CHAPTER ONE
Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering
“I don’t understand what you’re asking for,” the man in Target in Boston kept saying to me. “These are the cheapest phones we got. They have super-slow internet. That’s what you want, right?” No, I said. I want a phone that can’t access the internet at all. He studied the back of the box, looking confused. “This would be really slow. You could probably get your email but you wouldn’t—” Email is still the internet, I said. I am going away for three months, specifically so I can be totally offline.
My friend Imtiaz had already given me his old, broken laptop, one that had lost the ability to get online years before. It looked like it came from the set of the original Star Trek, a remnant from some aborted vision of the future. I was going to use it, I had resolved, to finally write the novel I had been planning for years. Now what I needed was a phone where I could be called in emergencies by the six people I was going to give the number to. I needed it to have no internet option of any kind, so that if I woke up at 3 a.m. and my resolve cracked and I tried to get online, I wouldn’t be able to do it, no matter how hard I tried.
When I explained to people what I was planning, I would get one of three responses. The first was just like that of this man in Target: they couldn’t seem to process what I was saying; they thought I was saying that I was going to cut back on my internet use. The idea of going offline completely seemed to them so bizarre that I had to explain it again and again. “So you want a phone that can’t go online at all?” he said. “Why would you want that?”
The second response—which this man offered next—was a kind of low-level panic on my behalf. “What will you do in an emergency?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem right.” I asked: What emergency will require me to get online? 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. “Anything,” he said. “Anything could happen.” I kept explaining to the people my age—I was thirty-nine at the time—that we had spent half our lives without phones, so it shouldn’t be so hard to picture returning to the way we had lived for so long. Nobody seemed to find this persuasive.
And the third response was envy. People began to fantasize about what they would do with all the time they spent on their phones if it was all suddenly freed up. They started by listing the number of hours that Apple’s Screen Time option told them they spent on their phones every day. For the average American, it’s three hours and fifteen minutes. We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours. Sometimes they would wistfully mention something they loved and had abandoned—playing the piano, say—and stare off into the distance.
Target had nothing for me. Ironically, I had to go online to order what seemed to be the last remaining cellphone in the United States that can’t access the web. It’s called the Jitterbug. It’s designed for extremely old people, and it doubles as a medical emergency device. I opened the box and smiled at its giant buttons and told myself that there’s an added bonus: if I fall over, it will automatically connect me to the nearest hospital.
I laid out on the hotel bed everything I was taking with me. I had gone through all the routine things I normally use my iPhone for, and bought objects to replace each one. So for the first time since I was a teenager, I bought a watch. I got an alarm clock. I dug out my old iPod and loaded it with audiobooks and podcasts, and I ran my finger along its screen, thinking about how futuristic this gadget seemed to me when I bought it twelve years ago; now it looked like something that Noah might have carried onto the Ark. I had Imtiaz’s broken laptop—now rendered, effectively, into a 1990s-style word processor—and next to it I had a pile of classic novels I had been meaning to read for decades, with War and Peace at the top.
I took an Uber so I could hand over my iPhone and my MacBook to a friend who lived in Boston. I hesitated before putting them on the table in her house. Quickly, I pushed a button on my phone to summon a car to take me to the ferry terminal, and then I switched it off and walked away from it fast, like it might come running after me. I felt a twinge of panic. I’m not ready for this, I thought. Then somewhere, from the back of my mind, I remembered something the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset said: “We cannot put off living until we are ready…. Life is fired at us point-blank.” If you don’t do this now, I told myself, you’ll never do it, and you’ll be lying on your deathbed seeing how many likes you got on Instagram. I climbed into the car and refused to look back.
I had learned years before from social scientists that when it comes to beating any kind of destructive habit, one of the most effective tools we have is called “pre-commitment.” It’s right there in one of the oldest surviving human stories, Homer’s Odyssey. Homer tells of how there was once a patch of sea that sailors would always die in, for a strange reason: living in the ocean, there were two sirens—a uniquely hot blend of woman and fish—who would sing to the sailors to join them in the ocean. Then, when they clambered in for some sexy fish-based action, they’d drown. But then, one day, the hero of the story—Ulysses—figured out how to beat these temptresses. Before the ship approached the sirens’ stretch of sea, he got his crew members to tie him to the mast, hard, hand and foot. He couldn’t move. When he heard the sirens, no matter how much Ulysses yearned to dive in, he couldn’t.
I had used this technique before when I was trying to lose weight. I used to buy loads of carbs and tell myself I would be strong enough to eat them slowly and in moderation, but then I would guzzle them at 2 a.m. So I stopped buying them. At 2 a.m., I wasn’t going to haul myself to a store to buy Pringles. The you that exists in the present—right now—wants to pursue your deeper goals, and wants to be a better person. But you know you’re fallible and likely to crack in the face of temptation. So you bind the future version of you. You narrow your choices. You tie yourself to the mast.
