Producers' Pick | Johann Hari: Stolen Focus - Why You Can't Pay Attention

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Put it all out there and start finding that someone for today or for ever. Download the Bumble app. Welcome back, everyone. It's the Brian Kilmeachill, 1-866-408-7669. It's time to bring in my next guest, John Hariri. Joanne Hariri, he joins us now to talk about focus and focusing on what needs to be done. Joanne, welcome. Hi. You said my name better than most people, Brian. It's actually Johan Hari. The book is called Stolen Focus, but don't worry.

I once waited for six hours with a broken arm in an emergency room because they were calling for Joanna Hariri to come forward. So you did it better than most people. So what you do is, my apologies. So what you do is you focus on focus.

And what did you discover about this technological age when it comes to focusing? Yeah, you're so right. I mean, I wrote this book because I noticed that with each year that passed, things that required deep focus, like reading a book, watching a long movie, were getting, for me, more and more like running up a down escalator. You know what I mean?

I could still do them, but they were getting harder and harder. And I noticed this is happening to almost all of us. The average American office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now 100 children who've been identified with that problem. So I wanted to figure out what's happening to us, right?

What's going on? So I used my training at Cambridge University to travel all over the world from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne to interview 200 of the leading experts on attention and focus and really dig deeply into their science. And what I learned is there's scientific evidence for 12 factors that can make your attention better or can make it worse. And loads of the factors that can make your attention worse have been hugely increasing in recent years. If anyone is listening and your attention is getting worse, or your kid's attention is getting worse, it's not your fault.

It's not just you. You're not imagining it. And crucially, your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you. That's why the book is called Stolen Focus.

And when we understand the 12 factors that are doing this to us, we can begin to build bigger solutions. Well, did it happen intentionally? Or is it just one of those things, keep on making the iPhone better, keep on making social media more attractive, keep on building a website that gets more eyeballs? Or is it something devious and insidious?

It's a bit of both. Some of it is by accident. For example, we can talk about this more, but the food we eat is profoundly damaging our ability to focus and pay attention.

The fact we don't allow our children to play outside freely is profoundly damaging their ability to focus on attention. Now, no one designed that. That wasn't anyone's intention. Some of it has been very deliberate.

I mean, don't take my word for it. Sean Parker, one of the biggest initial investors in Facebook, said we designed Facebook to maximally invade people's attention. We knew what we were doing, and we did it anyway. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brain. So let's look at, say, Brian, one of the 12 factors that's damaging our focus and attention that I think will be playing out for every single one of you who are listening today.

I went to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to interview one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, a man named Professor Earl Miller. He said to me, look, there's one thing you've got to understand about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at the same time.

That's it. This is just a fundamental limit of the human brain. Human brain ain't going to change anytime soon.

But what's happened is we've fallen for a massive delusion. The average American teenager now believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is scientists get people into labs, not just teenagers, older people as well, and they get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time. And it turns out every time you can't do more than one thing at a time, what you do is you juggle very quickly between tasks.

And it turns out that comes with a really big cost, just like in KFC comes with the cost that you gain weight. Trying to do more than one thing at a time comes with something called the switch cost effect. When you try and do more than one thing at a time, you will do all the things you're trying to do, much less competently. You'll make more mistakes. You'll remember less of what you do.

You'll be much less creative. And this isn't a small effect, right? The one study, for example, found that just being interrupted a lot while you're working is twice as bad for your intelligence and attention as getting stoned on cannabis. This is a really big effect. This is why Professor Miller said to me, we are living in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation at the moment as a result of being constantly interrupted.

So interesting. So in terms of you keep on getting interrupted and you don't have that time to wind down and reflect and think, it hurts you cognitively in the long term? I think you put that really well, Brian. You know, one study found that if you're interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to get back to the level of focus you had before you were interrupted.

