📖문해력 위기? 산만의 시대? 현대인들이 집중을 못하는 이유 (ft.도둑맞은 집중력, 요한하리 작가)

Today, I turned on the camera because I have a book that I want to recommend to those who are really curious. It's a book called Stolen Focus. I thought that this is a story that I really need. I gave a few books to my family and friends because I liked the book so much. But my family and friends thought, Hey, isn't this my story? We live in a world dominated by the 21st century, that is, the Internet and cell phones. That's why people all over the world feel similar. In particular, anxiety, indifference, and indigestion. These things lower the quality of life, and in serious cases, they lead to hatred. I think there are a lot of people who think that society is getting very anxious because they feel that it leads to a lot of violence that we see on the news. Haru, who wrote this book, is also looking for scientific experts related to immersion and concentration. I wrote a book about how serious anxiety and indigestion are in our society, what the real cause is, and how we should respond. In many ways, I got to know the writer's personal email. Last month, I had a two-hour video call, and I put a lot of thought into the book and the message I wanted to convey. I just thought, well, there's something wrong with me, right? I don't have enough willpower. I'm not strong enough. The kind of messages you're getting from the people who shout at you on YouTube. You know, just pull yourself together. Pull yourself together, I kept saying to myself. And actually, it was an experience with a young person that I really loved that really forced me to begin to investigate this. I've got a godson, and when he was nine, he developed a brief and very cute obsession with Elvis Presley. And every night when he would get me to tuck him into bed, it got me to tell him the story of Elvis's life over and over again. And one night, I mentioned Graceland, where Elvis lived. And I said, you know, people go and visit it. And his whole face lit up. And he said, well, Johann, will you take me to Graceland? And I said, sure, the way you do with nine-year-olds. And he said, no, do you really swear one day you'll take me to Graceland? And I said, I absolutely promise. And I didn't think of that moment again for 10 years until so many things had gone wrong. By the time he was 19, he spent literally almost all his waking hours alternating between his iPhone, his iPad, and his laptop. And his life was just this blur of WhatsApp, YouTube, porn. And it really felt like he was almost like moving at the speed of Snapchat. I wasn't that much better, right? I wasn't quite as bad, but I was staring at my own devices. And I thought, God, this is no way to live. And I suddenly remembered this moment all these years before. And I said to him, hey, let's go to Graceland. This is no way to live. Let's break this numbing routine. Let's go on a road trip all over the South. But you've got to promise me one thing, which is that if we go, you'll leave your phone in the hotel during the day because there's no point in going if you're just going to stare at your phone the whole time. And he took a while and he really thought about it because he wasn't happy living like this. And he said, you know what, let's do it. And I think it was two weeks, maybe three weeks later, we took off to New Orleans where we went first. And a couple of weeks later, we got to the gates of Graceland, right? There was no person to show you around anymore. What happens is you arrive, they hand you an iPad. You put in earbuds and the iPad shows you around, right? It says, go left, go right. I'm noticing as we're walking around, people just walk around Graceland staring at the iPad, right? But it's this slightly odd, I'm kind of looking at them and thinking, wow, we traveled a long way to get here, but no one's looking at it. And you told your grandson that he shouldn't be looking at a screen, but looking at the screen is part of the tour program. Exactly. It's like the world is constantly pushing you to be staring at screens. And every now and then someone would look away from their screen and I would smile and try to make eye contact with them. And I'd realize they looked away from the iPad to take out their iPhone, take a selfie, put the phone back, go back to looking at the screen. I turned to my godson to laugh about it. He was standing in the corner, staring at Snapchat. Because from the moment we landed, he literally could not stop. And I went up to him, grabbed the phone out of his hands, but he's stronger than me. And I said, look, I know you're afraid of missing out, but this is guaranteeing that you'll miss out. You're not present in your own life. You're not showing up at the events of your own existence. This is no way to live. And he stormed off, understandably. And I found him that night by the Heartbreak Hotel where we were staying up the street. And he was sitting by the huge guitar shaped swimming pool. And I went up to him and I apologized for getting so angry. And he didn't look up from his phone. He said, I know something's really wrong and I don't know what it is. We came to get away from that problem of distraction, but there was nowhere to escape to because it is the air we breathe. It's everywhere. And that's when I thought, okay, I need to get to the bottom of what's happened to us. And most importantly, how do we put it right? He says that he has realized that these factors are disrupting our concentration. In particular, the part about why distraction is a social problem was refreshing. First of all, we say that distraction is inefficient. Multitasking is not efficient. A teenager now believes they can follow seven forms of media at the same time. So what happens is scientists like Professor Miller, scientists all over the