There has been a small range of scientific experiments to see if this really works, at least in the short term. For example, in 2013 a professor of psychology named Molly Crockett—who I interviewed at Yale—got a bunch of men into a lab and split them into two groups. All of them were going to face a challenge. They were told that they could see a slightly sexy picture right away if they wanted to, but if they were able to wait and do nothing for a little while, they would get to see a super-sexy picture. The first group was told to use their willpower, and discipline themselves in the moment. But the second group was given a chance, before they went into the lab, to “pre-commit”—to resolve, out loud, that they were going to stop and wait so they could see the sexier picture. The scientists wanted to know—would the men who made a pre-commitment hold out more often, and longer, than the men who didn’t? It turned out pre-commitment was strikingly successful—resolving clearly to do something, and making a pledge that they’d stick to it, made the men significantly better at holding out. In the years since, scientists have shown the same effect in a broad range of experiments.
My trip to Provincetown was an extreme form of pre-commitment, and like Ulysses’s victory, it also began on a boat. As the ferry to Provincetown pulled out, I looked back at Boston Harbor, where the May light was reflecting on the water. I stood toward the back of the ship, next to a wet and flapping Stars and Stripes, and watched the foam of the ocean spraying behind us. After about forty minutes, Provincetown slowly appeared on the horizon when I saw the thin spike of the Pilgrim Monument come into view.
Provincetown is a long, lush strip of sand where the United States juts into the Atlantic Ocean. It is the last stop in the Americas, the end of the road. You can stand there, the writer Henry David Thoreau said, and feel the whole of the United States at your back. I felt a giddy sense of lightness, and as beach appeared through the foam, I began to laugh, though I didn’t know why. I was almost drunk with exhaustion. I was thirty-nine, and I had been working nonstop since I was twenty-one. I had taken almost no holidays. I fattened myself with information every waking hour to make myself a more productive writer, and I had started to think that the way I lived was a bit like the process where, in a factory farm, a foie gras goose is force-fed gross amounts in order to turn its liver into pâté. In the previous five years, I had traveled over 80,000 miles, researching, writing, and talking about two books. All day, every day, I tried to inhale more information, interview more people, learn more, talk more, and I was now manically skipping between topics, like a record that has been scratched from overuse, and I was finding it hard to retain anything. I had felt tired for so long that all I knew was how to outrun it.
As people began to disembark, I heard the ping of an incoming text message somewhere on the ferry and reached instinctively for my pocket. I felt a panic—where’s my phone?—and then remembered, and laughed even more.
I found myself thinking, at that moment, about the first time I had ever seen a cellphone. I was around fourteen or fifteen—so this was 1993 or 1994—and I was on the top deck of the 340 bus in London, coming home from school. A man in a suit was talking loudly into an object that in my memory is the size of a small cow. All of us on that top deck turned and looked at him. He seemed to be enjoying us looking, and he talked louder. This continued for some time, until another passenger said to him: “Mate?” “Yes?” “You’re a wanker.” And the people on the bus broke the first rule of public transport in London. We looked at each other, and we smiled. These small rebellions were happening all over London, I recall, at the birth of mobile phones. We saw them as an absurd invasion.
I sent my first email about five years later, when I went to university. I was nineteen years old. I wrote a few sentences, and clicked send, and waited to feel something. No surge of excitement came. I wondered why there was such a fuss about this new email thing. If you had told me then that within twenty years a combination of these two technologies—that seemed initially either repellent or yawnsome—would come to dominate my life to the point where I would have to get on a boat and flee, I would have thought you had lost your mind.
I tugged my bag off the boat and pulled out the map I had printed from the internet. I hadn’t navigated anywhere without Google Maps in years, but fortunately, Provincetown consists of one long street, so there are literally only two directions you can give—go left, or go right. I had to go right, to the real estate agent I had rented my sliver of a beach house from. Commercial Street runs through the middle of Provincetown, and I walked past the neat New England stores selling lobsters and sex toys (these are not the same shops, obviously—that’s a niche even Provincetown would shun). I remembered that I chose this place for a few reasons. A year before, I had come over for a day from Boston to visit my friend Andrew, who lives there every summer. Provincetown is like a cross between a quaint Cape Cod village in the old New England style, and a sex dungeon. For a long time, it was a working-class fishing town populated by Portuguese immigrants and their kids. Then artists started to move in, and it became a bohemian enclave. Then it became a gay destination. Today it is a place where, in old fishermen’s cottages, there now live men whose full-time job is to dress as Ursula, the villain from The Little Mermaid, and sing songs about cunnilingus to the tourists who dominate the town in summer.