But most of us now never get 23 minutes spare. And when you look at all the evidence that our attention is getting worse, one of the reasons this is so important is I would say to anyone listening to your show, just think about anything you've ever achieved in your life that you're proud of. Whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, learning to play the guitar, whatever it is, that thing you're proud of took a lot of sustained focus and attention. And when focus and attention break down, your ability to achieve any of your goals starts to break down. Your ability to solve your problems breaks down. This is why it's so heartbreaking when you see kids who can't focus and pay attention because you know they're going to be less able to achieve anything in the world. Obviously, a third of my book is about what's happening to our kids and how we can put it right. If we don't get attention right, you can't get anything right. You can't achieve what you want to achieve in your life. People have really said they see the same problem of all ages about focusing, which is kind of interesting.

It's almost we have a national, it's a self-inflicted ADD. So what study did you do that maybe gave you an idea of how to beat this problem and what could be done to attack this problem? Because almost everybody listening right now, outside that crazy friend you have who still has a flip phone, could really benefit from what you've researched. So I think for all of the 12 factors that are screwing with our ability to focus and pay attention, I would argue there's two ways we've got to deal with this. I think of them as defense and offense. So we've got to defend ourselves and our kids as much as possible as individuals.

So I'll give you one example out of dozens and dozens that I give in the book. Stupidly I'm pointing, although this is the radio, I know you can't see it. In the corner of my room over there, I've got something called a K-safe. It's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone, you put the lid on, and you turn the dial at the top, and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. I will not sit down to watch a movie with my partner unless we both imprison our phone.

If people come round for dinner, I make everyone put their phone in the phone jail. I use that for four hours a day to give myself the head space to think, to just think properly. So that's one example I give lots and lots of examples of things I recommend to people. But I also want to be honest with people.

I don't want to BS people, right? There are loads of things we should do as individuals. They will hugely help.

I'm passionately in favor of them. But the truth is, at the moment, they will only get you so far because we are living in what one of the leading experts on children's attention problems, Professor Joel Nigg, who I interviewed in Portland in Oregon, said to me, is an attentional pathogenic environment. It's like at the moment someone is pouring itching powder into our heads all day and then leaning forward and going, hey, buddy, you might want to learn how to meditate, then you wouldn't scratch so much. And you want to kind of go, well, screw you. I'll learn to meditate. That's very good.

But we need to stop you pouring itching powder on me, which is why we need to have some bigger changes. So I'll give you an example if it's OK, one of the bigger changes. One of the heroes of my book is a woman called Lenore Skenazy. And Lenore grew up in a suburb of Chicago in the 1960s. And I'm guessing like you, like me, from when she was five years old, she would leave her house and walk to school, which was 15 minutes away. Generally, she did it on her own. She would bump into the other kids because all the kids used to walk to school on their own.

Right. By the time you got to 2003, that had completely ended. Only 10 percent of American children by that point ever played outside without an adult. And the kids who did play outside got like 10 minutes a week. So basically, childhood became this thing even before COVID, which obviously slammed it. Children, childhood became something that happened behind closed doors, under adult supervision. And it turns out that childhood we have lost contained loads of things that was essential for children to be able to focus and pay attention.

To give a really obvious one, exercise. Children who run around can pay attention much better. If your kid can't focus, let them run around. But more importantly, when children play freely with other kids without adults there, they learn how to use their attention. They learn what they find interesting. They learn how to persuade other kids to pay attention to them.

They learn how to take turns. And we got rid of all of that. And the reason Lenore is one of the heroes of the book is not because she described that problem.

It's very easy in life to describe problems. It's because she built the solution. So she leads a group called Let Grow. Letgrow.org, I really urge everyone listening who's got kids to go to this site. And what she does, and that organization does, is they go to whole schools and whole neighborhoods and persuade them to let the children have increasing levels of independence, building up to playing outdoors again where they can begin to actually develop a healthy sense of attention.

And of all the conversations I had for my book, Stolen Focus, I think one of the most moving was in Long Island. I spoke to a 14-year-old boy who was in a Let Grow program. And this kid, Brian, he was a big, strong boy. He was taller than me, right? And until this program began nine months before, he had never been allowed out of his house on his own.

