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AS SEEN ON ARMCHAIR EXPERT WITH DAX SHEPARD AND THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW, WALL STREET JOURNAL, NEW YORK TIMES AND MORE
**A “NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB” BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR**
**A COSMOPOLITAN BEST NEW NON-FICTION BOOK TO ADD TO YOUR TBR IN 2023**
**A “NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB” MUST-READ BOOK FOR JANUARY**
Rediscover your ability to pay attention with this groundbreaking new approach from “the definitive expert on distraction and multitasking” (Cal Newport).
We spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting our attention. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we’re interrupted by others.
In Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark reveals these and more surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention. She shows how much of what we think we know is wrong, including insights such as:Why multitasking hurts rather than helps productivityHow social media and modern entertainment amplify our short attention spansWhat drains our mental resources and how to refuel themThe four types of attention that we experience every day and how to recognize them
While the concept of “flow” has previously been considered the ideal state of focus, Dr. Mark offers a new framework to help explain how our brains function in the digital world: kinetic attention. This book reveals how we can take control, not only to find more success in our careers, but also to find health and wellness in our everyday lives.
From the Publisher
Publisher : Hanover Square Press; Original edition (Jan. 10 2023)
Language : English
Hardcover : 368 pages
ISBN-10 : 1335449418
ISBN-13 : 978-1335449412
Item weight : 1.05 kg
Dimensions : 15.54 x 2.92 x 23.5 cm
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K. I. –
Practical and Useful Tips
I found in this book many practical tips and tools to manage my adult ADHD. Recommend!
Wayne Hayes –
A fluorescent yellow book with the words ATTENTION SPAN written boldly across the cover cannot fail to catch the eye of a generation raised on clickbait. Given that the author, Dr. Gloria Mark, is a world-renowned researcher who has spent decades documenting how our devices drive us to distraction, the striking and alluring nature of the book’s cover can be no accident.Every decade or so, I read a nonfiction book that so profoundly changes my viewpoint, is so chock full of useful information that feels “bang-on”, that I am compelled to fill the inside cover with notes to ensure I don’t forget the useful lessons learned. Gloria Mark’s “Attention Span” is the latest among the very select few that have earned this accolade. (Others included Lila by Robert M. Pirsig of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fame; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel; Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin; and Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden.)Chock full of painstakingly gathered observations, clever insights and hard evidence, Dr. Mark’s book carefully documents how and why we have slowly lost our ability to pay attention as our devices—with their notifications and addictive click-bait—have slowly intruded into our everyday lives. In response, Dr. Mark and her research groups have placed themselves—carefully and unobtrusively—into the homes, offices, and devices of hundreds of test subjects over the past three decades. Starting in the 1990s by standing all day behind an office worker with a stopwatch and clipboard, and moving progressively to less intrusive and more sophisticated logging techniques, her team (with permission) have documented how our thoughts and workflows are disrupted by interruptions anywhere from dozens to hundreds of times per day, and how productivity and our health and well-being have suffered as a consequence. Some experiments are outlandish (and instructive!), like convincing an office run with military precision to entirely give up email for a week—with surprisingly few negative side-effects and several positive ones.Dr. Mark exposes with surprising and disturbing detail how the algorithms behind ads can track our behaviour—and even our daily mood—via sophisticated methods and to sometimes disturbing depth. For example, in one experiment she created a new social media account and refused to provide any identifying information, nor access to her contacts… and yet the site presented her with a few dozen “suggested” contacts, about half of whom she already knew. The (tentative) explanation was that they cross-referenced her phone’s internal IMEI number with her other social media accounts… a questionable practice and potential security hole that explicitly circumvents even our best attempts to protect our privacy.The book is chock full of deep-dives into psychology, technology, workflow, personal downtime, online advertising, social media, even how different video edits affect our perception of the content. After providing this context, the book ends with a top-down discussion of free will and agency, leading to practical advice on self-regulation—including how different personality types may need to regulate themselves differently.While some other reviews have complained that the book “rambles” and doesn’t get around to practical advice until the last few chapters, I think they’ve missed the point: a list of “tips and tricks” are likely to be forgotten without a good understanding—a mental model—of the surrounding context. In that sense it’s true that this is not simply a self-help book. It is a well-researched treatise intending to provide a deeper understanding of the why, the how—and the mechanisms by which—our attention has been usurped over the past few decades (unintentionally by users of devices, but intentionally by those who make them), written by a world-class expert who’s studied the process under a microscope for the duration. The context is deep and broad, and provides meaning and context to the tips and tricks provided in the last third of the book. I, for one, would find it difficult to remember and apply any such “tips and tricks” without the mental model provided by the background and context.As Dr. Mark observes, brain-imaging fMRI studies have shown that we become addicted to the reward we feel with new information learned after clicking a link. If the fluorescent yellow cover and bold title of this book are viewed as clickbait, you will not be disappointed with the reward earned by opening it and reading the content within.—Favorite quote: “fMRI studies show that curiosity triggers an expectation of a reward… So as we traverse the internet, links stimulate our curiosity; we select links, read more content, and are rewarded. Our mind is further aroused, we click on new links… and we easily fall down the rabbit hole. Curiosity is the drug of the internet.”
Sebastien –
Ce livre est illisible et inutilisable car il est arrivé en très mauvais étatTrès déçu
Brotkopf –
Pointless tangents, too many repetitions (it becomes insulting quite fast) simply too much noise for the signal. A little focus would have helped a lot. The irony of writing about attention and then not respecting the readers time/attention baffles me. Badly written, even for the pop science genre. Perhaps the second edition can be one fifth of the length to show at least a little respect to the readers attention?There are some worthwhile contributions to the discussion hidden in this book, mostly the role of rote activities for attention. I recommend to start reading at chapter 13 and skip reading the other chapters if more details are wanted.
Brian F Donovan –
We receive constant alerts, notifications and sounds telling us about a new email, a calendar invitation, the latest text message or a reminder to check out a social media post. That’s why I was pleased to read Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life, by Gloria Mark. She suggests, ‘Without top-down control of our attention, we open ourselves up to stimuli that steer our attention for us. Our mind becomes like a pinball propelled from lever to lever by text chimes, social media notifications and targeted ads.’She also explains that strange feeling we get that the distractions are not all that satisfying. It is called the “Zeigarnik effect,” a finding that, when a task is interrupted, whether by some other task or the end of the workday, “it creates a state of tension from that unsatisfied need to finish it, which stays with us and serves to remind us—over and over and over again—to return to the task.”Turning off notifications is only the first part of focusing on what we want to accomplish. We also need to address the self-induced distractions of our work environment, interruptions from others and doom scrolling on social media. Gloria Mark believes if we reduce the distractions, we can pay more attention to better quality things and make time for thinking deeper. Whereas if we push ourselves to the point of exhaustion, we lack the resources to come up with new ideas.I highly recommend this book if you’re ready to focus on what matters to you.
An amateur –
Confirms what we know with a good exposition on the fragmentation of our attention spans in today’s modern world. Always good to be reminded.