What if there’s more to our collective struggle to FOCUS than we’ve considered? And what do we have to do to regain what we’ve lost? Those are the questions Johann Hari is exploring in his new book, “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and How To Think Deeply Again.” It’s a surprising look at how our struggle with attention isn’t just about tech. In this conversation, Johann brings the same inquisitive, roving gaze that led him to observe, “the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety - it’s connection.” When he dropped that nugget in his legendary TED Talk (link in the notes below,) he articulated something that we didn’t know we had been searching for. While the statement isn’t totally accurate - most of us know addiction is more complicated than one thing – it still illuminated something fundamental about the misunderstanding our society has had about addiction forever. Johann’s view on our individual power to address the collective fog that has enveloped us around the pandemic is empowering and worth our time. Show notes: Johann Hari: https://johannhari.com/ Johann’s TED Talk: Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong Episode link: https://www.tmstpod.com/episodes/40-johann-hari-regaining-our-ability-to-focus Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4h6931YcA4D0Ax080zerkL Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. If you're listening to this, you're not hearing the complete unedited version of this conversation. If you want in on that, you can get it by becoming a TMST plus member. Just head over to our website @tmstpod.com and click support. All right. Enjoy this.
[00:00:29] Hey everyone. It's Laura. All right. I have a good news, bad news situation and I'm going to give you the bad news first. The bad news is if you've been following along and you know that I was in Austin last week for South by Southwest moderating a panel on addiction with Wes Hurt, Jan Rader and Jason Isbell, one of my musical heroes.
[00:00:57] And it was amazing by the way, it was a very big pinch me moment for me having not been to South by Southwest, since I was a drinking person, I figured it out. It was 10 years ago. It was the last time I was there and then this time sharing a stage with these people. It was great. It was beyond great. I'm just now as is typical for me really metabolizing it. I was having a little bit of an out-of-body experience the whole time and I love Austin. I always loved that city. I joke that if I was going to, it's not really a joke though, if I was going to live in any landlock city, it would be Austin. And it's true. I love the vibe there. The people there, the food there, the music, all of it. It was great. And I got to meet and see a lot of TLC members. My, The Luckiest Club [00:02:00] folks, it was just, it was special. We had hoped and promised to air the panel discussion this week on the show. And it's not going to happen this week, because as you could probably tell from the title, because we just haven't got the audio yet.
[00:02:21] As soon as we get it, you're going to hear it. We hoped to have it in our hands in time, but that didn't happen. And so I apologize for the folks who are excited for that. All right. That's the bad news. The good news is I think you're gonna be really excited to hear from the guest this week, Johann Hari, he's been on my radar for quite some time.
[00:02:49] The first time I heard his quote, it's delivered in a Ted talk of his about it's titled, Everything We Know About Addiction is Wrong. If you want to go watch it, the quote is, “The Opposite of Addiction isn't Sobriety, it's Connection”. He articulated something that we didn't know we had been searching for in that. And while a statement isn't totally accurate, we all know addiction is more complicated than one thing. It's still illuminated something so fundamental about the misunderstanding our society has had about addiction really forever. As soon as I saw his latest book come out, I knew I wanted to take the opportunity to talk to him.
[00:03:38] It's a subject very close to my heart. He is also the author by the way of Chasing the Scream, which is a seminal book on addiction. Lost connections is his exploration of depression. And the book he just came out with is called, Stolen Focus: Why you Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.
[00:04:01] Yes, it's something we talk about a lot here. Damn it. I hate when I don't turn off my email. There's a bing for you. It's a surprising the book is a surprising look at how our struggle with attention. Isn't just about tech and how we can regain what we know we've lost. I really, really liked the book. I highly recommend it as someone who's even, you know, I thought I kind of knew what there was to know about this.
[00:04:29] And I learned a lot of new things from reading it and talking to him. So I was very excited to have him on Tell Me Something True. And even though the internet was having a rough day, the day we talked, the sound is not exactly where we like it. I'm very excited to share this conversation with you.
[00:04:51] Just bear with the sound. We did our very best to produce it and edit it in a way that made it sound as good as possible. But sometimes there's not a lot we can do to make it what we wish it was. And as a bit of a tease to what's coming your way, right at the end, he delivers another pearl of observation that I think is one of the most reassuring things someone has said on the show.
[00:05:22] So tell me what you think. All right. Enjoy.
[00:05:35] I'm so excited to be talking to you on a personal note I've quoted your book quite a lot in my own work around sobriety, that the company that I started in, during the pandemic, which is a global sobriety support community, your quote is on our homepage.
[00:05:53] Johann Hari: I’m really touched by that. Thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:05:56] LauraMcKowen: It's a missing link for a lot of people when they hear the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, but connection.
[00:06:04] Johann Hari: You know, it's so funny that when people say that line back to me, the opposite of addiction is connection because I remember the exact moment that line occurred to me.
[00:06:14] I mean, we'd had a lot of addiction in my family, which is why I wrote my book about that subject Chasing the Screen. And I was trying to find out, you know, what actually works in reducing addiction and what causes addiction. And I was going to all these different places all over the world. And I went to the downtown east side of Vancouver, which is an area, with a lot of very chaotic street addiction and people who were really, really suffering.
[00:06:40] And it was in the downtown east side of Vancouver that I think the most important breakthrough in the history of addiction was made by a man named Bruce Alexander. He did an experiment called rat park. We can talk about it if you like, but yeah, but I remember I met Bruce and we talked about that experiment.
[00:06:57] And then I went and sat in this place called pigeon park, [00:07:00] which is kind of shitty patch of land, basically. There's lots of people there with, you know, very, very, very painful chaotic street addictions, a lot of public shooting up and things. And I was sitting in pigeon park and I sat there for about an hour and it was kind of chatting to people.
[00:07:18] But as I said, just reflecting and I saw this guy opposite me, like really unwell and that's really strong urge to got him and give him a hug. And I suddenly thought, wow. The opposite of addiction is connection. So it's always very funny to me that moment, which must be, I don't know, nine years ago now, now, since then, since substances, I read the book and I give a Ted talk about it.
[00:07:40] Like that slogan has been put all over the New York subway it's, you know, it's, I mean, it's people put it on t-shirts in Columbia. I get all these messages and people all over the world. Whenever I hear it, be put back to me. I always picture that moment in pigeon park and that guy, I didn't give him a hug.
[00:07:56] And I really regret that I didn’t. Yeah, it makes me picture that moment in my mind.
[00:08:01] Laura McKowen: I know. Isn't it funny? And you never really know what's going to, what's going to stick to people, but that, that is such a profound thought.
[00:08:11] Johann Hari: I'm so grateful for Bruce Alexander, you know, who did the rat park experiment, which I can explain if you, if you want, people don't know it, but is one of the most good and wise people I've ever met.
[00:08:24] And you know, all I was doing is finding a catchy way to express what Bruce discovered and also what Bruce embodies in his work. I'll just quickly say what rat pack is because some people listening a bit that you want to have about. If you had asked me when I started doing the research for my book about this Chasing the Scream years ago, if you'd asked me, you know, what causes addiction, let's say heroin addiction, because that was something close to me.
[00:08:53] The company look to you like you're an idiot. I would have said, well, the clues in the name dummy, obviously heroin causes heroin addiction. We've been told this story for a hundred years. It's become totally part of our common sense. Certainly part of mine, we think if we took the next. You know, 20 people to walk past your apartment in Boston, where you are now.
[00:09:14] And we injected them all with heroin every day for a month, like a villain in a movie at the end of that month, they’d all be heroin addicts for simple reason. There's this chemical hooks in heroin that bodies would start to desperately physically crave. And when you stop giving it to them, they'd have this tremendous physical hunger for the chemical hooks.
[00:09:31] In fact, that's why in English, we call it being hooked and it turns out that story isn’t totally wrong. That chemical hooks are real, but they're actually a very small part of what's happening with addiction. And we know this for lots of reasons, but it really began to be discovered because of something that Bruce did, professor Alexander did.
[00:09:51] He explained to me that this, this story we have, the addiction comes primarily or entirely from the chemical hooks comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments. Your listeners can try them at home. If they're feeling a bit sadistic, don't actually try them.
