Your ability to concentrate has not collapsed. They stole it from you<

At the age of nine, my godson Adam had a brief but terribly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He sang his song, Jailhouse Rock, in a raspy voice, swaying his pelvis just like Elvis himself. And once I put him to bed, he asked me seriously, "Johann, will you ever take me to Graceland?" I agreed without thinking. That promise went completely out of my head. Until everything went wrong.

Ten years later, it was a completely different Adam. At the age of fifteen, he dropped out of school and spent almost all of the time he did not sleep alternately at different screens - in a mess of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. His mind seemed to catch Snapchat's speed, and he couldn't concentrate on anything calm or serious.

During the decade Adam grew up, similar mental fragmentation began to manifest in many of us. The ability to pay attention to something constantly fell apart before our eyes. I was just forty at the time, and whenever I met someone in my age group, we ended up lamenting our lost ability to concentrate. Although I still read a lot of books, reading with each passing year still felt more and more like running up the stairs.

One evening, as Adam and I were lying on the couch, each staring at our own, constantly screaming screen, I looked at him and felt a chill run down my spine. "Let's go to Graceland," I reminded Adam quietly of a promise made so many years ago. It was clear that the vision of breaking out of the dull monotony of one's own life had ignited something in him. I told him we would only go on one condition: if he kept his phone off during the day. He vowed to do it.

Irresistible screen

When you arrive in Graceland, you will no longer be guided by a living person - you will get an iPad in your hand, put on headphones in your ears and the tablet will tell you what to do. Turn left, right, keep going straight… In each room, a photo of where you are will appear on the screen and the voice from the tablet will describe it to you. As a result, we were constantly surrounded by blank-faced people during our visit, who did almost nothing but stare at the screen.

During the visit, I felt more and more tense. When we arrived at Elvis's favorite jungle-style room, and the iPad was talking again, I noticed an older man standing next to me turning to his wife. In front of us, I saw huge artificial plants that Elvis wanted to transform into a room in his own artificial jungle. "Honey, that's amazing, look!" The man shouted, waving a screen in front of her eyes and running a finger over her. "If you swipe your finger to the left, you'll see what's in the jungle-style room to your left. And if to the right, then to what is to your right. "

His wife looked at him, smiled, and began to play with her own tablet. I leaned over and reminded, "Dear sir, do you know that there is a somewhat old-fashioned alternative to swiping your finger over a tablet? It's called turning her head. Because we're right here, in a jungle-style room. You can see it with your own eyes. Here, just look around. ”

I swung my hands and the artificial green leaves rustled a little. But the couple's eyes returned to the screens. "Look!" I tried again. "Can't you see we're really here? Your screens are useless to you, we're right in the middle of a fake jungle. ”The couple preferred to leave the room in a hurry. I turned to Adam to laugh at the whole absurd situation with him, but my godson stood in the corner with the phone hidden under his jacket, fully focused on what had happened on Snapchat.

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He broke his promise from the very beginning of the journey. He pulled out of his cell phone while our plane landed in New Orleans two weeks earlier. "You swore to leave him alone," I reminded Adam. "I thought it meant I wouldn't call anyone. He didn't say that I didn't use Snapchat or write text messages all day. ”He said it with such shocked sincerity, as if I had asked him to hold his breath for ten days.

In a jungle-style room, I lost my temper and tried to snatch the phone from his hand. Irritated, he disappeared from my sight. I didn't find him until later that evening at our Heartbreak Hotel, sitting next to a giant guitar-shaped pool, his face sad. As we sat together, I realized that I was not really angry with him, but with myself. I experienced the problems of keeping attention just like Adam. I hated losing my ability to fully experience the present.

"I know there's something wrong with me," Adam muttered, his phone still clutched. "But I don't know what I can do about it." Then he immersed himself again in text messaging. That's when I realized I had to understand what was really going on with Adam - and with him so many of us. It was the beginning of a journey that completely changed my thinking about concentration.

