prolog
What's Really Happening to Our Focus
What Concentration Problems and Rising Obesity Rates Have in Common: We May Lose the Ability to Think Deeply

Chapter 1: Too Fast, Too Frequent Multitasking - Focus is a Limited Resource
Information overload, shortening attention span │ What happens to concentration when you slow down │ The trap of multitasking │ The brain that can't filter out unnecessary information

Chapter 2: The Damage of Immersion - Skinner's Pigeon and Mihaly's Painter: What Do You Want to Be?
Technology applied to billions of users │ The forgotten pleasure of immersion │ What will we look back on at the end of our lives?

Chapter 3: A Sleepless Society - When sleep quality declines, the world becomes more murky in every way.
The first thing that disappears when you stay awake is the feeling of a hangover. People who are asleep don't access Amazon.

Chapter 4: The Age of the Novel's Passion - What Happens When Your Ability to Read Long Texts Fails
The Screen's Edge | How We See the World on Social Media | The Long-Term Effects of Reading Novels

Chapter 5: What New Research on Mind Wandering Tells Us - The Benefits of Letting Our Minds Wander
What Happens to Our Brains When We Mind-Drift │ Again, Failing to Mind-Drift

Chapter 6: Tech Companies Track and Control Us - Destroying Our Attention Is Their Business Model
The World's Greatest Magician's Story │ "Millionaire Maker" │ How to Capture the Attention of 2 Billion People │ Time Lost in Infinite Scrolling

Chapter 7: Fueling Distraction - How a Distracted Society Is at Risk
When tech companies give something away for free │ Whose interests is technology designed for │ A little more blame, a little less understanding │ We don't know much about algorithms │ What happens when group focus is broken │ Real threats and non-existent threats

Chapter 8: Small, Shallow Solutions - Why "The Problem Is Inside You" Is Wrong
Just press the "Do Not Disturb" button and everything will be solved? │ Then let them eat cake │ People on the other side of the screen who are breaking our self-control

Chapter 9: Witnessing a Radical Solution for the First Time - Why Did Zuckerberg Ignore Scientists' Research?
The Approach Zuckerberg Hates │ Technology for Humans

Chapter 10: Stress and Chronic Arousal - Why Our Ability to Resist Distractions Is Significantly Reduced
In the face of danger, our brains focus on just one thing: What the Finnish basic income experiment tells us.

Chapter 11: Places that directly challenge the logic of our society - How would a four-day workweek affect concentration?
Is this possible? │ The Right to Disconnect

Chapter 12: The Cheap and Bad Diet - Foods That Are Destroying Your Waist, Heart, and Focus
The brain is built through food intake │ MRI photos of a child flown in from Mexico

Chapter 13: Misdiagnosis of ADHD - What's Really Happening to Our Children While We Blame Genes
Your Son's Behavior Is Not Your Fault │ Animals Diagnosed with Psychiatric Drugs │ What Life Factors Lead to ADHD │ Children's Brains Are Most Vulnerable to Drugs │ Flaws in Twin Studies

Chapter 14: Children Who Are Physically and Psychologically Locked Up - Children Play, Roam, Ask Questions, and Become Competent
An idea that has never existed in human history │ What we take away from children │ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn │ “Life begins the moment you step out of your comfort zone” │ Children have desires

Epilogue
Concentration rebellion
Three Types of Focus | How the Pandemic Changed Our Focus | Exercises to Reclaim Focus | How Economic Growth Works | Why Focus is So Urgent for Humanity Now

How Are We Being Stealing Our Focus Without Even Realizing It?
30,000 Miles of Flight, Interviews with 250 Experts
A comprehensive exploration begins with the New York Times bestselling author.

All over the world, our ability to focus is collapsing.
American teenagers can't focus on one thing for more than 65 seconds.
The average attention span of office workers is just three minutes.
New York Times bestselling author and journalist Johan Hari embarked on an epic journey to meet leading scientists and experts from around the world to find out why this phenomenon is happening.
And in the meantime, we discovered that we were wrong about this topic.
We often think of inability to focus and distraction as a personal failure to exercise self-control when using digital devices like smartphones.
But that's not the case.
The author explains that the concentration problems we are currently experiencing are similar to the rising obesity rates in modern society.
Just as our food supply system and lifestyle changes, centered around junk food, have contributed to the rise in obesity rates, the widespread rise in attention deficit disorder is a pandemic created by our modern social systems.
Along the way, the author travels from a Silicon Valley dissident who discovered a trick to hijack human attention, to a vet who diagnosed a dog with ADHD, to a Rio favela suffering from a severe attention crisis, to a New Zealand company that found a surprising way to restore its workers' focus.
And we find that this widespread attention crisis is driven by 12 factors, including sleep deprivation, the breakdown of reading, and the manipulation and exploitation of our attention by tech companies.