[00:10:06] You take a rat, you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the always, always, almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself by overdosing quite quickly. So there you go. That's our story.
[00:10:26] The rat tries to drug needs more and more of it dies. But in the seventies, professor Alexander was working on the downtown east side of Vancouver with people with really bad diction problems. And he looked at these experiments from which such big conclusions have been drawn. And he said, well, hang on a minute.
[00:10:42] They put the rat alone in an empty cage where it has got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats. All it's got is the drugs. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built the cage that he called rat park, which is basically. Paradise for rats. They've got loads of friends. They've got loads of cheese.
[00:10:59] They've got loads of colored bowls. They can have loads of sex, anything a rat wants in life. It's there in rat park and they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water. This is the fascinating thing in rat park. They don't like the drug water. They hardly ever use it. None of the music compulsively, none of them overdose.
[00:11:20] So you go from almost a hundred percent compulsive use of overdose when they don't have their needs met when they don't have the things that make life worth living for them to no compulsive use of reputation when they do have their needs met. And they do have the things that make life worth living.
[00:11:34] Now, obviously there's loads of human examples that go into in the book they've played out in my own family, but that's why Bruce is the person who did all that work. All I did was describe it and say, oh, the opposite of addiction is connection. And then I went to the places that actually rebuilt their drug policies around this insight, like Portugal, where they decriminalized all drugs and took all the money they used to spend on fucking up people's lives, shaming them, punishing them and spent all that money instead of helping them.
[00:12:01] And addiction massively fell overdose deaths, massively fell, HIV transmission massively fell, and almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back. So you can see, you know, how that principal can lead to profound change.
[00:12:29] Mikel Ellcessor: Hi, I'm Mikel. I'm the executive producer of Tell Me Something True. And I co-created the show with Laura. We built TMST and our online community with the hope of creating a sane spot on the internet. We're really passionate about the ad-free nature of this work. Our belief is that this project worked best if we're not hustling to keep advertisers happy, and we keep our attention on you, the TMST community, and this is where you can play a major role. TMST plus is the membership group that helps to keep this podcast going. Whether it's through a monthly membership or a one-time contribution, TMST plus members are vital to this experiment. As a TMST plus member, you get to join Laura for member only events, send in questions for the guests, hear the complete unedited interviews and connect with other TMST community members. You know, sometimes we feel like we can't make a difference in the world. With the TMST [00:26:00] plus membership, you can be keeping this space alive and thriving for a one-time gift or for as little as 10 bucks a month, you can find the link in the show description and then please head over to TMSTpod.com right now to support the show. And thanks.
[00:13:58] LauraMcKowen: As I was reading your book, something occurred to me. And I was just curious if this is true, I kept thinking of this beautiful quote by Steve Almond about the author, Cheryl Strayed. He wrote the foreword for her book, Tiny, Beautiful Things. And he said that Cheryl Strayed understands that attention is the first and final act of love.
[00:14:16] And I've that, quote to me just hit, hit me so hard. I think about it a lot in my daily life and how I'm directing my attention. It seems like in some way, all your, all your work has been around attention. If you think of attention as the currency of love and connection, you know, it seems like you've studied.
[00:14:40] Things that disrupt our ability to receive and give attention whether it's addiction, depression, you know, different mental states and, and now stolen focus. Does that feel true?
[00:14:57] Johann Hari: I wrote Stolen Focus for very kind of personal reason, which is that every year that passed, I could feel that my own attention was getting worse.
[00:15:03] Things that require deep focus, like reading a book, having deep conversations, watching long movies, things that are so deep to my sense of self we're getting more and more like running up a down escalator. Do you know what I mean? Like I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I noticed it seemed to be happening to pretty much everyone around me.
[00:15:23] You know, the average american office worker. Now focuses on any one task, but only three minutes. There was one small study backed by a wider body of evidence that found that a typical, the typical American college student only focuses on any one task for 65 seconds for every one child who is identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred children. Who've been identified with that problem. And I wanted to understand, okay, well what's happening to us and with all of my books and I'm not a scientist, I'm not an expert. I was trained in the social sciences at Cambridge University, but I'm a journalist.
