Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: ReThinking with Adam Grant
Episode: "The truth about the attention crisis"
Guest: Daniel Immerwahr, historian at Northwestern University and author
Release Date: July 29, 2025
Main Theme:
Adam Grant sits down with historian Daniel Immerwahr to interrogate the widely accepted belief in a modern “attention crisis.” Together, they explore the origins of attention-related anxieties, challenge prevalent narratives about declining attention spans, and discuss the role of motivation, technology, and culture in shaping our focus.

Key Topics and Insights

1. Rethinking the "Attention Crisis" Narrative

• Contradictory Narratives about Technology
  • Immerwahr highlights two prevailing attitudes:
    • Technology is destroying our attention, making it impossible to focus.
    • Technology is making us obsessive and deeply focused within micro-tribes (e.g., fandoms or conspiracies).
  • “The more that we’re sorted out into micro tribes, the more we become obsessive and avid rather than sort of checked out and unable to focus on anything. So weirdly, the age of distraction is also the age of obsession.” — Daniel Immerwahr (03:16)
• The real conversation, according to Immerwahr, isn’t about losing the ability to pay attention, but about what we’re choosing to attend to.

2. The Recurring History of Attention Panics

• Historical Echoes
  • Attention-related panics are nothing new; similar crises have occurred with the rise of the novel, the pianoforte, and the stove.
  • “The measure of our attentional failures today… those were the objects of attention panic back then. Priests worried that women reading these long novels were just engrossed and their minds were taken away from prayerful obedience.” — Daniel Immerwahr (05:44)
  • 1843 example: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fear that the stove would erode community—eerily reminiscent of today’s anxieties about smartphones. (07:51)
• Cultural Treadmills
  • What was once considered “junk food” for the mind (like novels or the piano) is now nostalgically revered.

3. The Value and Complexity of Distraction

• Benefits of Mind Wandering
  • Historical and modern thinkers have argued that mind-wandering and task-switching can promote creativity.
  • Adam references research showing the value of “mindless tasks” for cognitive resets (09:59), and the concept of “attention residue” when switching tasks (10:13).
  • Immerwahr discusses the 19th-century diagnosis of "monomania"—being too fixated—versus modern concerns about ADHD. The problem once was too much attention, not too little.

4. Motivation vs. Ability in Sustaining Attention

• Debunking Ego Depletion
  • Grant highlights how research has moved away from the "limited resource" model (ego depletion) and toward understanding attention as motivation-driven.
  • “It’s not ability, it’s actually motivation…if there’s enough desire, then you can basically reboot your focus.” — Adam Grant (12:42)
  • Immerwahr agrees, relating personal experience of sustaining focus based on interest.

5. Can Psychologists Measure Attention Span?

• Grant challenges Immerwahr’s claim that “psychologists can’t measure attention spans.”
• After discussion, both agree there’s no fixed, innate attention span—attention is always task and motivation-dependent (15:32).
  • “All attention spans are task dependent, which means there’s no…central concept of an attention span in the way there would be a concept of someone’s height or weight….”—Daniel Immerwahr (15:12)

Key Research Highlight:

• Grant references a meta-analysis (16:09):
  • Data from 32 countries, 3 decades (1990–2021), 20,000+ people.
  • No decrease in attention performance among children; adults' attention improved.
  • “Performance has not gone down over those three decades among children and it’s gone up among adults.”—Adam Grant (17:03)
• Immerwahr: “The way we normally say it…which is our attention spans are becoming shredded—that, I find completely uncompelling.” (17:12)

6. Choosing the Objects of Our Attention

• Not an Attention Deficit, But an Attention Allocation Issue

  • The public debate often confuses having attention with what gets our attention.
  • Discussion of video games as highly engaging, attention-heavy activities (18:13).
  • “One of the most popular video games…takes 75 hours to play through quickly and easily…we used to say that getting through Wagner’s Ring cycle, which is 15 hours, was amazing.” — Immerwahr (18:37)
  • Grant notes the cognitive and emotional skills fostered by video games, sometimes more so than traditional “highbrow” activities (19:33).

• Shifting Cultural Value Judgments

  • The challenge, then, is explaining why opera should be judged as superior to video games (21:17).
  • Technology has not made us passive; the internet creates “feedback loops” that encourage interaction, creativity, and sometimes obsessive participation (21:07, 22:12).

7. Changing Media Consumption and Empathy

• The Novel’s Unique Strength

  • Grant: Novels cultivate empathy via perspective-taking, unlike TV or movies (25:43).
  • Immerwahr, as a teacher, reflects on declining attention for long texts and increase in preference for audio/video formats (26:09-26:23).
  • Tradeoffs: Listening/watching are immersive; reading is better for critical thinking and retention (27:33).

