Who Stole Your Attention?

Johann Hari argues that your scattered focus isn't a personal failing: it was engineered. In Stolen Focus, he traces the theft to infinite scroll, slot-machine uncertainty, and the silent accumulation of sleep debt. A two-week study showed six-hour sleepers performed like the fully sleep-deprived while feeling fine. Even the "goldfish attention span" statistic, when a journalist traced it, led nowhere. The number is a ghost. The design is real.

You'll learn:

- Why removing the "load more" button was a turning point

- How sleep debt hides behind a plateau of feeling okay

- What attention researchers actually measure versus what headlines claim