Protect Your Precious Focus

The most valuable thing on earth is not gold, dollars, or yen but human attention.

Ten years ago I found it difficult to read books. When I got to a passage that required more intense focus, I put the book aside and reached for my cell phone. As literature has always been an important part of my life, I was both disappointed and surprised. Why had my lifelong interest suddenly become difficult?

When I put the cell phone in another room, it was then possible to read as usual. As a psychiatrist with an interest in what shapes our behaviors, I wanted to understand what made the phone so seductive that it trumped my passion for books.

At the time, there was not much research on the subject. The few studies that have been published suggest that the phone’s ability to capture our attention is due to it hacking a number of deep-seated psychological mechanisms, mechanisms that have helped humans survive.

It made me think of the Nobel Prize-winning researcher Nikolaas Tinbergen’s experiment with herring gulls. Herring gulls have a red spot on their beak. When the chicks are hungry, they peck at the parent’s spot and are fed. In the 1940s, Tinbergen painted a red spot on a pencil, a spot larger than the one on the beak. When he put the pencil in the nest, something strange happened: The chicks stopped pecking at their parents and pecked at the pen. Even though they were hungry, even though the parents were in the nest and even though the pen didn’t give them any food, they chose the pencil again and again.

Tinbergen called the large red spot on the pencil a "superstimulus" and by that meant a stimulus so strong that it trumps what nature has developed. I realized that the mobile phone is such a superstimulus, as there is nothing as rewarding in the real world as the screen, which interferes with other stimuli so powerfully that even my interest in books fell flat.

In the decade that has passed, many have had similar experiences and noticed how the things they used to enjoy have been outcompeted by screens that have progressively gotten better at attracting our attention. The result is that adults spend an average of four hours per day on their mobile devices and teenagers closer to six hours. In fact, screen time increases so quickly that surveys quickly become outdated.

Parallel to time spent on screens, our ability to focus has deteriorated. Psychologist Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine has long measured people’s ability to focus by clocking how often they jump between different tasks at work. In 2004, they spent an average of 150 seconds on one task before jumping to the next. By 2022, focus time had dropped to 47 seconds.

What makes the numbers particularly interesting is that Mark measured in real work situations, not in contrived laboratory experiments.

The most valuable thing on earth is not gold, dollars, or yen but human attention. Through increasingly sophisticated technology, companies like Facebook and TikTok have managed to hack our attention and thus become some of the most powerful and highly valued companies in history.

Our impaired concentration is therefore not a coincidence. The technology that today makes up such a large part of our lives did not have to have the goal of consuming the maximum amount of our attention. You have a hard time concentrating on this text because someone is making money off it. Someone has stolen your attention.

This development extends beyond the last decade’s era of smartphones and social media. The British author Johann Hari shows in his 2022 book Stolen Focus how a development that has been going on for 200 years has been put into turbo gear in the last decade with the result that we now live in a world so full of distractions that people find it difficult to be present in their own lives. The devil’s advocate asks why this is a problem. People must be allowed to decide for themselves what they want to spend their time on. If they choose to look at a screen six hours a day it is because they get something out of it.

As a psychiatrist, I know it’s not that simple. Our well-being rests on three pillars: sleep, exercise, and—most important—other people. These three protective factors against mental illness are being eroded in today’s society. We sleep less, move less, and don’t meet as often in real life. As a result, we become more vulnerable to depression and anxiety.

As the connected takes place at the expense of the disconnected, screens have therefore played a central role in the erosion of the three protective factors. Further, it is not so simple that we perceive the time on the screen as valuable. According to a survey, almost half of Swedish teenagers wish to spend less time on mobile and social media. They try to cut back but fail, something I personally recognize. There are many of us who, like Tinbergen's gulls, try to stop picking at the pencil without succeeding.

There is every reason to believe that it will become even more difficult for us not to pick the pencil, as we have taken only the first baby step into digitization. With artificial intelligence, the companies for whom our time is their money have been given the opportunity to create content so tailored to each of us that it will feel it is coming from someone who knows our innermost being—which thus becomes even more difficult to ignore and erodes our concentration even more.

So what can we do? To begin with, we need to be aware that every time we log into Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube, an artificial intelligence worth billions of dollars is trying to figure out: how can I get him or her to not log out. But we must also remember that it is not only our fault when enormously strong commercial forces have been allowed to make digital products so addictive that we find it difficult to resist.

Everyone realizes that it is not enough to tell people to wear masks to protect themselves from the smog of Bangladesh; authorities must also protect the city's residents by improving air quality. In other words, regulations are needed. I am convinced that future generations will find it incredibly naive that we implemented such powerful and addictive digital products as TikTok with virtually no regulation. However, the lack of the latter is not surprising from a historical perspective. History is full of examples of the introduction of a new technology of communication, whether it is the printing press or the radio. It is the first generation that pays the price. So also this time.

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