• Subtitles Phenomenon

  • Gen Z may avoid reading novels but simultaneously prefers having subtitles on, indicating complex new habits rather than a straightforward decline in reading (28:26-28:36).
  • Immerwahr: “It is really true that…we are seeing a recursion to text…we’re interested in all kinds of complex relationships between text and videos…” (28:43)

8. Grant’s and Immerwahr’s Practical Strategies for Attention

• Personal Practices (30:02)
  • Grant: uses a “to-don’t” list—e.g., don’t turn on the TV without intention, don’t scroll social unless there’s nothing else to do.
  • Immerwahr: No Wi-Fi at home, inspired by desire to shape his own environment and attention (02:26, 30:46).
  • Anecdote: The discomfort people display when someone is simply sitting and thinking in public (30:46-31:25).

Broader Reflections and Historical Perspective

• Evaluating Panics: The Historian’s Caution (32:13)

  • Historians often avoid judging crises in the moment—the “30-year rule”—because emotional urgency clouds objective evaluation.
  • “The present always feels so emotionally gripping that it's just really hard to separate the deep feelings of urgency that you have from any kind of analysis.” — Daniel Immerwahr (33:12)
  • Distinguishing between panics (overblown fears, e.g., attention crisis) and emergencies (genuine, e.g., climate change).
  • Immerwahr explains his method: deliberately arguing the opposing view to test the robustness of current assumptions (34:58).

• Comic Books and Marvel Movies Parable

  • Past panics (like comic books leading to “moral decline”) seem quaint in retrospect.
  • Marvel movies, often criticized by Hollywood insiders, are in fact long, complex, and demanding—contrary to the idea that media is getting “dumber” (36:49–37:44).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|-------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:16 | Daniel Immerwahr | “The age of distraction is also the age of obsession.” | | 05:44 | Daniel Immerwahr | “Priests worried that, you know, women reading these long novels were…engrossed by them and their minds were taken away…” | | 07:51 | Daniel Immerwahr | “Nathaniel Hawthorne…sounds like he's describing an iPhone. He's talking about the stove replacing the open hearth.” | | 12:42 | Adam Grant | “It’s not ability, it’s actually motivation…if there’s enough desire, then you can basically reboot your focus.” | | 15:12 | Daniel Immerwahr | “There’s no…central concept of an attention span in the way there would be a concept of someone’s height or weight.” | | 17:03 | Adam Grant | “Performance has not gone down…among children and it’s gone up among adults.” | | 18:37 | Daniel Immerwahr | “Baldur’s Gate 3…takes 75 hours to play through quickly…We used to say getting through Wagner’s Ring cycle…was amazing.” | | 21:17 | Daniel Immerwahr | “If that’s the complaint we want to make, let’s make it…you have to say opera is better than a video game. And why?” | | 22:12 | Daniel Immerwahr | “You can also say you now get to become the idiot box.” | | 25:43 | Adam Grant & Immerwahr | “It’s an empathy machine.” (on novels) “Yes, in a way that watching as an observer on a screen…hard to imagine yourself…” | | 27:33 | Adam Grant | “Listening is better for immersion…But reading is actually better for critical thinking…More likely to stop and reread.” | | 30:09 | Adam Grant | “My to-don’t list: don’t turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch.” | | 33:12 | Daniel Immerwahr | “The present always feels so emotionally gripping…hard to separate the deep feelings…from any kind of analysis.” | | 39:36 | Daniel Immerwahr | “That everyone should pay attention harder. That if we just try harder, it’ll work.” (worst advice) | | 39:43 | Daniel Immerwahr | “Take seriously people’s hesitation about attention…Don’t just berate them for it.” (best advice) |

Important Segments and Timestamps

• Arguing obsession vs. distraction, “the age of distraction is also the age of obsession” (03:16)
• Historical complaints about media/technology—novels, stoves, pianos (05:44, 07:51)
• Benefits of distraction and mind-wandering (09:59–11:59)
• Motivation vs. capacity in sustaining attention (12:42–13:27)
• Meta-analysis: attention spans actually improving in adults (16:09–17:03)
• Examples of deep attention in video games (18:37–19:33)
• Questioning the superiority of ‘high culture’ (opera, novels) over new media (21:17, 25:21)
• Empathy from novels vs. immersion from audiovisual media (25:43–28:13)
• Subtitles trend and the complexity of contemporary media habits (28:26–29:30)
• Grant and Immerwahr’s personal attention management practices (30:02–31:25)
• The historian’s “30-year rule” and evaluating panics vs. emergencies (32:13–34:58)
• Comic books, Marvel movies, and shifting standards of cultural value (36:49–37:44)
• Best/worst advice about attention (39:36–39:43)

Takeaways

• The so-called attention crisis is less about a loss of ability to focus, and more about shifts in what culture and technology motivate us to focus on.
• Historical panics about attention (novels, pianos, stoves) remind us to question present-day narratives about decline.
• Evidence does not support the idea that human attention spans are getting shorter in any fundamental way.
• The debate should shift from “can people pay attention?” to “what are the objects and social consequences of our attention?”
• Curation of attention is best achieved by intentional practices and thoughtful self-limitation, not through guilt or harder effort.

End of summary.