‘We need to rescue our ability to pay attention’
Has our ability to focus been shattered by our addiction to screens? Johann Hari argues it’s time to get back to the books.
Our ability to pay attention and focus is collapsing. With each year that passes, tasks that require sustained concentration seem more and more like running up a down escalator, and we see our kids in particular struggling to focus. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there’s now 100 kids with this problem. The typical US office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. We can see the symptoms of this attentional collapse all around us – even in our political sphere, where we can’t summon the sustained attention to get anything done. I spent three years researching why this is happening to us, interviewing more than 200 of the leading experts, and travelling all over the world for answers – from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne.
I learnt there are 12 causes of our attention crisis – big social forces that we are going to have to take on. They range from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we don’t sleep to the hours we overwork. To get our brains back, we are going to have to tackle this at two levels. We all need to make personal changes, to protect ourselves and our kids. And we also need to take on the bigger forces that are doing this to us.
To try to get the headspace to think more clearly about this, at the start of my journey I took three months completely off the internet. I left my smartphone and internet-connected laptop behind in Boston and I took a ferry across the water to a place called Provincetown, in Cape Cod. (Picture Byron Bay but with more gay people and less surfing.) I was amazed by how deeply my attention came back. I was nearly 40, and I thought my attention might just have degenerated because I was getting older – but it went back to what it had been when I was 17. I was particularly struck by one change. I was able to read books like I used to – in day-long stretches of deep attention. It felt like my mind was coming back to life.
In the West End of Provincetown there’s a gorgeous bookstore named Tim’s Used Books. You walk in and you immediately inhale the tangy must that comes from having old books stacked everywhere. I went in almost every other day that summer to buy another book to read. There was a young woman who worked at the cash register who was really smart, and I took to chatting with her. I noticed that every time I went in, she was reading a different book – one day Vladimir Nabokov, another day Joseph Conrad, another day Shirley Jackson. Wow, I said, you read fast. Oh, she replied, I don’t. I can only read the first chapter or two of a book. I asked: Really? Why? She said: I guess I can’t focus. Here was an intelligent young woman with lots of time, surrounded by many of the best books ever written, and with a desire to read them – but she could only get through the first chapter or two and then her attention puttered out, like a failing engine.
There has been a collapse in sustained reading in some parts of the world. The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. Complex literary fiction is particularly suffering. For the first time in modern history, less than half of Americans read literature for pleasure. In Australia, a 2016 survey found that 95.7 per cent of respondents browsed the internet and 92 per cent watched TV, while only 65.5 per cent read a book at least once per week.
There are many environmental factors impacting our ability to read books. For example, we spend our lives plugged into apps that are designed to hack and invade your attention – your distraction is the fuel for Facebook’s profit margins. We eat food that causes our energy to spike and crash, causing brain fog. We are constantly interrupted – and every time you are interrupted, it takes 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before. But reading books trains us to focus.
In Provincetown I noticed I wasn’t just reading more; I was reading differently. I was becoming much more deeply immersed in the books I had chosen. I got lost in them for really long stretches, sometimes whole days – and I felt like I was understanding and remembering more of what I read. It seemed like I travelled further in that deckchair by the sea, reading book after book, than I had in the previous five years of shuttling frantically around the world: I went from fighting on the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars, to being an enslaved person in the Deep South, to being an Israeli mother trying to avoid hearing the news that her son has been killed. As I reflected on this, I started to think again about a book I had read 10 years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, a landmark work that alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis. He warned that the way we are reading seems to be changing as we migrate to the internet – so I went back to one of the key experts he drew on, to see what she has learnt since.
Anne Mangen is a professor of literacy at Stavanger University in Norway, and she explained to me that in two decades of researching this subject, she has proved something crucial. Reading books trains us to read in a particular way – in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way – in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another. We’re more likely to “scan and skim” when we read on screens, her studies have found – we run our eyes rapidly over the information to extract what we need. But after a while, if we do this long enough, she says, “this scanning and skimming bleeds over. It also starts to colour or influence how we read on paper… that behaviour also becomes our default, more or less”. It was what I had noticed when I tried to settle into Dickens when I arrived in Provincetown and found myself rushing ahead of the words on the page, as if it was a news article and I was trying to push for the key facts.
This creates a different relationship with reading. It stops being a form of pleasurable immersion in another world and becomes more like dashing around a busy supermarket to grab what you need and then get out again. When this flip takes place – when our screen-reading contaminates our book-reading – we lose some of the pleasures of reading books, and they become less appealing.
It has other knock-on effects. Mangen has conducted studies that split people into two groups, where one is given information in a printed book and the other is given the same information on a screen. Everyone is then asked questions about what they just read. When you do this, you find that people understand and remember less of what they absorb on screens. There’s broad scientific evidence for this now, emerging from 54 studies, and she explained that it’s referred to as “screen inferiority”. This gap in understanding between books and screens is big enough that in primary school children, it’s the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s growth in reading comprehension.
As I wandered the streets of Provincetown I found myself thinking back over a famous idea – one that was also examined, in a different way, by Nicholas Carr in his book. In the 1960s, Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan talked a lot about how the arrival of television was transforming the way we see the world. He said these changes were so deep and so profound that it was hard to really see them. When he tried to distil this down into a phrase, he explained that “the medium is the message”. What he meant, I think, was that whenever a new technology comes along, you think of it as like a pipe – somebody pours in information at one end and you receive it unfiltered at the other. But it’s not actually like that.
Every time you start to use a new medium – whether it’s the invention of the printed book, or TV, or Twitter – it’s like you are putting on a new kind of goggles, each with their own special colours and lenses. Each set of goggles makes you see things differently. So, for example, when you start to watch television, before you absorb the message of any particular TV show, whether it’s Wheel of Fortune or The Wire, you start to see the world as being shaped like television itself. That’s why McLuhan said that every new medium has buried in it a message. It is gently guiding us to see the world according to a new set of codes. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself. TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it’s about surfaces and appearances; that everything in the world is happening all at once.
This made me wonder what the message is that we absorb from social media and how it compares to the message we absorb from printed books. I thought first of Twitter. When you log in to that site – it doesn’t matter whether you are Joe Biden or Bubba the Love Sponge – you are absorbing a message through that medium and sending it out to your followers. What is that message? First: that you shouldn’t focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn. When you tweet, before you say anything else, you are saying that at some level you agree with these three premises. You are putting on those goggles and seeing the world through them.
I realised one of the key reasons social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world, and with myself. I think all of these ideas – the messages implicit in these mediums – are wrong. Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s most likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right – you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated.
After thinking all this, I would return to the printed books piling up against the wall of my beach house. What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.
I realised that I agree with the messages in the medium of the book. I think they encourage the best parts of human nature – that a life with lots of episodes of deep focus is a good life. It is why reading books nourishes me. And I don’t agree with the messages in the medium of social media. I think they primarily feed the uglier and shallower parts of my nature. It is why spending time on these sites leaves me feeling drained and unhappy. I dislike the person I become.
There are a thousand reasons why we need to rescue our ability to pay attention – and there’s good news: it can be done. One of the most urgent reasons is that we are currently on course to lose the ability to read deeply. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take on the forces that are stealing and wrecking our attention. We can save our focus – and rescue books.