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Informationen zum Autor By Maggie Jackson - Foreword by Bill McKibben Klappentext In this gripping expose of our cyber-centric, attention-deficient life, journalist Maggie Jackson argues that we are eroding our capacity for deep attention and mindfulness - the building blocks of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. The implications for a healthy society are stark.Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion and detachment. With our attention scattered among the beeps and pings of a push-button world, we are less and less able to pause, reflect, and deeply connect.In her sweeping quest to unravel the nature of attention and detail its losses, Jackson introduces us to scientists, cartographers, marketers, educators, wired teens, and even roboticists. She offers us a compelling wake-up call, an adventure story, and reasons for hope.As the author shows, neuroscience is just now decoding the workings of attention, with its three pillars of focus, awareness, and judgment, and revealing how these skills can be shaped and taught. This is exciting news for all of us living in an age of overload.Pull over, hit the pause button, and prepare for an eye-opening journey. More than ever, we cannot afford to let distraction become the marker of our time.Preface to the New Edition The pace was brisk and the dialogue frenetic. The one-liners flew thick and fast. In a small New York theater, I was watching Distracted , a play centered on a mother’s struggle to cope with her nine-year-old son’s attention deficit disorder. The year was 2009. Onstage, a mammoth wall of television monitors spewing sports, news, and sitcoms competed with the actors for the spectators’ attention. And just in front of me, two women in the audience compounded the evening’s cacophony with a running sideshow of phone-checking and chatter. Nearly a decade ago, the world was growing ever more noisy and overloaded. We didn’t need to fire up a laptop, a BlackBerry, or its new competitor the iPhone to feel the insistent clamor of modern life. Were these glorious new riches for the heart and mind or an excess to be feared? we wondered. “This is an ADD society,” Distracted ’s playwright Lisa Loomer told an interviewer, “and I don’t know whether this is a dysfunction or a difference.” It was the heyday, after all, of our yearning to live in the fast lane. Multitasking was a job description, a sure mark of success. Juggling was a mother’s main ambition, the booster rocket to having it all. The problem of distraction, we fervently hoped, was someone else’s burden, a malady for those who simply couldn’t keep up. We didn’t need to pay much attention to the costs of this way of living, or so we thought. The future was ours to splice. Distracted , the play, was billed as a comedy. Now the curtain rarely falls on quick-cut, split-focus living. A crisis of inattention has crept onto center stage of an increasingly technological world. Skimming as a mainstay, days mired in trivia, interactions faceless and fractured, perpetually shattered focus: all these are no longer the daily diet of an elite and busy few. Toddlers stare with glazed eyes at the screen of the moment, oblivious to the real world blooming all around them. Early on, they learn that neat, easy answers come from gleaming little boxes that mesmerize their parents. In an era prizing diffusion, the young in effect are groomed to be half there, in class or at the dinner table, in the office or crossing the street. By one estimate, people check their devices an average of eighty-five times or more a day, anxiously searching for yet another dopamine-laced reward. So habituated are we to the siren song of being elsewhere that the mere presence of our own phone, silent and untouched, dramatically undermines our powers of focus. A Pandora’s box has sprung open. The struggle now seems real, and we are increasing...