[00:16:00] So my job is I look at this mystery. Each of my books, I start with a mystery. What's going on depression. What what causes addiction, um, how, why are so many more people depressed? Why are we struggling to focus and pay attention? And then I just go and I interview the leading experts in the world.
[00:16:19] And what I learned from them is the scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better, or can make your attention worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have significantly increased in recent years. So if you're listening to this and you're struggling to focus and pay attention, it's not your fault.
[00:16:37] It's not that you're weak or lacking in willpower. Something big is happening to all of us. But once you understand those 12 factors, you can begin to defend yourself in your children and we can begin to take on the forces that are doing this to us.
[00:16:51] Laura McKowen: That's one of the things that I was most struck by is hearing because I'm, I looked it up, we're exactly two years apart.
[00:17:00] So we've grown up in the same era of technology and living without the internet and with it. And I've been in a constant battle with tech and my phone and social media and on all of the things you described and it's always been just like drinking was for me. I just need to try harder, clearly. If I, you know, I, it's a willpower issue, it's a rules issue.
[00:17:27] That type of thing and to hear, oh, there's these large stick systemic forces that are pressing down on us as was such a relief. I loved the personal narrative of how, of your exploration of your own attention and how you, uh, started the book, which was this trip to Provincetown. Close by me over the water, over the Bourne bridge.
[00:17:57] And you said you were like, [00:18:00] can you just talk about what led up to that trip and, and then plop us right in Provincetown with what you planned to do and why.
[00:18:09] Johann Hari: I've got a Godson who I call Adam in the book and when he was nine years old. So he dropped out of school when he was 15 and by the time he was 19.
[00:18:19] He, this isn't an exaggeration. He spent almost literally every waking hour alternating between his iPad and his iPhone in this kind of blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn, one day he was sitting on my sofa and I've been trying to talk to him all day and nothing was getting any traction. And to be honest with you, Laura, I wasn't that much better.
[00:18:43] I was looking at my own devices and I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before. And I was like, hey, let's go to Graceland. And I said, actually, let's go all over the south when we to break this numbing routine. But you've got to promise me one thing. You've got, leave your phone in the hotel during the day when we go out, otherwise it'll drive me crazy.
[00:19:06] And he thought about it and he said, yeah, I'll do that. And two weeks later we took off from Heathrow to New Orleans. And then we traveled around the south. And two weeks after that, we got to Memphis and we got to the, when we get to the gates of Graceland, this is even before COVID, there's no one to show you around.
[00:19:25] What happens is they hand you an iPad and you put an ear buds and the iPad shows you around. It says, go left, go right. Tells you about the room you're in. And in every room you go into, it shows you a picture of that room on the iPad. So what happens is people walk around Graceland, staring at their iPads.
[00:19:42] Not really looking up and I'm kind of wondering around, only look up and take selfies and then look back at the iPad. And I was kind of wondering around, I'm getting more and more irritated by this. And we got to the jungle room, which is our, this is, was Elvis's favorite room in Graceland. It's got, there's a fake plant and it was a Canadian couple next [00:20:00] to us.
[00:20:00] And the man turned to his wife and he said, honey, this is amazing. Look, 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. And I laughed out loud. I thought he was kidding and I tend to watch him and his wife and they're just swiping back and forth against the house.
[00:20:16] It's amazing. And I leaned over and I said, but sir, that's an old fashioned form, a swiping you could do. And it's called turning your head because we're actually in a jungle room. You don't, you don't have to look at it on your iPad. But look, we were literally there and they looked at me like I was insane possibly correctly and backed out of the room and I turned to my Godson to laugh about it.
[00:20:43] And he was standing in the corner, staring at his phone. Because from the moment we landed, he could not stop. And I went up to him. He was looking at Snapchat. And I did that thing. That's never going to deal with a teenager. I tried to grab the phone off them and I said, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you're missing out. You're not showing up to your own life. You're not present at the events of your own existence. And he stormed off again. Understandably. And I found him that night in the Heartbreak Hotel, where we were staying down the street and he was sitting by the swimming pools again, flicking through Snapchat. And I went up to him and I apologize for getting so angry.