world, including in Korea, get people into labs and get them to think they're doing more than one thing at a time. And then they monitor them. And what they discover is always the same. You can't do more than one thing at a time. But what you do is you juggle very rapidly between tasks. You're like, what did you just ask me? What is this message on WhatsApp? What does it say on the TV over there? What is this message on Facebook? So what did you ask me again? And it turns out that juggling comes with a really big cost. The technical term for it is the switch cost effect, one of the most important terms people can learn, the switch cost effect. There's a scientific term for this. It's called the switching cost. If you do this job, you do that job, or you change jobs. Then every time you change jobs, you get a little bit of stress. Humans are animals that can't multitask. It's a bad pattern that reduces quality of life and decreases productivity. He's at Packard, the printer company. He got a scientist in to study their workers, and he split them into two groups. And the first group was told, just get on with your task, whatever it is, and you're not going to be interrupted. And the second group was told, get on with your task, whatever it is. At the same time, though, you've got to answer a heavy load of email and phone calls. So pretty much how most of us live. And at the end of it, the scientist involved, Dr. Glenn Wilson, tested the IQs of both groups. The group that had not been interrupted scored, on average, 10 IQ points higher than the group that had. To give you a sense of how big an effect that is, if you or me smoked cannabis together now and got stoned, our IQs would go down in the short term by five points. So being chronically interrupted is twice as bad for your intelligence in the short term as getting stoned. But you can see how big an effect this is, right? The technical term for it is negativity bias. Basically, you will stare longer at something that makes you angry and upset than you will at something that makes you feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash on the highway, you know what I mean. You stared longer at the car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street, right? Closer to our profession is when we see 90 good book reviews, we forget about them, and we see one bad one, and you stay up at night wanting to respond to that person, you know, saying that that's not what I meant. I completely agree. This has always been part of us. But when it combines with algorithms that learn who you are and what makes you specifically angry, it has a terrible effect. So picture two teenage girls who go to the same party and go home on the same bus. They both open their phones and do TikTok videos. And one of them says, that was such a great party last night. We danced to Ariana Grande, loved it, what fun. And the other one opens their phone and goes, Karen was an absolute skank at that party, and her boyfriend's an asshole, and just does an angry rant about everyone at the party. Algorithms are constantly scanning the kind of words you use. And they'll put the first video into a few people's feet, but it will put the second video into far more people's feet. Because if it's enraging, it's engaging, and what do you mean Karen's a skank, you're a skank? It's going to cause a fight, you're going to come back, you keep arguing, more and more people get drawn in. So we can talk about the sharing lovely videos about flipping water bottles, which I agree, love it. But the algorithm will mix that with increasingly negative and hostile videos, because you are more likely to keep scrolling if you see angry and hostile videos. In fact, Professor Jean Twenge in San Diego has shown in the United States, the average teenage girl now has the same level of anxiety that the average teenager admitted to a psychiatric hospital had in the 1950s. So we've got very high levels of anxiety. In fact, they discovered that a third of all the people who had joined neo-Nazi groups in Germany had joined because the Facebook algorithm specifically recommended it. You might want to join it, said, followed by a neo-Nazi group. It's a tension involved to attach to meaning. A frog can pay really good attention to a fly, and it doesn't pay very much attention to a stone. Because a fly is really meaningful to a frog. That's dinner, right? The stone, who cares? It's nothing to me, right? Schools that are about finding out what kids find interesting and infusing learning with meaning produce kids who can pay much better attention. So I spent a lot of time going to progressive schools for the book to see this in practice. For example, I went to a school in Berlin called the Evangelischer Schulzentrum, which has this fascinating model. So they start every school year by looking, by getting the kids to talk about something they find interesting. So when I was there, they'd come up with the question, could human beings ever live on the moon? It's an elementary school, they're young kids, right? And then half of all the lessons they do are exploring this from different questions. So they learn the history of people going to the moon or going to space. They learn the math of how do rockets get to the moon? How would you build? They learn the science of like, how do you bring oxygen to the moon? And because it's something, a question they wanted to answer, they're so much more plugged in to exploring it. You can see their excitement and they start coming up with other elements they want to explore, right? The difference between that and what I got at school. I imagine you got one of these back in the days. You know, the thing is now as an adult, Latin would be really interesting to me, right? I'd love to be able to read loads of ancient Roman