I chose Provincetown because I found it charming but not complex—I felt (slightly arrogantly) that I had figured out its essential dynamics in my first twenty-four hours there. I was determined to go to a place that would not trigger my journalistic curiosity too much. If I had chosen (say) Bali, I know that I would have soon started trying to figure out how Balinese society worked, and begun interviewing people, and soon I would be back to my manic information-sucking. I wanted a pretty purgatory where I could decompress, and nothing more.
The real estate agent, Pat, drove me out to the beach house. It was close to the sea, a forty-minute walk from the center of Provincetown—almost in the neighboring town of Truro, in fact. It was a plain wooden house, split into four different apartments. Mine was to the bottom left. I asked Pat to remove the modem—in case, in some fit of madness, I went and bought an internet-connected device—and to cut off all the cable packages on the television. I had two rooms. Beyond the house, there was a short gravel path, and at the end of it, waiting for me, was the ocean, vast and open and warm. Pat bid me good luck, and I was alone.
I unpacked my books and began to flick through them. I couldn’t get any traction with the one I picked up. I left it aside and walked over toward the ocean. It was early in the Provincetown season, and there were only around six other people that I could see in any direction stretching for miles. I felt then a sudden certainty—you only get these feelings a few times in a lifetime—that I had done absolutely the right thing. For so long I had been fixing my gaze on things that were very fast and very temporary, like a Twitter feed. When you fix your gaze on the speedy, you feel pensive, amped-up, liable to be washed away if you don’t move, wave, shout. Now I found myself staring at something very old and very permanent. This ocean was here long before you, I thought, and it will be here long after your small concerns are forgotten. Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego—it loves you, it hates you, it’s talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It’s never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.
I stood there for a long time. There was something shocking to me about being so still—to be not scrolling, but static. I tried to remember the last time I had felt like this. I walked down toward Provincetown through the ocean with my jeans rolled up. The water was warm and my feet sank a little into the sand. Little fish swam past and around my pasty white legs. I watched crabs burrow into the sand ahead of me. Then, after about fifteen minutes, I saw something so strange that I kept staring at it, and the more I stared, the more confused I became. There was a man standing on the water, out in the middle of the ocean. He was not on a boat, or on any floating device I could see. But he was far out at sea, and he was standing tall and firm. I wondered if, in my exhaustion, I had somehow begun to hallucinate. I waved to him; he waved back; and then he turned away, and stood with his palms out, facing the water. He stood there for a long time, and I stood there just as long, watching him. Then he began to walk toward me, seemingly on top of the ocean.
He saw my puzzled expression and explained to me that when the tide comes in in Provincetown, it covers the beach—but what you can’t see is that the sand beneath the water is uneven. Beneath its surface there are sandbars and islands of raised sand—and if you walk along them, it gives the peculiar impression to anyone watching that you are walking on water. I would see this man often after that, as the weeks and months passed, standing out in the Atlantic, his palms facing outward, still and unmoving for hours. That, I thought to myself, is the opposite of Facebook—standing perfectly still, looking out toward the ocean, with your palms open.
Eventually I came to my friend Andrew’s house. One of his dogs ran to greet me. We strolled down to have dinner together. Andrew had been on a long silent retreat the year before—no phone, no talking—and he told me to enjoy this sense of bliss, because it wouldn’t last long. It’s when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from. Oh, Andrew, you’re such a drama queen, I said, and we both laughed.
Later, I walked down Commercial Street, past the library, and the town hall, and the AIDS monument, and the cupcake store, and the drag queens handing out flyers for their shows that night, until I heard some singing. In a pub, the Crown & Anchor, people were gathered around a piano, singing show tunes. I went in. Together with these strangers, we covered most of the soundtrack of Evita and Rent. I was struck again by a big difference—between standing in a group of strangers singing with them, and interacting with groups of strangers through screens. The first dissolves your sense of ego; the second jabs and pokes at it. The last song we sang was “A Whole New World.”
I walked back to the beach house alone at 2 a.m. I thought about the difference between the glowing blue light I had spent so much of my life staring at, which keeps you always alert, and the natural light that had faded all around me, which seemed to say: The day is over; rest now. The beach house was empty. There were no texts or voice messages or emails waiting for me—or, if there were, I wouldn’t know for three months. I climbed into bed, and I fell into the deepest sleep I could remember. I didn’t wake up until fifteen hours later.
I spent a week in this haze of decompression, feeling almost stoned with a mixture of exhaustion and stillness. I sat in cafés and talked to strangers. I wandered around Provincetown’s library and its three bookstores, picking out yet more books I was going to read. I ate enough lobsters that, if that species ever evolves consciousness, I will be remembered as their Stalin figure, destroying them on an industrial scale. I walked all the way out to the spot where the Pilgrims first arrived on American soil, four hundred years before. (They wandered around, couldn’t find much, and sailed farther down, landing on Plymouth Rock.)
