Johann Hari

If you’re an adult and tempted to feel superior, hold off. A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine—who I interviewed—observed how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes.

Denmark I interviewed the first scientist who has, with his team, shown that our collective ability to pay attention really is rapidly shrinking. T

I came to believe that we have profoundly misunderstood what is actually happening to our attention. For years, whenever I couldn’t focus, I would angrily blame myself. I would say: You’re lazy, you’re undisciplined, you need to pull yourself together. Or I would blame my phone, and rage against it, and wish it had never been invented. Most of the people I know respond the same way. But I learned that in fact something much deeper than personal failure, or a single new invention, is happening here.

Professor Joel Nigg, who is one of the leading experts in the world on children’s attention problems. He said it might help me grasp what’s happening if we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates. Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is endemic in the Western world.

What’s going to happen? I’m not the president of the United States—I don’t have to issue orders if Russia invades Ukraine.

How do you slow down in a world that is speeding up?

Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.”

and it’s only the first part—when I went to interview Professor Earl Miller. He has won some of the top awards in neuroscience in the world, and he was working at the cutting edge of brain research when I went to see him in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He told me bluntly that instead of acknowl

acknowledging our limitations and trying to live within them, we have—en masse—fallen for an enormous delusion.
There’s one key fact, he said, that every human being needs to understand—and everything else he was going to explain flows from that. “Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure of the brain,” and it’s not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time. To pretend this was the case, we took a term that was never meant to be applied to human beings at all. In the 1960s, computer scientists invented machines with more than one processor, so they really could do two things (or more) simultaneously. They called this machine-power “multitasking.” Then we took the concept and applied it to ourselves.
When I first learned about Earl’s claim that our ability to think about several things at once is a delusion, I bristled—he couldn’t be right, I thought, because I have done several things at the same time my

There are three ways, he explained, in which this constant switching degrades your ability to focus. The first is called the “switch cost effect.”