NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Our ability to pay attention is
collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the
Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why
this is happening—and how to get our attention back.“The book the
world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”—Adam Grant,
author of Think Again
“Read this book
to save your mind.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet
WINNER OF THE
PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Post, Mashable,
Mindful
In
the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only
sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three
minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly
switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and
depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help
solutions—even abandoning his phone for three months—but nothing
seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to
interview the leading experts on human attention—and he discovered
that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.
We
think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough
willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our
focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us
uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention
for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this
crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all
of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus,
he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to
hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD.
He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their
attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand
that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’
productivity.
Crucially,
Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus—as individuals, and as a
society—if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus
will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to
get it back.