Over the next three years, I traveled almost the entire world, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, Australia, and interviewed the world's leading concentration camps. What I have learned convinced me that we have nothing to do with the common fears that every generation has been going through for ages. In fact, we are experiencing a serious crisis that has far-reaching consequences for our lives. I have learned that there are twelve factors that have been shown to reduce a person's ability to concentrate - and that many of these factors have been gaining momentum over the last few decades, in some cases really dramatically.

In Portland, I heard Professor Joel Nigg, one of the world's greatest experts on children's concentration problems. He told me that we must begin to ask ourselves whether we happen to be creating a "pathogenic culture of attention" - an environment in which it is becoming increasingly difficult for all of us to focus on something for a really long time and deeply. When I asked him what he would do if he had the power to decide our culture and want to destroy people's ability to concentrate, he replied, "Probably exactly what our society is doing."

Professor Barbara Demeneix, a leading French scientist who looked at some of the key factors that impair the ability to concentrate, was even more straightforward: "At present, it is simply not possible for our brains to function normally." We see the consequences all around us. A small study on college students found that today they can concentrate on just one second. Another study conducted among administrative staff revealed that, on average, they could concentrate for only three minutes at a time. None of this happens because we all have less willpower at once. Your ability to concentrate has not collapsed on its own. They stole it from you.

Price for constant switching

When I returned from Graceland, I was sure I was losing my concentration because I didn't have a strong enough will and I was controlled by my own phone. It caused me a spiral of unpleasant thoughts and endless remorse. I said to myself: you are weak, you are lazy, you have no self-discipline. The solution seemed obvious to me: to regain control of oneself and get rid of my phone addiction. So I booked a small beach room in Provincetown, on the outskirts of Cape Cod.

I triumphantly announced to everyone that I would be closed there for three months without a phone and without a computer with internet access. I'm full of it, I'm tired of being online all the time. I was aware of how lucky I was to be able to afford such a decision at all, because I had made a lot of money with previous books. I also knew very well that this was not a long-term solution. I did this because I thought I might otherwise lose some crucial aspects of my own ability to think deeply. At the same time, I hoped that if I disconnected for a while, I might wonder what changes are needed to find a more sustainable solution.

The first week without a connection, I went through a kind of decompression. Provincetown is a small spa resort with the largest proportion of same-sex couples in the United States. I was eating cakes, reading books, talking to strangers and singing. Everything slowed down dramatically. Under normal circumstances, I check the news about every hour, feed on the facts that cause me anxiety and in which I try in vain to find some meaning. In Princetown, however, I simply read a paper newspaper once a day. Every few hours, I felt an unfamiliar feeling bubbling inside me before I understood what it was. Oh yes. Peace.

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Later, through interviews with experts and studies of their research, I realized that there were many reasons why my ability to concentrate began to improve from day one without connection. One of them was explained to me by Earl Miller, a professor of neurology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to him, our brain "can only keep one or two thoughts in a conscious state" at a time. That is all. "We're really extremely one-sided," Miller said, adding that we have "very limited cognitive capacity."

However, we have suffered a huge deception. The average teenager today is convinced that he can watch six different types of media at once. But neuroscientists have found that people who think they are doing several things at once are actually engaged in mental juggling. "They're constantly switching back and forth. They don't even realize it, because their brains adjust it to give them a smooth experience of consciousness. But in reality, they still switch and reconfigure their brains from moment to moment and from task to task. And it costs something, "Miller explains.

For example, imagine that you are just filling out a tax return, you receive a text message, and you look at it. You give her a single, maybe three-second long look, and you return to the world of taxes. But you don't realize that "your brain needs to be reconfigured" at that moment. You need to remember what you did before, and at the same time remember what you thought about it at the time. Scientific evidence shows that at such a time, “your performance is declining. You are slower. And all this as a result of switching from one task to another. ”

This phenomenon is called the "switch-cost effect". In practice, this means that if you check text messages in the middle of your work performance, you will not only lose small periods of time spent looking at them, but also the time spent restoring concentration. And that it's not enough. For example, in a study conducted at the Carnegie Mellon University Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, 136 students were asked to write a test. While some of them had their phones turned off, other students had to have them on and receive more and more messages. Students with their phones on then had an average of twenty percent worse results. It seems to me that almost all of us are losing that twenty percent of our brain capacity almost continuously. According to Miller, we found ourselves in a "faith of cognitive degradation."

