WorkLife: The truth about the attention crisis with historian Daniel Immerwahr

Summary

WorkLife with Adam Grant: The Truth About the Attention Crisis with Historian Daniel Immerwahr

Release Date: July 29, 2025

In this enlightening episode of "WorkLife with Adam Grant," host Adam Grant engages in a profound conversation with Daniel Immerwahr, a distinguished historian and award-winning author from Northwestern University. Together, they delve into the pervasive narrative surrounding the so-called "attention crisis," challenging widely held beliefs and offering a fresh historical perspective.

---

Challenging the Attention Crisis Narrative

00:47 – The Thesis Unveiled

Adam Grant opens the discussion by introducing Daniel Immerwahr's provocative thesis: the attention crisis may itself be a distraction. Daniel argues that the widespread belief in declining attention spans is not only overstated but also rooted in historical patterns of moral panic.

Daniel Immerwahr:

"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."
(05:25)

A Historical Lens on Attention

02:28 – Parallels from the Past

Daniel draws parallels between contemporary concerns about digital distractions and historical anxieties over emerging technologies and cultural shifts. He highlights how society has long grappled with similar fears, suggesting that today's attention crisis mirrors past moral panics.

Daniel Immerwahr:

"There were a lot of things in the 18th century people were complaining about that sound shockingly modern, but they were talking about novels and pianos."
(06:06)

Debunking the Myth of Shrinking Attention

14:22 – Empirical Evidence Against Declining Attention

Adam presents a compelling piece of evidence from a 2024 meta-analysis by Andrew Juski and colleagues, which examined data from 32 countries over three decades. Contrary to popular belief, the study found no decline in attention spans among children and even an improvement among adults.

Adam Grant:

"Their data span 1990 to 2021. And what they show is that performance has not gone down over those three decades among children, and it's gone up among Adults."
(17:25)

Daniel Immerwahr:

"So it's gonna get really got more than two thirds. Keep going."
(33:10)

Attention Shifts, Not Losses

19:08 – Rethinking What We Pay Attention To

Daniel emphasizes that the issue isn't a reduction in our ability to focus but rather a shift in what captures our attention. From novels to video games, the mediums have changed, but the capacity to engage deeply remains intact.

Daniel Immerwahr:

"The Internet has not turned us into passive zombies. We've also had moments where the Internet riles you up into this weird frenzy of like doing your own research and having heterodox opinions."
(23:35)

The Quality of Engagement Across Mediums

26:29 – Novels vs. Modern Media

The conversation explores the unique benefits of different mediums. While novels are lauded for fostering empathy and critical thinking, modern media like video games offer interactive and engaging experiences that also build valuable cognitive skills.

Adam Grant:

"There's a whole series of experiments that show that you're better at retaining information when you read it than when you listen to it because you have to work harder to process it."
(28:41)

Practical Takeaways on Managing Attention

31:17 – Strategies for Attention Management

Adam and Daniel share practical advice for navigating the modern attention landscape. They discuss the importance of setting boundaries and being intentional about where and how we direct our focus.

Adam Grant:

"My favorite one is just a simple to don't list. So my, my to don't list includes don't turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch."
(31:17)

Daniel Immerwahr:

"Take seriously people's hesitation about attention. Like when people are inattentive to something, don't just berate them for it."
(41:26)

Conclusion: Rethinking Our Relationship with Attention

The episode culminates with a thoughtful reflection on the nature of attention in the digital age. Adam and Daniel agree that while concerns about attention are valid, they often stem from misplaced fears rather than actual declines in cognitive capacity. Instead, the focus should shift to recognizing and valuing the diverse ways in which we engage with the world around us.

Adam Grant:

"My biggest takeaway from Daniel is that we have not lost the capacity to pay attention. What shifted is our motivation."
(41:59)

Daniel Immerwahr:

"One thing the past is really good at, one thing that is cool about being a historian is that it allows you to look at a maybe similar situation without the same overriding sense of what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong."
(36:37)

---

Key Insights & Reflections

• Historical Parallels: Concerns about attention are not new; similar fears have been voiced throughout history in response to changing technologies and cultural practices.

• Empirical Evidence: Recent studies contradict the narrative of declining attention spans, suggesting that adults may even be improving in their ability to focus.