His parents wouldn't even let him run around the block, right? And then this program began. And I said to him, what did you do? And he said, me and my friends, we started to play ball in the street. And then we went into the woods. And he said, even though our phones didn't work, we're still there. We still went into the woods. He said that with great awe. And I said, what did you do in the woods? And he said, we built a fort.

And we go and we sit in our fort and we build things. And I know this sounds a bit, maybe, melodramatic, but honestly, watching this boy talk was like watching a child come to life. And I thought about how many kids I know who never get that. The only place we let our children explore anything is on Fortnite, right?

And I can't be surprised if they become obsessed with video games. That's the only space they get any freedom. And when that boy left, Lenore was with me that day, she said, you know, think about human history. For all of human history, kids had to go out. They had to hunt.

They had to map the territory. They had to explore. And in the space of one generation, we took all of that away. And those boys, given a tiny little bit of freedom, what did they do?

They went into the woods and they built a fort. Because this is so deep in human nature. And obviously, I end the book Stolen Focus by talking about lots of things we need to do together to heal our attention and focus. But one of the big ones, and there's many big ones, but one of them is we need to restore human childhood. We've given our kids, especially in the last two years, but to be honest, even before that, we've given our kids a childhood that our ancestors would not even recognize as a human childhood.

If we want kids who can focus, we need to give them a childhood. So interesting because Willie Robertson, the Robertson family, he grew up on a farm. He was driving a tractor at eight. He would go out in the woods with a gun. He learned how to shoot it, but he would go hunting. That was the way we lived at one point in life.

We figured out things for ourself. And a lot of times you watch the news, you think if your kid's out alone, he or she is going to get kidnapped, you'll never see him again. Yeah, your child is three times more likely to be hit by lightning than be kidnapped.

And if anyone said, I'm not going to let my child play outside because they might be hit by lightning, you'd think they were deranged, right? But this is one of these really big changes that happened. Think about another one. And this is the one that most shocked me. And to be honest with you, Brian, it's the one that I most struggle with. So the way we eat is profoundly damaging our ability to focus and pay attention. I literally have a KFC bucket in this room, so believe me, there's no superiority here. And there's three big ways in which this is happening.

One is, so let's imagine you have the standard American British breakfast, the stuff we grew up eating, either sugary cereal or, you know, white toast with bread on it, right? What that does is it releases a huge amount of energy really quickly into your brain, which feels great. Like, yes, the day has started, it's begun. But because it's released so much energy so fast, what it does is you'll get to your desk, or your kid will get to their school desk an hour or two later, and your energy will just tank and it crashes. And you get what's called brain fog, where you just can't really focus until you have another, you know, sugary, carby treat, right? The way we live puts us on a roller coaster, the way we eat, sorry, puts us on a roller coaster, and energy spikes and energy crashes throughout the day, which gives us these patches of brain fog. The way one nutritionist put it to me is it's like we're putting rocket fuel into a linen.

You know, it'll go really fast for a few minutes, and then it just stops. But if you eat food that releases energy more steadily throughout the day, you know, you'll be able to pay attention much better. Or think about one of the other causes. You know, your brain to focus, to function optimally needs all sorts of nutrients, and our diets are really lacking those nutrients. But the third cause is the one that I find most disturbing. It's not just that our diets lack the stuff we need.

Our current diets contain food, chemicals that act on us like drugs. There was a study in Britain in 2007 where they got 297 kids, and they split them into two groups. And the first group was just given water, and the second group was given water laced with a lot of the synthetic dyes that are in the food we buy in the supermarket all the time. And what they found, particularly candies, and they monitored the kids. The kids who had the synthetic dyes were way more likely to become hyperactive, to struggle with focus. So you can see how so many of the things that we don't even think of as affecting our attention, like sleep, like food, like the stress we experience at work, are massively damaging our focus and attention, along with the component that most of us think of, which obviously I write about a lot in the book, which is some elements of the technology we use. I could talk to you for four hours, and I hope to talk to you again. No doubt about it, the New York Times bestselling author, a British writer, Johann Horry, Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention, and How to Think Deeply Again.

So you don't only identify the problem, you solve it. So that's awesome. Johann, thanks so much. Cheers, Brad.