About this item
Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding it much harder to focus than he used to. He found that a life of constantly switching from device to device, from tab to tab, is diminishing and depressing. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions - even abandoning his phone for three months - but in the long-term, nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings - and learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong. In the U.S., teenagers now focus on a task for only sixty-five seconds on average, and office workers manage only three minutes. We think this inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices.
About the Author
Johann Hari is an award-winning British journalist and playwright. He was a columnist for The Independent and the Huffington Post, and has won awards for his war reporting. His work has also appeared in the , the , the , the , the , the (Britain's main gay magazine) , the and a wide range of other international newspapers and magazines. Hari describes himself as a "European social democrat", who believes that markets are "an essential tool to generate wealth" but must be matched by strong democratic governments and strong trade unions or they become "disastrous". He appears regularly as an arts critic on the BBC Two programme Newsnight Review, and he is a book critic for Slate. He has been named by the Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain, and by the Dutch magazine Winq as one of the twenty most influential gay people in the world. After two scandals in 2011 involving plagiarism and malicious editing of Wikipedia pages, Hari was forced to return the prestigious Orwell prize he had won in 2008, and lost his position at