[00:21:31] I said, that was sorry. And he said, I know something's really wrong here. And I don't know what it is. And that's when I thought, okay, I need to think about this. So I booked a place in Provincetown and I wasn't there for three months and I left my smartphone and my laptop that could get online in Boston with my friend Shaylene.
[00:21:54] And I took that ferry on for three months. I had absolutely no internet and no cell phone.
[00:22:02] Laura McKowen: Yeah. When I first heard what you were going to do, I had this like moment of jealousy. Cause I've fantasized about doing that as I'm sure a lot of people have. I'm fantasized about some kind of. You know, nomadic break from all of tech. Okay. So, so then what happened?
[00:22:22] Johann Hari: I mean, loads of things happened in Provincetown and there were lots of ups and downs, but the thing that most amazed me is, you know, I was nearly 40, I thought, well, okay, maybe. Maybe my attention is suffering because I'm just getting older. Right? Most of just what happens to you?
[00:22:37] My attention went back to being as good as it had been. When I was 18. I could read books for eight hours a day. I was stunned by the scale and depth with which my attention recovered. I mean, there were certainly ups and downs and moments when I missed things. And I actually learned when I learned about the 12th of courses problems I write about in Stolen Focus actually realized lots of things changed in Provincetown.
[00:23:04] LauraMcKowen: And I want to go through those. Let's go through those like slowly one by one. I'll prompt you. Because I, there are a few that I really want to talk about. Because I think they're so they were surprising, not surprising when you hear about them, but they're no all tech-related.
[00:23:23] Johann Hari: It's interesting if you think about, because at first I thought, oh, this is going to be a book about tech. Actually tech ended up being about a third of the book, right? And it's not even tech, that's done this towards its specific aspects of the current design of tech. We could have all the technology we currently have now and have it not designed to hack and invade our attention that we can talk about that.
[00:23:42] And that's a very practical goal for us to achieve collectively, but, but it was also the way I started to think about it is if you think about this technology is like a virus. You know, this technology is designed to hack and invade our attention at the moment, right? It's it comes along like a virus.
[00:24:01] And at any moment in human history, when it came along that would have had some effect on us, but it came along by coincidence at a moment when it's like our collective immune system was already down, there were already loads of things happening to us that were lowering our ability to focus and pay attention.
[00:24:19] So that can sound a bit weird in the abstract. So I'll give you a very concrete example. One that is literally playing out for me today. We sleep 20% less than we did a century ago. Only 15% of us wake up feeling refreshed. And so I interviewed many of the leading sleep experts in the world. And I remember I went to interview this guy, extraordinary scientist, Dr. Charles Czeisler who's at Harvard Medical School. Who has advised everyone from the Boston Red Sox to the US Secret Service on sleep and the science of sleep. He said to me, even if nothing else had changed, but that we sleep 20% less than we used to do that alone will be causing a very serious tension crisis.
[00:24:58] But he does, you know, if you stay awake for 19 hours, your attention is, it becomes as bad as if you were legally drunk. But even if you just go nine days with six hours, the same thing happens. And there was this piece of research. Dr. Czeisler did that really haunted me. He gets tired people that it had to be that tired I would certainly be in this category now. And he puts them into pet scans at brain scanning technology. And what he discovered is you could appear to be awake. You can be around looking around you and talking just as surely as we are now, but whole significant parts of your brain can have gone to sleep.
[00:25:39] It turns out when we say we're half asleep, that's actually not a metaphor. A lot of us are literally half asleep. A lot of the time.
[00:25:52] There's many reasons why sleep is so important for attention. One of them, I was taught by professor Roxanne Proshad, who I interviewed at the University of Minneapolis is a completely brilliant scientist. She said to me, look, we think of sleep as a passive process. You know, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Sleep is an active process. The whole time you're awake you're building up in your brain, something called metabolic waste, what she calls brain cell poop. And when you go to sleep, a watery fluid washes through your brain, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up. And that that brain cell poop is washed down out of your brain, down into your kidneys, where it's eventually taken out of your body.