• Shift in Focus: The real issue lies in what we choose to pay attention to, not in our inherent capacity to do so.

• Media Benefits: Different mediums offer unique cognitive and emotional benefits, from the empathy fostered by novels to the problem-solving skills developed through video games.

• Intentional Attention Management: Practical strategies, such as setting boundaries and curating our attentional focus, are essential in navigating the modern information landscape.

---

Notable Quotes

• Daniel Immerwahr:

  "We should make a case that we're paying attention to the wrong things, not that we can't pay attention anymore."
  (22:12)

• Adam Grant:

  "If there's enough desire, then you can basically reboot your focus."
  (14:38)

• Daniel Immerwahr:

  "It's weird, but we've had this attention crisis discussion rather a lot before."
  (06:28)

---

Final Thoughts

In "The Truth About the Attention Crisis," Daniel Immerwahr and Adam Grant provide a nuanced and historically informed perspective on a topic that dominates modern discourse. By challenging the prevailing narrative and presenting robust evidence, they encourage listeners to rethink their assumptions about attention in the digital age. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the deeper dynamics of focus, motivation, and the ever-evolving landscape of human attention.

Transcript

[Elise Hu]

Hi TED Podcast listeners. It's Elise Hu here from TED Talks Daily. Thanks for making our podcast part of your routine. We really appreciate it and we want to make your favorite TED podcasts even better. We put together a quick survey and we'd love to hear from you. It only takes a few minutes, but it helps us shape our shows and.

[Adam Grant]

Get to know you, our listeners, way better.

[Elise Hu]

Head to the episode description to find the link.

[Adam Grant]

Thank you again for listening and for.

[Elise Hu]

Taking the time to help our shows.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

This episode is sponsored by Greenhouse, the leading hiring platform helping companies get measurably better at hiring. In today's world of work, time is precious and talent is everything. But too often hiring gets bogged down in administrative tasks that slow teams down. That's where Greenhouse AI comes in. Greenhouse AI automates the tedious parts of the hiring process so recruiters and hiring managers can spend more time doing what they do best finding the right people for the right roles. With Greenhouse, you can pinpoint and engage top talent with precision streamline interviews using AI tools that handle the busy work and make faster, more confident hiring decisions. In a competitive talent landscape, having the right tech isn't just helpful, it's essential for building teams that thrive. Book your demo today to learn more about Greenhouse [e-mail] this episode is brought to you by Earth Animal. Most of us want to make better choices for ourselves, our families and the planet. Earth Animal is bringing that same mindset to pet care with a simple Our pets deserve products made with the same care and quality we'd want for ourselves. That philosophy led to Earth Animal no Hide Chews, a rawhide free alternative made with simple, wholesome ingredients. They're long lasting, easily digestible, and made in the USA by a certified bee corporation. It's a small switch, but one that shows a lot about how we care. Visit earthanimal.com and use code POD25 for 25% off your first order. Always supervise chewing. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by IBM. Is your AI built for everyone, or is it built to work with the tools your business relies on? IBM's AI agents are tailored to your business and can easily integrate with the tools you're already using so they can work across your business, not just some parts of it. Get started with AI [e-mail], the AI built for business.

[Ted]

IBM.

[Elise Hu]

You might not like the quality of the attention, you might not like the object of the attention, but now we're arguing about something different than like do people have the cognitive capacity to pay attention it just seems fairly obvious that we are living through an age of shortened attention spans when it comes to some things, but clearly lengthened ones when it comes to others.

[Ted]

Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Welcome back to Rethinking my Podcast with.

[Ted]

Ted on the science of what makes us tick.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Daniel Immerwar. He's a history professor at Northwestern University where he's won their highest teaching award. He takes his craft of studying the past very seriously.

[Elise Hu]

First of all, I should say that I currently live in an apartment without wi fi because.

[Ted]

Wait, you have no wi fi?

[Elise Hu]

I have no wi fi.

[Ted]

Wow, so you're basically living in the 90s.

[Elise Hu]

Oh, God, I wish. Yeah. I'm a historian, so my partner calls me a method historian, like a method actor. I want to know how they lived.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Daniel is the award winning author of the books Thinking Small and How to Hide an Empire. He writes for the New Yorker, where his piece what if the Attention Crisis is a Distraction? Is the best article I've read this year. He did a masterful job challenging us to rethink the widespread narrative about our inability to focus, which is what I want to talk to him about.