Strange things started to bubble up into my consciousness. I kept hearing in my head the opening lines of songs from the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a kid, ones I hadn’t thought about for years—“Cat Among the Pigeons” by Bros, or “The Day We Caught the Train” by Ocean Colour Scene. Without Spotify, I had no way to listen to the songs in full, so I sang them to myself as I walked down the beach. Every few hours, I would feel an unfamiliar sensation gurgling inside me and I would ask myself: What is that? Ah, yes. Calm. But all you’ve done is leave two lumps of metal behind; why does this feel so different? It felt like I had spent years holding two screaming, colicky babies, and now the babies had been handed over to a babysitter, and their yelling and vomiting had vanished from view.
Everything slowed down for me. Normally I follow the news every hour or so, getting a constant drip-feed of anxiety-provoking factoids and trying to smush it together into some kind of sense. In Provincetown, I could no longer do this. Every morning, I would buy three newspapers and sit down to read them—and then I wouldn’t know what happened in the news until the next day. Instead of a constant blast running all through my waking life, I got one in-depth, curated guide to what happened, and then I could turn my attention to other things. One day, not long after I arrived, a gunman went into a newspaper office in Maryland and murdered five journalists. As a journalist myself, that’s obviously close to my heart, and in my normal life, I would have received texts from my friends as soon as it happened, and then followed it for hours on social media, absorbing garbled accounts, gradually assembling a picture. In Provincetown, the day after the massacre, I knew within ten minutes all the clear, tragic details I needed to know, from a dead tree. Suddenly, physical newspapers—the very thing this gunman had targeted—seemed to me like an extraordinarily modern invention, and one we all needed. My normal mode of consuming news, I realized, induced panic; this new style induced perspective.
I felt like something was happening in that first week that was slowly opening my receptors a little—to more attention, to more connection. But what was it? I only began to understand those first two weeks in Provincetown—and why I felt the way I did—later, when I went to Copenhagen.
Sune Lehmann’s sons jumped into his bed, and he knew—with a lurch in his gut—that there was something wrong. Every morning, his two boys would leap all over him and his wife, excitedly shrieking, glad to be awake for another day. It’s the kind of scene you picture longingly when you imagine becoming a parent, and Sune adored his sons. He knew he should be thrilled by their joy at being awake and alive—but each morning, whenever they appeared, he would instinctively stretch out his hand, not for them, but for something colder. “I would reach over and grab my phone to check my email,” he told me, “even though these amazing, wonderful, sweet creatures are crawling around my bed.”
Every time he thought about it, he felt ashamed. Sune had trained as a physicist, but after a while, he figured he was going to have to investigate—at the Technical University of Denmark, where he is a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science—what was happening not just in physics, but in himself. “I had been obsessed with how I was losing my own ability to focus,” he told me. “I was realizing that, somehow, I was not able to control my own use of the internet.” He found himself mindlessly following the small details of events like the U.S. presidential election on social media, hour after hour, achieving nothing. This wasn’t just affecting him as a parent, but as a scientist. He said: “I came to this realization that my job in a way is to think something that is different from everyone else—but I was in an environment where I was just getting all the same information as everyone else, and I was just thinking the same things as everyone else.”
He had a sense that the deterioration he was experiencing in his focus was happening to a lot of the people around him—but he also knew that at many points in history, people have thought they were experiencing some kind of disastrous social decline, when in fact, they were merely aging. It’s always tempting to mistake your personal decline for the decline of the human species. Sune—who was in his late thirties at the time—asked himself: Am I a grumpy old man, or is the world really changing? So with scientists across Europe, he launched the largest scientific study yet conducted to answer a key question—is our collective attention span really shrinking?
As a first step they drew up a list of sources of information that they could analyze. The first and most obvious was Twitter. The site had launched in 2006 and Sune began this work in 2014—so there was eight years of data to draw on. On Twitter, you can track what topics people are talking about and how long they discuss them for. The team began to do a massive analysis of the data. How long do people talk about a topic on Twitter for? Has the length of time they focus, collectively, on any one thing changed? Do people talk about the topics that obsess them—the trending hashtags—for more or less time now, compared to in the recent past? What they found is that in 2013 a topic would remain in the top fifty most-discussed subjects for 17.5 hours. By 2016 that had dropped to 11.9 hours. This suggested that together, on that site, we were focusing on any one thing for ever-shorter periods of time.
