Losing Focus

I’ve noticed that it’s getting harder for me to concentrate when reading. I’m easily distracted and I lose focus. My eyes zone through a paragraph or two before I realize I haven’t processed any of the words that came into my visual field. It feels like I’m having a memory lapse. Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe, it’s because everyday things in my environment are stealing that focus away. This is the subject of Johann Hari’s recent book, aptly titled Stolen Focus. 

 

The book opens with Hari going on an internet-device fast. He takes three months away, cold turkey, from his fast-moving information-saturating journalistic lifestyle, and moves to a small fishing town sans devices. He goes on walks by the water, reads physical newspapers once a day in the morning, talks to people in town, and starts reading physical books he’s brought along to keep him company. The detox proceeds in stages, but he finds his ability to focus slowly resumes. What lessons did he learn?

 

Hari covers a dozen or so topics in brisk, very readable, engaging chapters. Many of the early ones went over material familiar to me: We’re drinking from an information firehose that’s exhausting with too much multitasking. We don’t get enough sleep. The bite-sized shallow copypasta of internet sound-bites, retweets, mindless videos, has made it difficult to engage in sustained reading. (Although binge-watching an engaging mini-series with a complex story arc is one example showing that we can focus in a different immersive medium.) And of course, the fact that social media and the way your devices are designed with their constant alerts, have made use of psychological principles to successfully grab your attention means our brains are losing the battle to the enemy of distraction. In later chapters, he discusses environmental pollutants, deteriorating diets, and other stress factors that promote hypervigilance, things that we may not have thought about. There are also vignettes discussing the virtues of a four-day workweek and universal basic income.

 

The two topics I want to highlight, because they are related to education, Hari calls the “disruption of mind wandering” and “the confinement of children, both physically and psychologically”. In interviewing psychologists and scientists, Hari learns that mind-wandering can be a good thing. He describes the following example: “When you read a book – as you are doing now – you obviously focus on the individual words and sentences, but there’s always a bit of your mind that is wandering. You are thinking about how these words relate to your own life. You are thinking about how these sentences relate to what I said in previous chapters. You are thinking about what I might say next. You are wondering if what I am saying is full of contradictions, or whether it will all come together in the end. Suddenly you picture a memory from your childhood, or from what you saw on TV last week… This isn’t a flaw in your reading. This is reading… Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book. This isn’t just true of reading. It is true of life. Some mind-wandering is essential for things to make sense.”

 

Perhaps, I need to consider what is actually happening when I think I’m losing focus in my reading. Maybe I’m more conscious of my mind-wandering now compared to when I was younger. And I do notice it mainly happens when I read non-fiction and when the material is denser. Perhaps when I see a glazed look on the face of a daydreaming student, it isn’t necessarily unproductive (although it could be – I can’t perform legilimency). Teaching at the college level, I’ve never had to exhort my students to ‘pay attention!’ although I could see teachers doing so in grade school. I suspect it happened to me in my early school years, but I honestly don’t remember. Our twenty-first century work culture is all about productivity. And mind-wandering seems to be the opposite of productivity. I think there is some truth to this, but mind-wandering may not be all bad. In my early years as a faculty member, being productive and efficient was important to me. Now, I’m less bothered about productivity, and slowly weaning myself away from trying to be overly efficient.

 

The second topic, closely related to the first, has to do with the more rigid structure of how many children grow up today, both at school but also at home. At least in middle-class families and more wealthy ones. In families trying to make ends meet, parents may barely have time to schedule their children’s activities or the children themselves may be out hustling to make a living. Hari’s point is that he thinks a loss of “free play” and the rigid structural confinements that have aggregated into a system of mass education are a big problem. (He experienced this as a child, half a generation younger than me.) While I grew up in a mass education environment, our school days were shorter (lack of facilities), and there was a lot of free play outside of school with my neighborhood friends. It’s hard for me to imagine how my psychological makeup would be different than someone who grew up in a much more structured environment – but these are my students today! Perhaps I need to make a better effort to understand them.

 

Reading about free-play approaches made me wonder if these are useful and applicable at the college level, or whether their largest impact is for younger kids, and that by the time they get to college there’s not much one can do. I also wonder if the highly structured environment has led to more stress and behavioral anomalies when students first come to college and many are living away from home for the first time in a seemingly less-structured environment. What sort of changes could I make in my classroom that incorporate the creativity of free play? Maybe I’m limited in my imagination in finding it hard to see how to do so in general chemistry or physical chemistry, the two classes I teach most. I’ve tried a few things (e.g. here and here), although I’m not sure they panned out all that well in terms of student understanding of chemical concepts. The experimenting goes on, I suppose.

 

I’m less worried about my own ability to focus after reading Hari’s book. That’s probably because my social media use is very low, I downscaled by doom-scrolling news reading from the early days of Covid, and I hardly use my mobile phone. I’m also very fortunate to live in an environment where I eat healthily and get enough sleep and exercise, and I have a job that pays decently and therefore don’t worry about making rent or being able to afford groceries. Not to mention I enjoy my job and I don’t find it stressful, which is a huge bonus. But just because I’m not experiencing as much stolen focus, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a huge burgeoning systemic problem. I should be part of the solution, and that means thinking about ways to do so in my field. I’m glad Hari’s book motivated me to consider such things.