[Ted]

Well, let me ask you this. What is your thesis about? What's going on with our attention?

[Elise Hu]

I'm coming to this as a skeptic. So it's a kind of anti thesis, right? The thesis that everyone sort of intuitively thinks and that I intuitively thought as well, which is our attention spans are getting shorter. Can't be right. And I guess one thing that struck me as I was working through this was that we actually say two things about our unhealthy relationship with technology. One is that it's doing cognitive damage and it's making it impossible for us to focus on anything. And then we also say that it's polarizing us and that we're kind of sorted into separate worlds and now we almost inhabit separate epistemological spaces. And I don't think people have noticed that those are contradictory stories. Because the more that people get polarized, this is true politically, this is true culturally. The more they are in niches, like small fandoms for like a K pop band or, you know, the more they're in like political niches like QAnon, those people are deeply obsessive. And so the more that we're like 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.

[Ted]

Oh, that's such an interesting juxtaposition. I. I want to talk about this potential moral panic that we're facing around attention. And before we dive into it, I'm just curious about, like, what piqued your interest in the topic of our attention and what claims it. It's such an unusual topic for a historian to take on.

[Elise Hu]

The attention discussion is really loud, and as a historian, it's hard not to immediately think. We've had this discussion rather a lot before. I mean, I know it always feels new and fresh and urgent, and it certainly feels that way, including to me. But I know that there's been round after round after round of the attention crisis with people saying things that sound shockingly modern, but saying them in the 18th century and it's not obvious what to take from. That doesn't mean that the attention crisis isn't real, but I found that it was resonating with things that people have been worried about kind of throughout informational modernity. That's what made me want to think through this.

[Ted]

Well, take us back to the past a little bit. What were the attention suckers of prior eras? I'm thinking, like, did people think books were a problem?

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, they thought novels were a problem. So what's really funny is that the measure of our attentional failures today, which is canonically expressed as our inability to read long novels, especially War and Peace, those were the objects of attention panic back then. Priests worried that, you know, women reading these long novels were, you know, just engrossed by them and their minds were taken away from prayerful obedience. So, I mean, that kind of does something to you when you realize that the thing that we are wistful about and wishing that we could do again used to be the problem, used to be the junk food of a past era.

[Ted]

This is making me think about John Stuart Mill's distinction between higher quality and lower quality pleasures.

[Elise Hu]

Go on.

[Ted]

Now, we would say that a novel like War and Peace is a fairly high quality. It's, you know, it's complex, it's rich, it forces you to think cat videos less.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

So.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, so it seems like there's a kind of like. I don't know if this is wrong to posit, but I wonder if there's a sort of treadmill by which junky past culture then kind of seems more elevated to us now. Because it's not just novels that People in the past were worried about there was a whole crisis of the pianoforte, so, you know, pianos were entering and this would also drive people to distraction and madness. So, I mean, yeah, it's just crazy when you think about all the past informational or entertainment genres that were disturbing to people. Because when we look at virtually anything that someone is doing in the 18th century for entertainment, we think, well, that's going to class up the joint. And there's two possibilities. One is that we've just become so degraded and debased in our forms of entertainment that anything from the past, you know, even TV looks amazing to us now. Or it's just there's something perceptual about that, that we perceive the media of our time to be a lower order. But in the past, it all just kind of through the kind of rose colored glasses, it all looks great.

[Ted]

So as I hear you describe the two possible theories, it seems like you can make a case for both of them, but we're under appreciating the second.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, my favorite example is I found a 1843 complaint by the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, which, where he's just like going on about some technology that is. It sounds like he's describing an iPhone. He's like, the generation that is born after this, they're never gonna have real conversations. They're just gonna be like, in their separate corners and they're never gonna know how to talk to anyone because basic possibility for people existing in community has been eroded by this new technology. And he's talking about the stove replacing the open hearth. You know, like, that's nuts, right?

[Ted]

Wait, so because we can't gather around.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, because we're not supposed to gather for warmth. We're not gonna talk a single heat source. And he's just like, you know, all mortal intercourse will become frosty and people just yell at each other. It sounds just like us talking about our cell phones.