Okay, they thought, that’s striking, but maybe this was a quirk of Twitter. So they started to look at a whole range of other data sets. They looked at what people search for on Google—what’s the rate of churn in that? They analyzed movie-ticket sales—how long did people carry on going to the cinema to watch a movie after it became a hit? They studied Reddit—how long did topics last there? All the data suggested that, as time passed, we were focusing less on any one individual topic. (The one exception, intriguingly, was Wikipedia, where the level of attention on topics has held steady.) With almost every data set they looked at, the pattern was the same. Sune said: “We looked at a lot of different systems…and we see that in every system, there is an accelerating trend.” It is “faster to reach peak popularity,” and then there is “a faster drop again.”
The scientists wanted to know how long this has been happening for—and that’s when they made a really eye-opening discovery. They turned to Google Books, which has scanned the full text of millions of books. Sune and his team decided to analyze books that were written between the 1880s and the present day using a mathematical technique—the scientific term for it is “detecting n-grams”—that can spot the rise and fall of new phrases and topics in the text. It’s the equivalent of finding hashtags from the past. The computers could detect new phrases as they appear—think of, say, “the Harlem Renaissance,” or “no-deal Brexit”—and they could see how long they were discussed for, and how quickly they faded from discussion. It was a way of finding out how long the people who came before us talked about a fresh topic. How many weeks and months did it take for them to get bored and move on to the next thing? When they looked at the data, they found that the graph looked remarkably similar to Twitter’s. With each decade that passed, for more than 130 years, topics have come and gone faster and faster.
When he saw the results, Sune told me, he thought: “Goddammit, it really is true…. Something is changing. It’s not just the same-old, same-old.” This was the first proof gathered anywhere in the world that our collective attention spans have been shrinking. Crucially, this has been happening not just since the birth of the web, but for the whole of my life, my parents’ lives, and my grandparents’ lives. Yes, the internet had rapidly accelerated the trend—but, crucially, this scientific team had discovered it was not the sole cause.
Sune and his colleagues wanted to understand what has been driving this change, so they built a complex mathematical model to try to figure it out. It’s a bit like the systems that climate scientists construct to successfully predict changes in the weather. (The full technical details of how they did it, if you’re interested, are in their published research.) It was designed to see what you could do to data to make it rise and fall at faster and faster rates in ways that resembled the decline in collective attention they had been documenting. What they discovered is there is one mechanism that can make this happen every time. You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
“It’s a fascinating explanation of why this acceleration is happening,” Sune told me. Today, “there’s just more information in the system. So if you think about one hundred years ago, literally it would take time for news to travel. If there was some kind of huge catastrophe in a Norwegian fjord, they would have to get up from the fjord down to Oslo, someone would have to write it up,” and it would slowly wend its way across the globe. Compare that with the 2019 massacre in New Zealand, when a depraved racist began to murder Muslims in a mosque and it was “literally streaming live,” so anyone could watch it, anywhere.
One way of thinking about this, Sune said, is that at the moment, it is like we’re “drinking from a fire hose—there’s too much coming at us.” We are soaked in information. The raw figures on this have been analyzed by two other scientists, Dr. Martin Hilbert at the University of Southern California and Dr. Priscilla López at the Open University of Catalonia. Picture reading an eighty-five-page newspaper. In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being—TV, radio, reading—it amounted to 40 newspapers’ worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day. (I’d be amazed if it hasn’t gone up even more since then.) The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.
How is this change affecting us? Sune smiled when I asked. “There’s this thing about speed that feels great…. Part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it’s awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out about it and learn about it.” But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion: “It becomes exhausting.” More importantly, Sune said, “what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth. Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes long time spans. And it takes commitment. It takes attention, right? All of these things that require depth are suffering. It’s pulling us more and more up onto the surface.”
There was a phrase in Sune’s scientific paper, summarizing his findings, that kept rattling around in my head. It said that we are, collectively, experiencing “a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.” When I read this, I realized what I had experienced in Provincetown. I was—for the first time in my life—living within the limits of my attention’s resources. I was absorbing as much information as I could actually process, think about, and contemplate—and no more. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.
Sune is a smiling, affable Dane, but when I asked him about how these trends will develop in the future, his body stiffened, and his smile turned to a tight pucker. “We’ve been accelerating for a very long time, and for sure, we’re getting closer and closer to whatever limits we have,” he said. This acceleration, he said, “can’t continue indefinitely. There’s some physical limit to how fast things can move. It must stop at some point. But I don’t see any slowing down right now.”
Shortly before I met with him, Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, “I was like—holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.” If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.”
Once he had learned all this, Sune deeply changed his own life. He stopped using all social media, except Twitter, which he checks only once a week, on Sundays. He stopped watching TV. He stopped getting his news from social media, and instead took out a newspaper subscription. He read many more books instead. “As you know, everything with self-discipline is not like it’s a thing you fix and then it’s fixed forever,” he said. “I think the first thing you have to realize is it’s an ongoing battle.” But he told me it had helped to trigger a philosophical shift in how he approached life. “In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a little bit difficult. What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.” He looked at me and smiled. “I wanted to give myself a chance at choosing something that’s more difficult.”
