Technological Addiction and Environmental Factors have Created the “perfect storm of cognitive degradation”, says Johann Hari
On January 2, 2022, in an edited extract from his latest book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, Johann Hari writes about the “serious attention crisis” that has “downgraded humanity”, fracturing our ability to pay attention and the central role of modern technology in this trend. Drawing on multiple studies, he argues that our “attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen” due to social media design and leveraging consumer interactions. Prof Earl Miller says that “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts’’ because we have “very limited cognitive capacity”. When people believe they are doing several things simultaneously, such as following multiple social media sources, they are unknowingly “switching back and forth”, which is called the “switch-cost” effect. We not only lose our concentration, but our minds need time to refocus on our original task. In contrast to this, Prof Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi stresses the importance of Flow, “the deepest form of attention human beings can offer ‘’, where we are able to concentrate for lengthy periods effortlessly. As per a Carnegie Mellon study, we are “currently losing 20% of our brain power, almost all the time” in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. Other than the constant mental stimulation from modern technology such as “YouTube, WhatsApp and porn”, environmental factors such as our food habits, air quality and sleep quality also determine our focus. Although individual discipline is part of the equation, many of these elements require societal measures such as the implementation of the “right to disconnect” protection in France, and transformations in social media business models that “would heal our attention”. Johann stresses that “we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds” and any delay would only make it harder to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus. “
Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook said “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works”. Studies have shown that 73% of respondents experienced mild panic if their phone was misplaced for a short period. This is a consequence of the neural circuitry concepts and dopamine release used to control our attention, fragmenting our focus en masse. New societal and environmental actions will be critical to enabling improvements in cognitive thinking across the board.
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