Into the flow state

In Provincetown, for the first time in an incredibly long time, I was able to focus on one thing without interruption. I lived within what my brain was really capable of. It seemed to me that my ability to concentrate increased with each passing day. But then there was a sudden deterioration. I was walking along the beach, constantly bumping into what had been teasing me since my trip to Graceland. Visitors seemed to treat Provincetown only as a backdrop for photographs of themselves, and barely raised their eyes from the screen to look at the ocean or each other.

But while at the time I wanted to shout that they were finally putting the damn phone in their pockets because they were wasting their real lives, this time I felt a completely different urge. "Give me the phone!" I shouted inwardly. "It's mine!" For so many years, I've been receiving intransigent signals from my electronic devices every few hours, a stream of likes and comments that said, "We see you." Depends on you. And now they were gone.

Simone de Beauvoir once said that when she became an atheist, it seemed to her that the whole world was silent. That's exactly how I lost my internet connection. After all those sharp exchanges on social networks, ordinary human interactions suddenly seemed pleasant, but insufficient. No normal social interaction will overwhelm you.

I realized that simply eliminating all distractions would not be enough to heal our ability to concentrate. You may feel good about it at first, but then a vacuum will be created where all the noise was. It needed to be filled with something. Because of this, I started to deal with the area of ​​psychology, which I learned about a few years earlier - it is called the science of flow states (so-called flow). Virtually every reader of this article has ever experienced a state of flow. These are the moments when you devote yourself to something meaningful, you fully immerse yourself in it, time and with it your ego seems to start to disappear and you find yourself in a state of deep concentration. "Flow" is the innermost form of concentration a person can achieve. But how?

One of my other interviews was with Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Claremont, California, who is one of the pioneers of the study of the state of flow and has devoted more than forty years of research to him. From his work, I learned that three main factors are needed to achieve a state of flow. First, one must set a single goal - "flow" consumes all mental energy and directs it in one direction. Secondly, the stated goal must have real meaning for the person, so it is not possible to try to achieve something with the state of flow that he does not care about. And finally, thirdly, it is useful when the chosen effort is at the limit of a person's abilities - that is, when, say, the rock he is trying to climb is a little higher and more inaccessible than the one he has conquered last.

With this knowledge, I started writing every morning - and I wrote in a different way than in the past, because I was really trying to stretch my strength to their very limits. Within a few days, I began to get into a state of flow and spent hours concentrating without giving me too much work. It seemed to me that, as last time in high school, I could concentrate effortlessly in long stretches. Before, I was afraid that my brain was irreparably waning. And when I realized that he could work at full speed again under the right circumstances, I wanted to cry with relief.

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I spent every night sitting on the beach and watching the lights slowly fade on the horizon. The light you see on the cape is unlike any other, and in Provincetown I have seen my own thoughts, goals, and dreams more clearly than ever before. Like I live in the light. So when it came time to leave the beach house and return to our extremely interconnected world, I was adamant that I had cracked the code to keep my attention focused. I came back determined to incorporate everything I had learned into my daily life. The phone and laptop I left at home in Boston made me feel alienated and made me feel alienated. But a few months was enough and I spent four hours a day on the screen again, and my ability to concentrate weakened again.

Not an individual but a collective problem

Former Google engineer James Williams, who after his departure became the most important concentration philosopher in the Western world, told me during a visit to Moscow where I had made a fundamental mistake. According to him, individual abstinence is "about as effective as trying to solve the problem of air pollution by wearing a gas mask twice a week." "It may avert some of the worst effects of pollution in the short term, but it is neither a sustainable nor a systemic solution to the problem." He believes that changing personal habits in technology is a mere "transfer of responsibility to the individual", because "the only thing that can really solve something is changes in our whole environment."

