Quotes from the book "Stolen Focus" Part II

Continued from "Quotes from the book "Stolen Focus" Part I"

Flow state: This is when you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to fall away, and you are flowing into the experience itself.

Distraction and multitasking kill flow, and nobody will reach flow if they are trying to do two are more things at the same time. Flow requires all of your brainpower, deployed toward one mission.

You have to be doing something that is meaningful to you.

It will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities.

Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us.

National sleep foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20% in just a hundred years.

If everyone sleep one hour more on an average, it would be an earthquake for our economic system.  Because our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people. The attention failures are just roadkill. Thats the cost of doing business.

Between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40%. 

Some 57% of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year.

Reading a factual account may make you more knowledgeable, but it doesn't have this empathy-expanding effect. Reading fiction books will improve your empathy or imagination. Reading non-fiction will improve your inspiration.

One of his studies showed that children are more empathetic if they read storybooks or watch movies, but not if they watch shorter shows.

In the fall of 2006, B.J Fogg testified before the FTC warning that there was a "potential dark side" looming, where it will be hard for you to tell "when you are being persuaded and when you are not".

The reason we have to be so careful about the way that we design technology is that they squeeze, they squish the entire world down into that medium and out the other end comes a different world.

humans make different decisions when we pause and consider.

Infinite scroll makes you spend 50% more of your time on social media sites. If billions of people are spending 50% more on a sting of social-media sites everyday, as a result total of 200,000 more human life times is now spent scrolling through screen.

A study by MIT found that fake news travels six times faster on twitter than real news.

It was simply selecting whatever would most shock and compel people to watch longer. Tristan started to look into this, and concluded: "No matter where you start, you end up more crazy".

Stress isn't something imposed on us. It's something we impose on ourselves.

The average weight gain for an adult between 1960 and 2002 was 24 pounds.

95% of people in our culture who lose weight on an a diet regain it within one to five years.

You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.

You need to be able to switch off the parts of your mind that are scanning the horizon for bears or lions or their modern equivalents.

Problems with money are really not good for concentration, if you have to worry about your financial situation it takes lot of capacity of your brain.

Frustrated biological objectives: Some domesticated horses crib/fake graze. Because it is innate nature of horses to graze 60% of the time. If you put them in a stable for long hours, they turn to fake grazing.

Zoochosis: The madness animal often develop when they are caged.

In the US, in apr 2020, during lockdowns, the average citizen spend 13 hours a day looking at a screen. The number of children looking at screens for more than 6 hours a day increased 6 fold and traffic to kids apps tripled.

Analyzing data from the 1880s, and it showed that every decade since, the way we experience the world has been getting faster and we have been focusing on any one topic less and less.

This is the belief that every year, the economy and each individual company in it should get bigger and bigger. That how we now define success.

Happy reading !!!