My BookWyrm Account. Runner, artist, musician, book nerd and privacy advocate. I'm the owner of Techlore & co-host of Surveillance Report.
I've developed resources for nearly a decade, using my voice and expertise to improve people's relationship with technology. I play the role of CEO, content creator, consultant, video producer, and more.
A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.
It's about …
"Friendship--my definition--is built on two things," he said. "Respect and trust. Both elements have to be there. And it has to be mutual. You can have respect for someone, but if you don't have trust, the friendship will crumble."
A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.
It's about …
She had been sharing a house with him for a week, and he had not once flirted with her. He had worked with her, asked her opinion, slapped her on the knuckles figuratively speaking when she was on the wrong track, and acknowledged that she was right when she corrected him. Dammit, he had treated her like a human being.
I was expecting Stolen Focus to predominantly focus on digital focus, and the negative impacts big tech companies have on our attention. That’s definitely a good portion of this book, which was incredibly insightful, but there are many more concepts tied to focus I had never considered which were equally amazing to learn about.
Diet, environment, social factors, economy, politics, and more. Stolen Focus ties relations between the focus crisis to the climate crisis, the obesity crisis, the mental health crisis, and much more. These are all interlinked problems which feed on each other in disastrous ways.
This book is not a “how to reclaim your focus” guide, it’s rather a thorough investigation into how and why focus is so important, and what has happened to it. It gives you the context and understanding required to not just fight back personally, but socially.
Writing-wise, I was thoroughly impressed with the …
I was expecting Stolen Focus to predominantly focus on digital focus, and the negative impacts big tech companies have on our attention. That’s definitely a good portion of this book, which was incredibly insightful, but there are many more concepts tied to focus I had never considered which were equally amazing to learn about.
Diet, environment, social factors, economy, politics, and more. Stolen Focus ties relations between the focus crisis to the climate crisis, the obesity crisis, the mental health crisis, and much more. These are all interlinked problems which feed on each other in disastrous ways.
This book is not a “how to reclaim your focus” guide, it’s rather a thorough investigation into how and why focus is so important, and what has happened to it. It gives you the context and understanding required to not just fight back personally, but socially.
Writing-wise, I was thoroughly impressed with the structure of the book. I was consistently captured by the book (ironically) as the author had a great balance of personal anecdotes, storytelling, interviews with dozens of experts, scientific research, and more. I felt the balance of facts, evidence, and story were perfect.
Great read, a must read if we are to reclaim some sanity in this insane world.
As I read Thomas's work more deeply, I realized this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going_-and that inevitably degrades our attention over time. In fact, when I reflected on it, this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about- our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets.
I thought about what Dr. Charles Czeisler had told me back at Harvard Medical School. If we all went back to sleeping as much as our brains and our bodies need, he said, "it would be an earthquake for our economic system, because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attentional failures are just roadkill. That's just the cost of doing business." This is true of sleep and it's true of much more than sleep.
Often, when a person argues for social change, they are called "naive." The exact opposite is the truth. It's naive to think we as citizens can do nothing, and leave the powerful to do whatever they want, and somehow our attention will survive. There's nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: "It's the only thing that ever has."
Children have needs and it's our job, as adults, to create an environment that meets those needs. In many cases, in this culture, we aren't meeting those needs. We don't let them play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains drug-like additives that can make them hyper, and doesn't contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It's not a flaw in them that causes children to struggle to pay attention. It's a flaw in the world we built for them.
After gathering evidence on this for decades, Alan concluded that "none of what I originally believed turned out to be true," and a "clear majority" of the kids who were later diagnosed "were not born to be ADHD. They developed these problems in reaction to their circumstances."
He told me that when people hear a child has been diagnosed with ADHD, they often imagine this is like a diagnosis of, say, pneumonia--that a doctor has identified an underlying pathogen or illness, and is now going to prescribe something that can deal with that physical problem. But with ADHD, there are no physical tests a doctor can carry out. All she can do is talk to the child, and to people who know the child, and see if the kid's behavior matches a checklist drawn up by psychiatrists. That's it. Sami says: "ADHD is not a diagnosis. It's not a diagnosis. It's just a description of certain behaviors that sometimes occur together. That's all it is." All you are saying, when a child has been diagnosed with ADHD, is that a child is struggling to focus. "It doesn't tell you anything about the 'why' question." It's like being told that a child has a cough, listening to the cough, and then saying "yes, the child has a cough." If a doctor identifies a child with attention problems, that should be the first step in the process not the last.
Dale told me that if you want to understand what's really going on here, you should look out across the world at the places where people are physically and mentally fitter than we are, with lower levels of diagnosed ADHD and dementia. If you do that, he said, at first it'll seem puzzling, because the diets they eat are actually very different some of them are heavy on fish, some have very little fish; some have a lot of plants, some don't have many plants; some have lots of carbohydrates and some have none at all. If you're looking for a magic ingredient, you won't find it. But "there's one thing that unifies every single one of them. They're all leaving out the crap that's making us sick in the first place. They're all leaving out the refined carbohydrates, the processed food, the junk oils. They're all building their foundations on whole foods.... That's the key. That's the magic bullet -just go back to whole foods. Foods as they were originally intended." He quoted Michael Pollan, who says we should eat only food that our grandparents would have recognized as food, and we should shop primarily around the outer edges of the supermarket- -the fruit and veg at the front, and the meat and fish at the back. The stuff in the middle, he warned, isn't really food at all.
Children who had experienced four or more types of trauma were 32.6 times more likely to have been diagnosed with attention or behavior problems than children who had not experienced any trauma. Other scientists across the U.S. have backed up the broad finding that kids are far more likely to have problems focusing if they experience trauma. For example, Dr.
Nicole Brown, in a separate body of research, found that childhood trauma tripled the development of ADHD symptoms. A large study by the British Office of National Statistics found that if there's a financial crisis in the family, a child's chances of being diagnosed with attention problems go up 50 percent.
If there's a serious illness in the family, it goes up 75 percent. If a parent has to make a court appearance, it goes up nearly 200 percent. This evidence base is small, but it is growing, and it seems to broadly back up what Nadine found in Bayview.
She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.
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." A separate internal Facebook team, whose work also leaked to the Journal, had independently reached the same conclusions.
At the moment there is a fundamental clash between your interests- to be able to focus, to have friends you see offline, to be able to discuss things calmly-and the interests of the social-media companies. With the introduction of a ban on surveillance capitalism and a move to a different business model, that clash ends.
As Tristan put it, you'd be paying for the interests to be aligned between you and the product you use.
Suddenly that team of Silicon Valley engineers behind the screen wouldn't be working against you and your deeper intentions; they'd be working for you and trying to serve your deeper intentions.
While at first glance, cruel optimism seems kind and optimistic, it often has an ugly aftereffect. It ensures that when the small, cramped solution fails, as it will most of the time, the individual won't blame the system-she will blame herself. She will think she screwed up and she just wasn't good enough. Ronald told me, "it deflects attention away from the social causes of stress," like overwork, and it can quite quickly turn into a form of "victim-blaming." It whispers: the problem isn't in the system; the problem is in you.