[00:26:29] If you don't get eight hours sleep a night, your brain, literally doesn't get to do that. It fully, it doesn't heal, it doesn't repair. It's why you feel quite kind of hung over and clogged up. When you're tired, you are in fact hung over and clogged up. Right? This is why people who don't sleep well are more likely to develop dementia later in life because their brains have literally been clogged up for years and years and years.
[00:26:52] That's one example of one of, one of the 12 causes that I write about where you can see how…we all know if you've had a night where you haven't slept well, that's the next day, you're much more likely to mindlessly scroll through Tik ToK or Facebook then on a day when you've slept well.
[00:27:08] Laura McKowen: And eat like crap and do all the things that contribute to feeling worse, right?
[00:27:16] Johann Hari: Hundred percent, hundred percent. So you can see how these factors interact. You know, we are more stressed, stress lowers your ability to focus and pay attention. The food we eat is profoundly damaging our ability to focus and pay attention or give you one that one of the biggest causes the one that will absolutely be playing out for everyone listening.
[00:27:33] Unless they're very unusual. I went to MIT just up the road from where you are and interviewed professor Earl Miller. Who's one of the leading neuroscientists in the world. And he said to me, look, there's one thing you've got to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time.
[00:27:51] That's it. This is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain has not significantly changed in 40,000 years. It's not going to change on any time scale. Any of us are going to see, but what's happening is we fallen from massive delusion. The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time.
[00:28:11] So what happens is scientists get people into labs, not just teenagers, older people as well. And they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time. And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. What you do is you juggle very quickly between tasks.
[00:28:27] What was that message on WhatsApp? Just then what does it say on the TV over there about Ukraine? Wait, what's this Facebook message. Oh, wait, what did Laura just ask me? So it's switching very rapidly between tasks and it turns out that comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the Switch Cost Effect.
[00:28:43] When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do. Significantly less competently you'll make more mistakes. You'll remember less of what you do. You'll be significantly less creative. And this sounds like a small effect. [00:29:00] It's a really big effect. I'll give you an example of a very small study.
[00:29:02] It's backed by a wider body of evidence. Hewlett Packard, the printer company got a scientist in to study some group of their workers and he split their workers into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with whatever your task is, and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told to go home with your task, but you're going to have to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls.
[00:29:24] And at the end of it, this scientist tested the IQ of both groups and he found that the group that had not been interrupted, scored 10 IQ points higher than the group that had been interrupted to give you a sense of how big that is. If you and me sat down now, Laura and we smoked a fat spliff together.
[00:29:41] Our IQs would go down by five points in the short term. So in the short term, you'd be better off sitting at your desk. Getting stoned and doing one thing at a time, then you would sit in your desk, not getting stoned and being constantly interrupted. That was a debate about the longer term effects of cannabis.
[00:29:56] If you were chronic stoner at that point, and to be clear, you'd be better off getting stoneware being interrupted, but you can see what this is. This is why professor Miller said to me, we're living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation as a result of being constantly interrupted. You know, when you're interrupted think about something really small. I assume your phone is somewhere in the room with you. If you just glanced at your phone now and started listening to me again, it seems like such a small thing. If you're interrupted a study by professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found if you're interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted.
[00:30:36] But most of us never get 23 minutes spare. So we're constantly operating at this diminished level of brain power. Does that ring true to you, Laura?
[00:30:43] Laura McKowen: Oh my God. Yes. I know that because, I mean, if you you've had to write books and the only I've learned, the only way I can get any amount of writing done is to shut everything down.
[00:30:59] And, [00:31:00] you know, you talked about different ways to do that, but I would never be able to write a book. I don't know that anyone can, you know, it's only when I've had to focus, I've had to focus on something for a considerable period of time, because otherwise you just learn to, you learn to work like that. I noticed that one of the things that started to scare me was I would, I lost my ability to read, which for me was devastating.
[00:31:26] I would have this nervous twitch to go check my phone every five minutes when I was reading. And it's like, why, why is, and I guess, you know, I guess I'm asking you.
