“I think a major fear is the idea of not getting the most out of life. The internet in your pocket makes that almost feel possible cause you won’t miss anything if you pay enough attention to what the rest of the world is saying”
– Stolen Focus, Johann Hari
“How elaborately can you program an animal using these reinforcements? He discovered you can take it really far. You can teach a pigeon to play ping-pong. You can teach a rabbit to pick up coins and put them into piggy banks. You can teach a pig to vacuum. Many animals will focus on very complex—and, to them, meaningless—things, if you reward them right.”
– Stolen Focus, Johann Hari
“There’s a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.”
– Stolen Focus, Johann Hari
“Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for reasons I am most anxious to explain, the Age of Exposition began to pass, and the early signs of its replacement could be discerned. Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business.”
– Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman