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Commentary
The screens are eating our brains
I recently finished “The Greeks: A Global History,” which its publisher calls “sweeping,” a PR-ish but fair description of its sprawling 608 pages. I put it down during duller stretches to check email or attend to other distractions. That’s typical; the fact that I actually finished the book was anything but.
This isn’t meant as preening but rather panic: Book-reading is cratering, in part because screens are eating our brains. That alarm comes from a place perhaps inaccessible to the withered attention spans of many: a book.
In “Stolen Focus,” journalist Johann Hari reports that nearly six of every 10 Americans don’t read a book in any given year. Since 2004, the number of male readers nosedived 40%, while the number of women picking up a book dropped by 29%.
Consulting numerous scholars of psychology, literacy and other disciplines, Hari identifies multiple Grinches who’ve stolen our focus: from how we eat to how we sleep (or rather, don’t sleep). But tech plays its baleful role. While the average American devotes 17 minutes a day to browsing a book, she spends 5.4 hours on her phone. The second stat partly explains the first, Hari says. Research shows that screen-reading turns us into literary frogs, hopping between segments for quick takeaways while whittling our attention spans to nubs. We tweet to the tune of 280 characters and scratch our heads at any Facebook posts that run more than a few lines.
Fretting over my own distracted reading style didn’t draw me to Hari’s book. Closing in on 63, one gets used to age’s toll on attention, nor do I share his partiality for fiction, which, he argues, drills our imaginations in empathy. OK, fine, but my nonfiction tastes find life too short to read what doesn’t interest me.
While the average American devotes 17 minutes a day to browsing a book, she spends 5.4 hours on her phone.
Rather, I was interested in Hari’s thesis because it seems to support my own that snap communication is a path to uniformed snap judgments. He’s right that the things of which we’re proudest in life — starting a business, good parenting, mastering new skills — require sustained focus. The threat from stolen focus isn’t as imminent as that from, say, insurrection (though it’s not coincidental that Twitter was Juliet to Donald Trump’s amorous Romeo). But shriveling attention should concern us nonetheless.
Hari offers persuasive if admittedly speculative evidence in the absence of long-term studies of tech and attention. Sleep deprivation is proven to slash attention, and it’s pretty clear that Americans sleep less today than in past decades. Fatigue is an inducement to hit-and-run digital scrolling rather than a deep read, Hari reasonably observes.
Moreover, there is evidence that chronic distractions shrink intelligence. One study Hari cites gave a set of workers uninterrupted time on a task, while a peer group juggled that task with incoming phone calls and email. Both took an IQ test afterwards in which the latter group averaged 10 points less — twice the mental hit than if they’d been stoned.
Book-reading is cratering, in part because screens are eating our brains.
Less sleep and unrelenting intrusions are part of a culture of nonstop stimulation nourished by life lived on screens: tweets, Tik Tok videos, pinging texts answered instantly. Then there are Hari’s revealing anecdotes of online addiction, one of which he shared with podcaster Andrew Sullivan. During a visit to Graceland, where visitors take self-guided tours with iPads, he bumped into a Canadian couple in the so-called Jungle Room. The husband marveled that swiping left or right on the screen gave you a panoramic view of the room. (Americans aren’t alone in our addiction.) Hari couldn’t resist accosting him:
‘Sir, there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you could do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re actually in the Jungle Room.’ … And they just backed away like I’m a crazy person.
There are self-treatments for inattention and distraction that individuals can practice, Hari says, from timed-lock safes for your phone and internet-blocking apps for your computer, to sending your kids outside to play in nature rather than in Fortnite. As a collective redress, he suggests regulation to require changes in Big Tech’s algorithms. Those track both our interests — for sale to advertisers, who bombard us to keep us scrolling ad nauseum — and incendiary misinformation that gets numerous users to rubberneck as if witnessing an online car crash. The algorithms then spread it around, so that even more users can wallow in it.
We might have to wait for political buy-in for regulation. In the meantime, you can always pick up a good book.
