Why You Can't Pay Attention And Focus - Johann Hari

Les Goh. Here’s the timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:33 Why Johann Studied Attention
11:22 Parable of the TikTokkers
15:33 What is Attention & How Does it Work?
20:08 How Detrimental is Constant Task-Switching?
30:37 Should there be Systemic Changes to Improve Attention?
43:32 Flow States for Wellbeing
1:02:52 How Sleep Relates to Focus
1:12:51 The Top Causes of Attention Loss
1:25:47 Are We to Blame for Device Addiction?
1:39:03 Johann’s Strategies to Enhance Attention
1:51:14 Where to Find Johann

Of course the joke is. how many can sit thru the nearly two hours of this video.
Love your work Chris. Thanks for bringing some great topics to the fore

My attention to tasks and interests got better after I developed a routine of forcing myself to read. Some breath work before and after helps tremendously. It's gotta be a physical copy, though.

Oh god don't get me started. As a retired school teacher I look back on the wasted effort of trying to keep kids engaged. The problems began to arise in about 2014, but really struck home the year before I retire in in 2019. One thing we are taught is to be assertive at the beginning of a lesson, get kids attention and lay out succinctly what will be happening in the lesson, knowing they have just come from a lunch break or another exciting class. What I noticed was that after two minutes into an explanation that also involved getting them to remember what we did last time and tying it to this lesson, they would switch off and start talking to each other. They just stopped listening. This ties into the purpose of education being gradually changed in their minds. It has lost its obvious appeal and purpose to them in the context of the rest of their lives. It also seems to tie in with how kids relate to the emotionally satisfying things in the other parts of their lives and what gives them emotional fulfillment, rather than what needs to be done or achieved. So there is no compromise. They only want to do what feels right for them. Social media builds social networks that allow for emotional bonding that excludes a whole range of other social connection, including educational environments and teachers. It as though they think it is irrelevant to what they see as important, so they have created emotional priorities which exclude other necessary things.
By my final year in the profession, I realized that kids were struggling to understand why they were even at school, as though it was an interruption to doing things they enjoyed, such as playing fortnight for hours on end and other things that were satisfying rather than annoying or not fun. I believe a generational issue related to having the capacity to understand the point of a basic education has manifested. This will not be turned around easily. I got the distinct impression when meeting a new class of year 7 students that they were bemused about the reason there was an old guy up the front of the class room. They actually looked confused and turned to look at each other. So I asked does everyone know why they come to school? Blank looks.
If I didn't know better I would say this is social engineering and has been planned a while ago, and is being implemented now.
The government of my state has just put out a request for retired teachers to come back into the work force, because younger teachers with little capacity emotionally to deal deal with the abuse and condescending attitudes and personal attacks by students, have left the profession in droves.

I feel like isolation has a lot to do with lack of focus. I'm only 30 min in to this video, so maybe he addresses this, but if I am around other people, I feel like I can get things done even if we're not talking. Where as when I am alone, the aloneness is practically unbearable, and I find ways to not feel alone. Typically that means Youtube, which distracts the shit out of me, and I end up not getting anything done. I used to think that it was the social pressure of being around people that helped me stay on task, and that might be part of it, but these days I'm sure there is a deeper component.

Most of us are recieving so much stimuli and information in the modern world, most of us are deficient in dopamine due to being bombarded with data and the amount of choice we have available to direct our attention. Johan Hari is spot on regarding the attention crisis we face today, especially in young people.

One of the best talks ever. I always really like Johann's work and he's an engaging speaker.

In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer's virtual memory resources are overused, leading to a constant state of paging and page faults, inhibiting most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse. The situation can continue indefinitely until either the user closes some running applications or the active processes free up additional virtual memory resources.

Brilliant. "If everyone agrees with you, it probably didn't need to be said."

The irony of listening to Chris and Johann talk about constant task-switching and attention whilst simultaneously sitting at work reading/responding to emails, working on spreadsheets, setting up meetings, etc...

7:25 When his godson says something is wrong but I don't know what it is I felt tears well up. We can be better than that. I just know we can.
Love your show C Dubbs.

Personally, I struggled with this a shit ton, until I found my passion and life purpose. So that solved my issue with this. Anyway, thanks for sharing. - Migue

One of the best podcasts I've seen. This was super informative and really interesting.

I've really noticed since covid started that my attention has dropped precipitously. So much information coming in plus the stress of it all and now I have such a hard time reading a book!

Wow, this is the most important podcast of all time. Everyone with an internet needs to watch this.

Anyone else start this podcast while death scrolling on fb/insta? Wooooooah what a stunned moment when I shifted focus and realized what I was doing!

Going to have to listen to this a few times and try to change my life.

I didn’t think this guy would ever be back! Interesting subject

This is an important video that people should see

I’d enjoy having a beer with this dude. Dry and blunt sense of humour by the looks of it.

Very interesting that you Chris easily read fictional opposed to nonfiction but that your podcasts which are all non fictional subjects, are so deepfylly meaningful and really brilliant.