Sune’s study is pioneering, so it only provides us with a small base of evidence—but, as I dug deeper, I found two related areas of scientific investigation that helped me to understand this more. The first comes, intriguingly, from studies investigating if we can really learn how to speed-read. Several teams of scientists have spent years figuring out: Can you make humans read things really, really fast? They found that you can—but it always comes at a cost. These teams took ordinary people and got them to read much faster than they ordinarily would; with training, and with practice, it sort of works. They can run their eyes over the words quickly and retain something of what they are seeing. But if you then test them on what they read, you’ll discover that the faster you make them go, the less they will understand. More speed means less comprehension. Scientists then studied professional speed-readers—and they discovered that even though they are obviously better at it than the rest of us, the same thing happens. This showed there’s just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain’s ability to understand it instead.
The scientists investigating this also discovered that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements. After I read this, I looked again at my own habits. When I read a physical newspaper, I’ll often be drawn to the stories that I don’t understand yet—why, say, is there an uprising in Chile? But when I read the same newspaper online, I usually skim those stories, and click on the simpler, more scannable stories related to the stuff I already know. After I noticed this, I wondered if in some ways we are increasingly speed-reading life, skimming hurriedly from one thing to another, absorbing less and less.
One day, in my webless summer, after slowly reading a book, slowly eating a meal, and slowly wandering around town, I wondered if, in my normal life, I suffer from a kind of mental jet lag. When you fly into a distant time zone, you feel like you’ve moved too fast and now you are out of sync with the world around you. The British writer Robert Colville says we are living through “the Great Acceleration,” and like Sune, he argues it’s not simply our tech that’s getting faster—it’s almost everything. There’s evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and in just twenty years, people have started to walk 10 percent faster in cities.
Usually, this acceleration is sold to us in a spirit of celebration—the original BlackBerry advertising slogan was “Anything worth doing is worth doing faster.” Internally, at Google, the unofficial motto among the staff is “If you’re not fast, you’re fucked.”
But there’s a second way in which scientists have learned how this societal slamming on the accelerator is affecting our attention. It comes from studying what happens to focus not when we speed up, but when we deliberately slow down. One of the leading experts on this topic is Guy Claxton, professor of learning sciences at the University of Winchester, who I went to interview in Sussex, in England. He has analyzed what happens to a person’s focus if they engage in deliberately slow practices, like yoga, or tai chi, or meditation, as discovered in a broad range of scientific studies, and he has shown they improve your ability to pay attention by a significant amount. I asked him why. He said that “we have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.” If you go too fast, you overload your abilities, and they degrade. But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. “That’s why those disciplines make you smarter. It’s not about humming or wearing orange robes.” Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.
At some level, in Provincetown, I sensed this was true—so I decided to try these slow practices. The first time I went to see my yoga teacher, Stefan Piscitelli, I said to him: “This is going to be like teaching yoga to Stephen Hawking. After his death.” I explained that I was an immobilized lump of flesh designed only to read, write, and occasionally walk. He laughed and said: “We’ll see what we can do.” And so every day, for an hour, under his guidance, I slowly moved my body in ways I had never done before. At first I found it extraordinarily boring, and I tried to draw Stefan into arguing about politics or philosophy. He would always gently guide me back to trying to move into some weird pretzel shape I had never tried before. By the end of the summer, I was able to be silent for an hour, and to stand on my head. Afterward, sometimes with Stefan’s guidance, I would meditate for twenty minutes—a practice I had tried at various points in my life but always let lapse. I felt a kind of slowness spreading through my body. I felt my heartbeat slow down, and my shoulders—which are normally in a kind of permanent hunch—relax gently.
But even when I felt the physical relief from this slowness, it was always followed by a kind of bubbling guilt. I thought, How can I explain this to my sped-up, stressed-out friends back home? How can we all change our lives so we feel more like this? How do you slow down in a world that is speeding up?
I started to ask myself an obvious question: If life has accelerated, and we have become overwhelmed by information to the point that we are less and less able to focus on any of it, why has there been so little pushback? Why haven’t we tried to slow things down to a pace where we can think clearly? I was able to find the first part of an answer to this—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 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 myself. In fact, I do it often. Here’s the first example that came to mind: I have checked my email while thinking about the next draft of my book and planning out an interview I was going to do later that day. I did them all from the same toilet seat. (I apologize for putting this image in your head.) Where’s the fantasy in that?
