1. Stop multitasking. It doesn't work. Switching from one task to another takes much longer for our brain to reconfigure than we realize.
2. Read more books. I probably didn't need to read this to make that goal - but he certainly does make a good argument for why this is so important. Comprehension, focus and empathy are what we lose when we don't read. I can resolve to take more time with a book though. Speed-reading is a detriment to comprehension and causes us to miss something.
3. Walk more...and without a podcast or book playing in headphones. Taking time to wander and to let our minds wander is key to creativity. He also has a really good argument for more unstructured play time and recess. I will definitely make sure there are more movement breaks and that everyone gets out for recess in my class.
4. Try to understand. Have conversations with people who believe totally different than you and try to really understand their perspective on an issue.
5. Limit Social Media and take big breaks from it. I've often heard people, especially church leaders in our church, tell us to do a social media fast. I've never been a big fan because so much communication happens in my circles with social media. His explanation of data tracking, AI and more was the most convincing thing I've read. He tells a really interesting story about a conversation with a scientist who shared with him about seeing a room full of people all wearing VR headsets....all but Mark Zuckerberg (who was at the front of the room speaking to the group). He said this is a metaphor for our future. We are being led, tracked and manipulated by social media.
One part I wasn't sold on was his chapters on ADHD. He summarizes that the reason children have ADHD is because of stress imposed upon them in certain periods of life.
Some of my favorite take-aways:
Anne Mangan, a professor of literacy at the University of Stavanger in Norway, 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...this [reading on screens] 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 themselves and they become less appealing.
It has other knock-on effects. Anne 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 fifty-four 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 elementary school children, it's the equivalent of two-thirds of a year's growth in reading comprehension.
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When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it's like to be inside another person's head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. So maybe, he said, if you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps fiction is a kind of empathy gym, boosting your ability to empathize with other people - which is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have. Together, they decided to study this question scientifically.
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We internalize the texture of the voices we're exposed to. When you expose yourself to complex stories about the inter lives of people over long periods of time, that will repattern your consciousness. You will become more perceptive, open, and empathetic. If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that. Your internal voices will become cruder, louder, less able to hear more tender and gentle thoughts. Take care of what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.
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If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture, ....it "turns hate into a habit." You can see this seeping into the bones of our society. When I was a teenager there was horrific crime in Britain, where two ten-year-old children murdered a toddler named Jamie Bulger. The Conservative prime minister at the time, John Major, responded by publicly saying that he believed we need "to condemn a little more, and understand a little less." I remembered thinking then, at the age of fourteen, that this was surely wrong - that' it's always better to understand why people do things, even (perhaps especially) the most heinous acts. But today, this attitude - condemn more, understand less - has become the default response to almost everyone, from the right to the left, as we spend our lives dancing to the tune of algorithms that reward fury and penalize mercy.
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The country that is often judged by international league tables to have the most successful schools in the world, Finland, is closer to these progressive models than anything we would recognize. Their children don't go to school at all until they are seven years old - before then, they just play. Between the ages of seven and sixteen, kids arrive at school at 9 am and leave at 2 pm. They are given almost no homework, and they take almost no tests until they graduate from high school. Free play is at the beating heart of Finnish kids' lives: by law, teachers have to give kids fifteen minutes of free play for every forty-five minutes of instructions. What's the outcome? Only 0.1 percent of their kids are diagnosed with attention problems, and Finns are among the most literate, numerate and happy people in the world.
Goodreads says:
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.
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.
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