Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
$7.99
Stolen Focus
- Why You Can’t Pay Attention
- By: Johann Hari
- Narrated by: Johann Hari
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Categories: Health & Wellness, Children’s Health
Publisher’s Summary
Bloomsbury presents Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, read by Johann Hari.
Why have we lost our ability to focus? What are the causes? And, most importantly, how do we get it back?
For Stolen Focus, internationally best-selling author Johann Hari went on a three-year journey to uncover the reasons why our teenagers now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and why office workers on average manage only three minutes. He interviewed the leading experts in the world on attention and learned that everything we think about this subject is wrong.
We think our inability to focus is a personal failing – a flaw in each one of us. It is not. This has been done to all of us by powerful external forces. Our focus has been stolen. Johann discovered there are 12 deep cases of this crisis, all of which have robbed some of our attention. He shows us how in a thrilling journey that ranges from Silicon Valley dissidents, to a favela in Rio where attention vanished, to an office in New Zealand that found a remarkable way to restore our attention.
Crucially, he learned how – as individuals and as a society – we can get our focus back, if we are determined to fight for it.
©2022 Johann Hari (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Tom Middleditch
An excellent book that I cannot rate highly
This book is thoroughly researched and the first half Is gorgeous
The second half, going into adhd, is massively disappointing, and potentially incredibly harmful
There is not one interview with any single adhd person, no mention of neurodiversity at all, and an insistence on ADHD folks as beneath being human, as if the quality of “Focus” being gone makes them nothing more than victims and beneath consideration as human, merely miserable refuse to be seen as a lesson for the lucky.
All the cliches of disability writing are here: from the perspectives of the non disabled lamenting how hard it is to live near the disabled over the the actual human lives of the disabled themselves, to the removal of disabled lives getting to exist within their own stories.
I know this author can write empathetically about mental health and neurodiversity, “Lost Connections” was a book I needed to read at that time and it gave me non-medical tools to engage in my own work. The vast disparity between that and this one makes this one all the more disappointing
If the author wishes to learn from those he seems determined to avoid, reach out to the Neurodivergent near him. or hell, while I’m suggesting ostentatiously, reach out to me Johann. I’ll tell you about living as an ADHD man, and why my mind and self are not just the consequence of an exploitative and unregulated attention economy but are what makes me, and the growing number of those recognising their own neurodivergence, a valid and unique human
25 people found this helpful
Joshua Van Arsdale
There are much better books on attention and focus
I’m not saying that there’s nothing going on for this book because there definitely are a handful of thought-provoking ideas scattered throughout, however, I could not enjoy this book for the remainder of the time padding out the book.
The author comes across as unrelatable and constantly moaning about problems in the world; every time the narrative returned to the author’s own journey, I found myself rolling my eyes at yet another issue that the world has to change for him.
I found that the strongest theme throughout the book is ‘the problem of losing focus is too big for you to manage by yourself, you need the government to solve that problem for you,’ take from that what you will, but I found it was not an empowering theme.
I also found that, ironically in a book about focus, the focus of the book meandered about and sometimes seemed to get lost in asides for long stretches before meandering back.
If you’re listening to the audiobook version of this, be prepared to be bombarded with phrases like “and he told me” and “and she said.” If there’s anything that stuck with me after listening, are those phrases ringing again and again in my head.
If found the logic of the arguments in the book was sometimes questionable, I found that there were a few occasions where the author would be building an argument, and then just drop in some pretty bold and unsupported statements as if they were facts and then draw conclusions based on those claims.
One of the main topics covered is about technology and social media – I found Adam Alter’s Irresistible a much better read on the topic and would definitely recommend it over Stolen Focus.
Overall it’s not a terrible book, but it’s definitely not for me, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else, especially with plenty of books that cover this topic in a much better way.
7 people found this helpful