Some scientists used to side with my initial gut instinct—they believed it was possible for people to do several complex tasks at once. So they started to get people into labs, and they told them to do lots of things at the same time, and they monitored how well it went. What the scientists discovered is that, in fact, when people think they’re doing several things at once, they’re actually—as Earl explained—“juggling. They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over, to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.”
There are three ways, he explained, in which this constant switching degrades your ability to focus. The first is called the “switch cost effect.” There is broad scientific evidence for this. Imagine you are doing your tax return and you receive a text, and you look at it—it’s only a glance, taking five seconds—and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another,” he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it, “and that takes a little bit of time.” When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”
So if you check your texts often while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts—you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterward, which can be much longer. He said: “If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted brain-processing time.” This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.
When Earl said this, I thought, yes, but it must be a small effect, a tiny drag on your attention. But when I went and read the relevant research, I learned there is some science suggesting the effect can be surprisingly large. For example, a small study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard looked at the IQ of some of their workers in two situations. At first they tested their IQ when they were not being distracted or interrupted. Then they tested their IQ when they were receiving emails and phone calls. The study found that “technological distraction”—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.
From there, the research shows, it gets worse. The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the “screw-up effect.” When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because—Earl explained—“your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off”—and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. “Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.”
Then there’s a third cost to believing you can multitask, one that you’ll only notice in the medium or longer term—which we might call the “creativity drain.” You’re likely to be significantly less creative. Why? “Because where do new thoughts [and] innovation come from?” Earl asked. They come from your brain shaping new connections out of what you’ve seen and heard and learned. Your mind, given free undistracted time, will automatically think back over everything it absorbed, and it will start to draw links between them in new ways. This all takes place beneath the level of your conscious mind, but this process is how “new ideas pop together, and suddenly, two thoughts that you didn’t think had a relationship suddenly have a relationship.” A new idea is born. But if you “spend a lot of this brain-processing time switching and error-correcting,” Earl explained, you are simply giving your brain less opportunity to “follow your associative links down to new places and really [have] truly original and creative thoughts.”
I later learned about a fourth consequence, based on a smaller amount of evidence—which we might call the “diminished memory effect.” A team at UCLA got people to do two tasks at once, and tracked them to see the effects. It turned out that afterward they couldn’t remember what they had done as well as people who did just one thing at a time. This seems to be because it takes mental space and energy to convert your experiences into memories, and if you are spending your energy instead on switching very fast, you’ll remember and learn less.
So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do. I wanted to know: How often are most of us engaging in switching like this? Professor Gloria Mark, at the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who I interviewed, has discovered that the average American worker is distracted roughly once every three minutes. Several other studies have shown a large chunk of Americans are almost constantly being interrupted and switching between tasks. The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are “multitasking”—which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day. I had to look again at that figure several times before I really absorbed it: most office workers never get an hour to themselves without being interrupted. This is happening at every level of businesses—the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company, for example, gets just twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes a day.
Whenever this problem is talked about in the media, it’s described as “multitasking”—but I think using this old computing term is a mistake. When I picture multitasking, I picture a 1990s single mother trying to feed a baby while also taking a work call and preventing the food she’s cooking from catching fire. (I watched a lot of bad sitcoms in the 1990s.) I don’t picture somebody taking a work call while also checking their text messages. We now use our phones so habitually that I don’t think we consider doing a task and checking our phones at the same time as multitasking, any more than we think scratching your butt during a work call is multitasking. But it is. Simply having your phone switched on and receiving texts every ten minutes while you try to work is itself a form of switching—and these costs start to kick in for you too. One study at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to take a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse. Other studies in similar scenarios have found even worse outcomes of 30 percent. It seems to me that almost all of us with a smartphone are losing that 20 to 30 percent, almost all the time. That’s a lot of brainpower for a species to lose.
If you want to understand how much harm this does, Earl told me, just look at one of the fastest-rising causes of death in the world: distracted driving. The cognitive neuroscientist Dr. David Strayer at the University of Utah conducted detailed research where he got people to use driving simulators and tracked how safe their driving was when they were distracted by technology—something as simple as their phone receiving texts. It turned out their level of impairment was “very similar” to if they were drunk. It’s worth dwelling on that. Persistent distractions have as bad an effect on your attention on the road as consuming so much alcohol that you got drunk. The distraction all around us isn’t just annoying, it’s deadly: around one in five car accidents is now due to a distracted driver.
The evidence is clear, Earl told me: there’s no alternative, if you want to do things well, to focusing carefully on one thing at a time. As I learned all this, I realized that my desire to absorb a tsunami of information without losing my ability to focus was like my desire to eat at McDonald’s every day and stay trim—an impossible dream. The size and capacity of the human brain hasn’t significantly changed in 40,000 years, Earl explained, and it isn’t going to upgrade anytime soon. Yet we are deluded about this fact. Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, discovered that the average teen and young adult genuinely believes they can follow six or seven forms of media at once. We are not machines. We cannot live by the logic of machines. We are humans, and we work differently.
