He has taken up where Nicholas Carr, the genius who in 2008 asked in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” left off when he wrote his 2010 book The Shallows (now with a 2020 edition). Still, he takes us through how he stitches together a plausible story of our unravelling concentration, including a brief description of why multitasking is a myth, the cost of switching from one task to another.Īn earnest visit to a professor here, privileged weeks of solitude away from distractions there. Researchers have worked on this exact hunch for years. I always think of the word hunch to describe that perfect intersection of understanding context and intuiting what will come next. He makes a few eureka claims, including his “hunch that there’s a crisis” of concentration. Instead, he recycles everything we have read about the impact of the internet but does it with style and appropriate attribution, in the genre of “non-fiction book designed to answer contemporary questions without enough scientific evidence”. The theme of fractured concentration is one with which I am pretty familiar (one might say, a living lab specimen) and so far, no one has come out to accuse him of plagiarism. In this latest book, Hari attributes widely and apparently well.
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