[00:31:39] Johann Hari: Yeah, well, I think the answer lies partly in, we should listen to what the tech engineers who control the current system, say Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook said, we designed Facebook to maximally hack your attention.
[00:31:58] We knew what we were doing and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains. That the most important thing to know about that is that it doesn't have to work that way and we can stop them doing it. And we'll come to that. I'm sure. But just to stay with that thing that you just said about how you felt when you couldn't read.
[00:32:15] I would say to anyone listening, think about anything you've ever achieved in your life, that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of focus and attention. And when your ability to pay attention breaks down your ability to solve your problems, breaks down your ability to achieve your goals breaks down. You begin to feel incompetent and that's because you become incompetent when you can't pay attention, or at least you become less competent. It diminishes your competence. You think about your daughter wanting as most 18 year olds do wanting to simultaneously, you know, be on a social media app while watching television. This says very good research on this. For example, professor Larry Rosen has done a lot of work on this. Give you an example. They did a study where they get a group of college students and they all watched the same lecture and they're split into three groups all in the same room.
[00:33:23] The first group doesn't receive any text messages during the lecture. The second group receives four text messages during the lecture and the third group receives eight text messages during the lecture, the group that received four text messages. And then they're all given a test on what was in the lecture.
[00:33:38] The group that got four text messages of much worse than the group that got none. And the group that got eight text messages did 30% worse than the group that got none. And what was interesting is in one bearing the experiment, they asked them in advance. How much do you think at receiving eight text messages will harm your attention?
[00:33:56] And they correctly estimated 30%. So they knew what it was doing, but they felt they couldn't, they couldn't stop. And this is why for all of the 12 factors that harming our attention that I write about in Stolen Focus. There's two levels at which we got to respond. I think of them as defense and offense.
[00:34:14] There are dozens of things we can do as individuals to defend ourselves and our children.
[00:34:19] Laura McKowen: Yeah. I mean, one of the that's, one of the things I really liked about the approach in the book is because I kept thinking of people that really can't have very little control over their environment. And like you said, to, to, to put it all on them is very similar to how we put addiction on people.
[00:34:40] A hundred percent. In my view, it just, there were a lot of parallels there. It's like if we live in a culture that completely normalizes alcohol as a benign substance, that is really only beneficial for you in moderation, but the moderation is on you.
[00:34:56] Johann Hari: I interviewed an incredible woman named Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. She was the surgeon general of California, that senior medical figure in the state, she wasn't when I interviewed her, and I stress I talked to her before COVID. So this is not a commentary on COVID, but she said to me, one day, imagine you were walking down the street and you were attacked by a bear and you survived in the weeks and months that followed something completely involuntary would happen to your attention.
[00:35:30] You would find it harder to say, read a book because a big part of your brain would be scanning the horizon for risk and danger. And that's not a disorder of attention. That's such a very rational response to danger. Okay. Now imagine that you were tapped by a bear again. At that point, you would likely slip into a state called hyper-vigilance. Hyper-vigilance is where you couldn't read a book because you're just doing so much of your brain is scanning for risk and danger.
[00:36:01] I remember a wonderful child psychiatrist called Dr. John Giardini in Adelaide, in Australia saying to me, you know, deep focus is a really good strategy when you're safe. Read a book you'll grow and you'll learn deep focus is a really dumb strategy when you're in danger, you'd be a fool to sit the Battle of the Somme and read a novel.
[00:36:21] You're going to get shot in the head. Right. And so we actually evolved for very good reasons to not be able to pay deep focus when we feel unsafe and, and in danger. And, you know, think about the last two years, the bad came back, the bad came back two times, right? Anyway, if anyone listening, if you haven't been able to focus during a global pandemic, stop, stop beating yourself up, right?
[00:36:52] Laura McKowen: Alright, thank you so much for being with us today. If you want more TMST head on over to TMSTpod.com and become a member. Members get access to the full uncut versions of these conversations, previews of upcoming guests, invites to join me for members only events and access to our members only community where I hang out a lot. We decided from the beginning to make this an independent project, we don't have sponsors and we don't run ads.
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