When I learned all this, I realized another crucial reason why I had felt so good—and so mentally restored—in Provincetown. For the first time in a long time, I was allowing myself to focus on one thing at a time for long stretches. It felt like I had had an enormous boost in my mental capacity—because I was respecting my mind’s limitations. I asked Earl if, given what we know about the brain, it was fair to conclude that attention problems today really are worse than at some points in the past. He replied: “Absolutely.” We have, he believes, created in our culture “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation, as a result of distraction.”
This was hard to take on board. It’s one thing to have a hunch that there’s a crisis. It’s another thing to hear one of the leading neuroscientists in the world tell you we are living in a “perfect storm” that’s degrading your capacity to think. “The best we can do now,” Earl told me, is “try to get rid of the distractions as much as possible.” At one point in our conversation, he sounded quite optimistic, suggesting that we can all achieve progress on this, starting today. He said: “The brain is like a muscle. The more you use certain things, the stronger the connection’s getting, and the better things work.” If you are struggling to focus, he said, just try monotasking for ten minutes, and then allow yourself to be distracted for a minute, then monotask for another ten minutes, and so on. “As you do it, it becomes more familiar, your brain gets better and better at it, because you’re strengthening the [neural] connections involved in that behavior. And pretty soon you can do it for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, you know?…Just do it. Practice at it…. Start slow, but practice, and you’ll get there.”
To achieve this, he said you have to separate yourself—for increasing periods of time—from the sources of your distraction. It’s a mistake, he said, to “try to monotask by force of will—because it’s too hard to resist that informational tap on the shoulder.” When I asked him about how, as a society, we could find a way to do this, he told me that he’s not a sociologist, and I’d have to look elsewhere for answers to that.
Our brains are not only overloaded now with switching—I learned they are also overloaded with something else. Adam Gazzaley, who is a professor of neurology, physiology, and psychiatry at the University of California, helped me to understand it when I sat down with him in a coffee shop in San Francisco. He explained that you should think of your brain as like a nightclub where, standing at the front of that club, there’s a bouncer. The bouncer’s job is to filter out most of the stimuli that are hitting you at any given moment—the traffic noise, the couple having an argument across the street, the cellphone ringing in the pocket of the person next to you—so that you can think coherently about one thing at a time. The bouncer is essential. This ability to filter out irrelevant information is crucial if you are going to be able to attend to your goals. And that bouncer in your head is strong and ripped: he can fight off two, four, maybe even six people trying to barge into your brain at a time. He can do a lot. The part of your brain doing this is known as the prefrontal cortex.
But today, Adam believes, the bouncer is besieged in an unprecedented way. In addition to switching tasks like never before, our brains are also being forced to filter more frantically than at any point in our past. Think about something as simple as noise. There’s broad scientific evidence that if you are sitting in a noisy room, your ability to pay attention deteriorates, and your work gets worse. For example, children in noisy classrooms have worse attention than kids in quiet classrooms. Yet many of us are surrounded by high levels of noise, working in open-plan offices, sleeping in crowded cities, and tapping away on our laps in crammed coffee shops like the one we were sitting in at that moment. Rising noise pollution is just one example—we live surrounded by shrieking distractions calling for our attention, and the attention of others. That’s why, Adam said, the bouncer has to work “way harder” to keep out distractions. He’s exhausted. And so a lot more is fighting its way past him, into your mind—interfering with the flow of your thoughts.
As a result, a lot of the time, he can’t filter like he used to. The bouncer is overwhelmed, and the nightclub becomes full of rowdy assholes disrupting the normal dancing. “We have fundamental limitations,” Adam added. “We could ignore them, and pretend we’re capable of everything we would wish—or we can acknowledge them, and live our lives in a better way.”
In my first two weeks in Provincetown, I felt I had finally stepped out of the madness. I had gone to live in a monotasking world that wasn’t forcing on me the mental pressure of switching and filtering. This is how my summer is going to be, I thought to myself. An oasis of calm. An example of how to live differently. I ate cupcakes and laughed with strangers. I felt light, and free.
And then something happened that I didn’t expect. On the fourteenth day I woke up, and my hand reached immediately for the nightstand to grab my iPhone, as it had done every morning since I arrived. It found only my dumb-phone, on which there were no messages, only the option to tell the nearest hospital I had fallen over. I could hear the ocean whispering in the distance. I turned and saw all the books I had been longing to read, waiting for me. And I felt an intense sensation—something I couldn’t quite place. And at that moment, the worst week I had experienced in years began.