Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

“If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted brain-processing time.” This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.

our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people.

the book

notifications for things he doesn’t want to know. All this frenetic digital interruption is “pulling our attention away from our thoughts,” and “suppressing your default mode network….

out: Is “our society driving people to this point so often, because we have an epidemic [that’s being] caused by specific things that are dysfunctional in our society?”

growth can happen in one of two ways. The first is that a corporation can find new markets—by

I realized that if Facebook won’t stop promoting fascism—promoting Nazism in Germany—they will never care about protecting your focus and attention. These companies will never restrain themselves. The risks of letting them continue behaving the way they have are greater than the risks of overreacting. They have to be stopped.

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent.

“Genes don’t operate in a vacuum. That’s the main thing we’ve learned from gene studies…. Genes are turned on and off in response to environmental input.”