Book: Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari

The following is a short summary of some points that I found interesting in the book "Stolen Focus".

Pigeon vs painters

 In 1948 Professor B. F. Skinner, an American psychologist, did an experiment to study the behavior and focus of a pigeon. Initially the animal was in a cage and hungry, so he observed the pigeon until it made a unvoluntary and distinct movement (this could a be a movement of a single wing, a torsion of the neck for instance) and in that moment he gave the pigeon food. After a few times the bird knew that every time that it did that movement it would be given food. Then, after a while the pigeon started to obsessively doing the movement to get the reward. The same happened in other studies with different animals and can also be applied to humans. This experiment got really famous in the psychology field and still to this day those results and implications are used by social media platforms to improve their algorithms so their users see the views, likes and comments as reward and start doing things that make them get more of those rewards.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist, saw this as a limited view of the human psychology and decided to focus his studies in the "good behaviors", like the making of art. He spent several months observing painters and observed that when they were in the process of creating, they lost track of time and entered in what appeared a hypnotic trance. What surprised Mihaly was that when the painters finished their work they just put it away and started another one. He saw that the point of painting was not to get the reward of the finished piece, but the process of painting itself. This state of loss of time and ego whilstdoing something that you enjoy he called "flow".

Fragmentation vs flow

When you are in a state of fragmentation of attention, you keep changing tasks, looking constantly to your phone, watching TV, doing some work and so on, you can't focus in anything for more than a couple of minutes. However, while doing something that really interest you, you loose track of time. This state of flow is achieved when what you are doing is the objetive itself and not some reward that you will get a the end of it.