We desperately need to improve our concentration. Here’s a novel idea

Scientists and educators have been wondering what we can do to improve humanity’s concentration span – battered as it has been by social media and the culture of instant gratification. Experts also wonder what we can do about the decline in empathy and the rise of narcissism.

Here’s where my brilliant new idea comes in. What if we could create an artifact that was quite long – perhaps 200 or 300 pages – but would contain information so engrossing that people would find themselves painlessly consuming the whole thing?

Actually, when I say “information”, I think a story would be the best thing, as I’ve seen this work in so many other settings involving human beings.

Human beings seem to like a story.Credit: Michelle Mossop

I’m not saying the mechanics of the task would be easy, but perhaps, over time, we could develop a group of people skilled in creating this particular object. In fact, since my idea is so novel, let’s call them “novelists”.

These so-called novelists would become adept at starting with an opening sentence that would immediately capture the interest of any human being who happened upon the story. I’m making up these examples, of course, but it might be a phrase such as: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. Or: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Or: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Those phrases are hardly a TikTok video – there’s no vision and no music – but, in studies so far, they appear to create a desire to know more. In fact, in random trials conducted in my own household, every participant who read those initial sentences went on to read the whole novel.

This, despite the briefest of these novels being 1222 times longer than the average TikTok video.

Next, after creating that opening phrase, the novelist would introduce a main character whose story illuminates some aspect of the human story. It might be a French doctor imprisoned in the Bastille, his life set against the background of the French Revolution. Or a man trying to survive a dystopian future of totalitarianism and mass surveillance. Or an aristocratic woman in Russia about to embark on a disastrous affair.

Obviously, it’s hard for me to give many more examples – not before I’ve attracted serious seed funding from Silicon Valley – but prospective investors, I hope, might realise these “novels” could have an impact on humanity – an impact at least as great as that of Grand Theft Auto in the early 2000s.

Anyway, the “reader” – to coin a term – would fall in love with this main character and be desperate to know more about their life, thus consuming further pages. This, in turn, would increase the reader’s concentration span and mitigate – on average - the likelihood that humanity will be overtaken by mass imbecility within the next two decades.

Even better, some novelists would offer more sophisticated iterations of the technology, iterations in which the main character wasn’t even that likeable. Maybe that Russian aristocrat, the one mentioned earlier, would be depicted as a bit horrible. The novelist might make her rather deluded and narcissistic and selfish, and yet – as the reader spent time with her, understanding her world and its attendant difficulties – something remarkable would happen.

This would mitigate the likelihood that humanity will be overtaken by mass imbecility within the next two decades.

The reader would discover they cared about the fate of someone different from them in every way – an aristocrat from a different century and a different country. They’d discover that you don’t have to be identical to someone to walk in their shoes.

I know this sounds like pie-in-the-sky stuff, but this effect – if proven – could change the world. The technology would not only provide a solution to humanity’s dwindling concentration span. It would also provide a solution to some of the chief problems of our time: narcissism, selfish individualism and the silo effects of social media. It would be a gymnasium of empathy.

Another boon: since you have to make the images in your own mind, supplying your own props, costumes and camera angles, you may even grow the size of your brain, or at least the complexity of its wiring.

After all, unlike TikTok, the story will only come to life if the reader is willing to serve as a camera operator, costume designer, casting agent and composer. You just don’t sit back, watching a 34-second video jangle before your eyes. You are the influencer! You are the TikToker! It’s like an Ozempic for the brain: a weekly injection that could save humanity from its worst excesses.

But – soft – I hear some criticism from the wings. “Richard, I think this technology already exists. It’s been around for a thousand years. Maybe longer. The only problem is that some people don’t realise how transformative it is; how readily it supplies an immediate answer to so many of our current problems”.

To that, I say: “Fair cop”. Maybe my novel idea is not all that novel. But when I think about what fiction has given me, I dream of people coming to it anew – and seeing it, newly created, a light so easily turned on, beaming into the dark valleys in which Big Tech would have us huddle.

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