drastic. When he was a little boy, he had been obsessed with Elvis. I said to him – let’s go to Graceland. We’ll travel all over the South. But there’s one condition. You have to use your phone only once, at the end of the day. He agreed.

When you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there is no longer a human being whose job is to show you around. You are handed an iPad, and you put in little earbuds, and the iPad tells you what to do – turn left; turn right; walk forward. In each room, the iPad, in the voice of some forgotten actor, tells you about the room you are in, and a photograph of it appears on the screen. So we walked around Graceland alone, staring at the iPad. We were surrounded by Canadians and Koreans and a whole United Nations of blank-faced people, looking down, seeing nothing around them. Nobody was looking for long at anything but their screens. I watched them as we walked, feeling more and more tense. Occasionally, somebody would look away from the iPad and I felt a flicker of hope, and I would try to make eye contact with them, to shrug, to say, hey, we’re the only ones looking around, we’re the ones who travelled thousands of miles and decided to actually see the things in front of us – but every time this happened, I realised they had broken contact with the iPad only to take out their phones and snap a selfie.

When we got to the Jungle Room – Elvis’ favourite place in the mansion – the iPad was chattering away when in front of me, a middle-aged man turned to his wife. In front of us, I could see the large fake pot-plants that Elvis had bought, to turn this room into his own artificial jungle. The fake plants were still there, sagging sadly. “Honey,” he said, “this is amazing. Look.” He waved the iPad in her direction, and then began to move his finger across it. “If you swipe left, you can see the Jungle Room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the Jungle Room to the right.” His wife stared, smiled, and began to swipe at her own iPad.

I watched them. They swiped back and forth, looking at the different dimensions of the room. I leaned forward. “But, sir,” I said, “there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the Jungle Room. You don’t have to see it on your screen. You can see it unmediated. Here. Look.” I waved my hand at it, and the fake green leaves rustled a little.

The man and his wife backed away from me a few inches. “Look!” I said, in a louder voice than I intended. “Don’t you see? We’re there. We’re actually there. There’s no need for your screen. We are in the jungle room.” They hurried out of the room, glancing back at me with a who’s-that-loon shake of the head, and I could feel my heart beating fast. I turned to Adam, ready to laugh, to share the irony with him, to release my anger – but he was in a corner, holding his phone under his jacket, flicking through Snapchat.

At every stage in this trip, he had broken his promise. When the plane first touched down in New Orleans two weeks before, he immediately took out his phone, while we were still in our seats. “You promised not to use it,” I said. He replied: “I meant I wouldn’t make phone calls. I can’t not use Snapchat and texting, obviously.” He said this with baffled sincerity, as if I had asked him to hold his breath for ten days. I watched him scrolling through his phone in the Jungle Room silently. Milling past him was a stream of people also staring at their screens. I felt as alone as if I had been standing in an empty Iowa corn-field miles from another human. I strode up to Adam and snatched his phone from his grasp. “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!”

I was talking loudly, but in their iPhone isolation, most people around us didn’t even notice. Adam snatched his phone back from me, told me (not without some justification) that I was acting like a freak, and stomped away, out past Elvis’ grave, and into the Memphis morning.

I spent hours walking listlessly between Elvis’ various Rolls Royces, which are displayed in the adjoining museum, and finally I found Adam again as night fell in the Heartbreak Hotel across the street, where we were staying. He was sitting next to the swimming pool, which was shaped like a giant guitar, and as Elvis sang in a 24/7 loop over this scene, he looked sad. I realised as I sat with him that, like all the most volcanic anger, my rage towards him – which had been spitting out throughout this trip – was really anger towards myself. His inability to focus, his constant distraction, the inability of the people at Graceland to see the place to which they had travelled, was something I felt rising within myself. I was fracturing like they were fracturing. I was losing my ability to be present too. And I hated it.

“I know something’s wrong,” Adam said to me softly, holding his phone tightly in his hand. “But I have no idea how to fix it.” Then he went back to texting. I took Adam away to escape our inability to focus – and what I found is that there was no escape, because this problem was everywhere.

That’s when I knew I had to go on a journey to understand from the leading scientists in the world why this is happening to so many of us – and, crucially, how we can solve it.

—Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari (Bloomsbury Australia) is out now.

Stolen Focus

Why You Can't Pay Attention

by Johann Hari

Why have we lost our ability to focus? What are the causes? And, most importantly, how do we get it back?

For Stolen Focus, internationally bestselling author Johann Hari went on a three-year journey to uncover the reasons why our teenagers now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and why office workers on average manage only three minutes. He interviewed the leading experts in the world on attention, and learned that everything we think about this subject is wrong...

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