texts. That's because I want now to understand it. I think about the disgrace of the fact that I was taught languages at school. I spent seven years learning those languages and I could not speak a damn word of them now because I was forced to do it and I didn't care. School systems infused with meaning produce kids who are much better able to focus. The problems that you point out is especially pronounced in Korea. It's interesting speaking to you and hearing what you're saying makes me, maybe it helps me to understand why the Korean edition is the best-selling non-English language edition of the book. What it makes you realize, and I think Korea is very acutely, but this is also true in Britain, the United States, many places, is how we ended up with a profoundly wrong conception of what productivity is. So at some level, we all know this because there's no one watching who would want the Korean soccer team to walk onto the match, having had five hours sleep the night before, really stressed out and anxious, and with their phone in their hand to answer text messages that might come in during the game. No one would want that, right? We all know the team would definitely lose if you did that, right? And we have to then apply that principle to ourselves, right? If it doesn't make your soccer team productive, it also doesn't make you productive. So there's a guy called Andrew Barnes, you should also have him on your podcast and introduce him, he's a great person. One day he was on a plane and he read a study that really shocked him, in The Economist or something like that, that found that the average office worker was actually only focusing on their job three hours a day. So they're sitting at their desk for eight hours a day, but they're actually only really focusing for three hours. And he thought, wow, this is a really bad deal for everyone. It's a bad deal for the worker, they're not doing the things they want to do, and it's a bad deal for the employer because you're paying people for eight hours and you're only getting three. So he decided to do an experiment. He figured, if I gave people an extra day off every week, so they only worked for four days a week, but I paid them the same as I currently pay them to work five days, if in return they were just 40 minutes more productive, if these figures applied to his company, they were just 45 minutes more productive, then that would make up for the extra day, right? And what they discovered seems at first really odd. The company achieved more in four days than they had in five, right? And this is something that's been found everywhere where they've tried a four-day week, they tried it in Toyota in Japan, they had a 40% increase in productivity. And again, it seems counterintuitive until you realize exhausted, worn out people are not productive. Let's look at Facebook's own internal research, which was leaked by a heroic whistleblower, Francis Haugen. In the wake of the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in my own country, which has had a catastrophic effect on the British economy, in the aftermath of that, Facebook set up a group of its own data scientists to figure out, well, did we play a role in promoting this rage, right? And what their own data scientists found is that Facebook's algorithm was inherently promoting hatred and division. It's not a coincidence that our individual attention is collapsing at the same time as our collective attention, right? The factors that are assaulting individual attention are profoundly harming collective attention. And democracy is a form of deep attention, right? It requires a citizenry that can pay attention, that can think deeply, that can distinguish truth from lies, can sustain pressure on politicians until they do the things they need to do. A society of people that can't do that can't be a democracy. The entire internet has existed for less than 10,000 days. Many of these changes that we're talking about are very recent, right? Lots of people watching can remember the world before many of these changes, right? We can fix this stuff if we want to, but it won't fix itself, right? Yes, of course, we want a life with lots of technology, but we also want a life where we can think deeply, where we can read books, where our children can play outside. If we want that, we can get it, right? The evidence is very clear about how to get there. I've seen it being put into practice all over the world, but it requires a shift in psychology. We need to stop blaming ourselves and stop blaming the factors that are doing this to us and taking them on, because we're not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg and King Musk for a few little crumbs of attention from their table. We are the free citizens of democracies, extremely hard-won democracies in the case of South Korea, and we own our own minds. And together, we can take them back if we want to. For example, depending on which city you live in, people have different levels of obesity. If the city itself is designed as a walking city, there are a lot of skinny people in that city, and if it's designed in a way that you can ride a car a little more comfortably than walking, obesity is bound to increase in that city. Wouldn't people's brains be the same? It's a really big problem. It's the biggest problem that I have to think about how to create a world where I can focus on what I want to achieve for a long time, and I agree with that to some extent, so I recommended this book today. That's it for today's Joseon's Exploration Life. I'll see you next time with a more interesting cultural history story. And please look forward to an interview with Walter Isaacson, the developer of Elon Musk, who followed Elon Musk for two years and wrote based on what he observed. Thank you. Goodbye.