Professor Nigg likens current developments in attention issues to the increasingly widespread obesity. The disease, which had barely existed in the Western world fifty years ago, has become a pervasive problem. And not because we suddenly become so greedy or indulgent. "Obesity is not a medical epidemic. Among other things, we have bad food at our disposal, so people are constantly gaining weight, "he explained.

Our way of life has changed dramatically as the food supply has changed or we have built cities where it is difficult to move on foot or by bike. These changes in the environment then led to bodily changes. We gained weight en masse. According to him, something similar is probably happening with changes in our ability to concentrate.

Not all factors that disturb our attention are obvious at first glance. At first, I focused primarily on the impact of technology, but in reality there are many more reasons - from our diet to air quality to the hours we spend working and struggling with insomnia. Among other things, these are a number of things that we consider completely normal today, such as when we take our children 'time to play or when our schools have reduced their studies to permanent testing.

I have come to believe that we must face constant attacks on our ability to concentrate on two different levels. The first is individual and involves a variety of changes in everyday behavior that have helped me improve my ability to concentrate by approximately twenty percent. But we have to be honest with people. Changing personal habits is not self-saving. We are in a situation similar to someone pouring an itchy powder all day and advising, "If you learned to meditate, you might not scratch as much." Meditation is certainly a useful tool, but at the same time we must stop those who the imaginary itchy powder is still pouring. Together, we must stand up to the forces that are stealing our concentration and take it back.

What can we do?

It may sound a bit abstract, but I've met people who have put this approach into practice in many places. One example for all: scientific evidence clearly shows that stress and fatigue can impair the ability to concentrate. About 35 percent of all employees now dare never turn off the phone because they can expect a message from the boss day and night. French employees decided they had had enough and pushed the government. As a result, they have a "right to disconnect" by law today.

It just works. The employee is entitled to a precisely defined number of hours worked and to have his employer leave him alone outside this time. Companies that violate these rules can be fined heavily. There are many such possible collective changes and they could serve to give us back part of our ability to concentrate. For example, we could force social networking companies to abandon the current business model, which is designed precisely with the aim of constantly attracting our attention and preventing us from taking our eyes off the screen. At the same time, social networks could work completely differently - and instead of constantly attacking, they help to improve our concentration.

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Some scientists question the available evidence and see our concerns about the declining ability to concentrate as a kind of moral panic comparable to fears about comics or rap. But according to many other scientists, we have sufficiently reliable data, and our fears are far more than moral panics than the first warnings about the obesity epidemic or the climate crisis of the 1970s.

Personally, I believe that, given our current uncertainty, we cannot afford to wait for perfectly unquestionable evidence. We must act on the basis of a sound risk assessment. What else can we lose if people who warn of the effects on our ability to concentrate turn out to be wrong? At the very least, we will reduce the time spent being bullied by our bosses and monitoring and manipulating technology. And we will also make a number of other improvements in our way of life that are desirable anyway.

But when it turns out that the warning voices were right, the price can be really high. As Tristan Harris told me, we will lower the level of our humanity and lose the ability to concentrate at a time when we are dealing with giant crises that more than ever require our full attention. One thing is certain: we will not achieve any change without a fight. Just as the feminist movement has succeeded in regaining the right to its own body (and must continue to fight for it to this day), we need to establish a movement that seeks to regain control of our own minds. We must act urgently, because, as in the case of the climate crisis or obesity, the longer we wait, the harder it will be to achieve our efforts.

With the ever-waning ability to concentrate, it will become increasingly difficult to mobilize the personal and political energy needed to stand up to the forces that rob us of it. In the first place, we must stop blaming ourselves or making demands for mere minor improvements from our employers and technology giants. Only ourselves own our mind - and together we can take it back from those who are trying to steal it from us.

František Kalenda translated the article from the English version on The Guardian.

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The British writer and journalist Johann Harim published the title Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions in 2020 in Czech translation. His latest book, published in January this year under the title Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again, addresses a similar topic.