From frequent multitasking to insufficient sleep
How Too Many and Too Little Factors Steal Our Focus

The author explains the causes that take away our focus by categorizing them into two broad categories: 'too much' and 'too little'.
Excessive multitasking, chronic stress and hyper-arousal, and the all-encompassing surveillance and manipulation of tech companies.
These include insufficient sleep, shortened novel reading experiences, immersive experiences, and lack of nutritious food.
People frequently multitask by opening multiple windows at the same time and switching between them to get the work done.
But is this really effective? Our brains constantly reset during frequent multitasking.
By the time you think about going back to what you were doing, your concentration and work speed have already decreased significantly.
The stress and arousal that are prevalent in modern people also take away concentration.
Let's assume a situation where bear attacks occur frequently.
An angry bear attacks a villager three times a week.
In situations where there is an obvious danger, such as a bear, the brain enters a state of 'hyperarousal', constantly looking for danger factors.
“Hyperarousal is essentially like looking for a bear wherever you go.


Our focus is on clues to potential danger.
“Instead of feeling what’s happening, or taking the lessons you need to learn, or doing the things you need to do,” he says, “this image is reminiscent of modern society, which puts us in a state of stress and arousal everywhere.
Unlike some factors that are problematic because they are too numerous, there are also factors that are problematic because they are too few.
While we sleep, a kind of 'cleaning' takes place in our brain.
The cerebrospinal fluid diligently performs a process called 'brainwashing' to clean out the toxic proteins that have accumulated in the brain during the day.
But when you sleep less, these functions decline and you continue to feel “hangover.”
What about food? "We're craving sugar and carbohydrate-laden snacks to keep us focused for short, sharp bursts," they say.
However, when we consume such cheap and poor carbohydrate foods, our bodies experience a 'roller coaster' phenomenon where blood sugar levels spike and then drop sharply.
It would be like putting rocket fuel into a BMW Mini.
In addition to this, the book comprehensively exposes the reality of concentration being stolen, including the surprising ways in which concentration is stolen, such as incorrect ADHD diagnoses, impaired immersion, and failure to manage mind-wandering, as well as the shocking causes that steal our concentration without us even knowing it.

The attention crisis is a 'social epidemic'
Beyond blaming individuals, launch a powerful counterattack against the system.

If people are losing focus so widely, without even realizing it, can we truly view the current attention crisis as merely a personal problem? We've lived in a culture that indoctrinates us to blame individuals first and foremost for focusing.
But this is “like reading a diet book to lose weight,” the author explains, calling the current attention crisis a massive “social epidemic.”
The specific elements of society's dysfunction make it extremely difficult for us to focus deeply and for long periods of time.
The author argues that to address this social epidemic, we must seek social solutions as well as individual efforts.
I suggest that we compare the current attention crisis to the climate crisis.
Even as we choke on smoke from devastating wildfires and face countless clear warning signs, our failure to act has left us facing an unprecedented catastrophe: the climate crisis.
The author warns that if the problem of concentration is left untreated, it could lead to an uncontrollable crisis for society as a whole.
“As the world’s attention spans burn out, we are being told to blame ourselves and change our habits.” In this way, “Stolen Attention” overturns the conventional wisdom of existing books that blame individuals for attention problems, leading us to expand the solution to a societal level that matches the scale of the problem.

Warnings from global experts on the front lines of attention deficit problems
“We may lose the ability to think deeply.”

To re-evaluate the problem of concentration and devise solutions that transcend the individual, the author embarks on a wide-ranging expedition spanning 30,000 miles across countries and sectors.
We interview experts at the forefront of attention issues, including neuroscientists, social scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, and we relentlessly pursue scientific clues and compelling evidence about why we lose focus.
Based on this thorough and extensive research, the author finally derives one fact.
“Over the past several decades, various factors that have been robbing us of our focus have been intensifying, sometimes dramatically.”
The author doesn't stop at simply overturning our misconceptions about concentration; he warns that if we continue on this path, we may ultimately "lose the ability to think deeply," forcing us to confront the undeniable reality of where the modern-day attention crisis is taking us.

A Bold Counterargument to the Attention Crisis
Presenting a new solution to refocus

The author, who has developed a compelling story about how we lose focus, suggests “three big, bold” goals as a way to regain it.
We need to ban surveillance capitalism, introduce a four-day workweek, and give children back their free childhood.
These methods may seem like vague and unattainable alternatives to us today.
But to overcome the “crisis of the human species”—the crisis of attention—we need an organized solution that can stand up to the massive system.
The author says that "Exercises to Regain Focus" will provide a solid foundation for winning the fierce battle against concentration, and emphasizes that if we are determined to fight, the battle is more winnable than we think.
“I realized that we now have to make a choice.
Do we value concentration? Is the ability to think deeply important to us? Do we want our children to develop concentration? If so, we must fight to regain it.
As one politician once said, “If you don’t fight, you don’t get it.” “Stolen Focus” demands a rethinking of the way we view the problem of concentration and presents a bold counterargument to the system.
By reading this book, we will gain a clear answer to how our concentration has been stolen, and only then will we be able to focus again.