[Ted]

Wow.

[Elise Hu]

Okay. So it's fun to think about how much those complaints resemble ours. But it wasn't just people complaining. There were also people talking back. So there's a lot of novelists in the 18th century who have to defend this new popular commercial genre that they're working in the novel and they're hearing from tutting priests that this is going to wreck everyone's brain. And they're asking themselves, is that true? And so you start to get a lot of people saying, actually maybe it's good to be distracted. Maybe too much attention is bad for the brain. And maybe your brain has to Hop around a little bit. The novel Tristram Shandy is all about the pleasures of losing your train of thought. And you're thinking about one thing and then something else pops up and somehow that creates a connection. So there's a lot of real serious philosophical questions about is it a good idea to pay attention, how attentive should we be? And some worries that if we pay too much attention, A, we're intellectually missing things, or B, we just become overly attentive and we become like schoolchildren or servants rather than free intellectuals with our own kind of autonomy over our minds.

[Ted]

This is a hot topic in my world in the present, where on the one hand, there's a paper I really loved by Kim Elsbach and Andrew Harganon about workday design and the importance in cognitively demanding jobs of having mindless tasks that allow for attentional resets and mind wandering and creativity. And on the other hand, we have researchers like Sophie Leroy who study attention residue, where if I'm working on task A and then I shift to task B, my performance on task B suffers because task A is still partially active in my mind. And maybe that's good for task A, but it impairs task B. And so I think, I guess at some level this controversy speaks to the fact that just concentrating on one thing is a double edged sword.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. And there's two ways to think about that. Right. One, you can say like, okay, how good is that for you as someone who's setting out to work? And you might think the attentional residue might be really helpful. And often we have these accounts of mathematicians who working really hard on a proof and they can't solve it and they step on a bus and they're just like, oh, I got it now. Somehow pushing you into a different intellectual space works. But you could also ask, independent of how good of a thinker, hopping from one thing to another makes you, is it good to be a really attentive thinker? Or might you, just, as a subject for other reasons other than your intellectual success, need some kind of protection? And there's a lot of people by the 19th century who get really worried that capitalism is demanding a sort of machine like focus of people and that's not fair, right, that employers shouldn't get to fix your mind on one thing. And weirdly, we have this concern about, I mean, huge concern about ADHD now, but the hot diagnosis of the 19th century was something called monomania. You have been deformed by industrial capitalism. This is what Moby Dick is About. And so you can just only think of one thing and you're thinking too much of one thing, and that's going to drive you nuts.

[Ted]

Oh, I mean, what a great problem to have in the 21st century.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. It's interesting, right? And the concern there is like, yeah, maybe that's good for your employer. Like, maybe that makes you a good worker, but it's like it makes you screwed up in the head, like it's not good for your life.

[Ted]

It strikes me that another, I guess another variation on that theme is that at some level, if your employer gets the best of your attention, what's left for your family?

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. The model there is like, you have a certain amount of attentional resources those are extracted in the workday and then you come home and all you've got left is drinking a beer and going to sleep.

[Ted]

I think there's some good news on that front, which is for a number of years in psychology, the ego depletion model of willpower was popular. And the idea was that self control and focused attention were limited resources that were drained and had to be replenished. And my read of the evidence is that effect has consistently failed to replicate and it's considered debunked at this point, that it's not ability, it's actually motivation, that over long periods of time of having to concentrate, especially if you're doing something tedious or painful, at some point you lose interest in sustaining your effort and at that point you disengage. But if there's enough desire, then you can basically reboot your focus.

[Elise Hu]

That seems intuitively right to me. Like, I can think of times when I've been had a sustained interest in something and like I don't burn out on it and I can think of things where I have zero interest and I burn out within two hours.

[Ted]

That sounds oddly familiar.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

So this goes to the one thing in your article that I had to challenge.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

You wrote that psychologists can't measure attention spans.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

And I beg to differ because.

[Elise Hu]

Tell me about that.

[Ted]

In 2024, there was a meta analysis, a study of studies of attention spans.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

And I want to get your reaction to what the research found. But first I wanted to hear why as a historian, you thought that psychologists couldn't do this task. Because I think we are up to the challenge.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. So my understanding, and I'm happy to be corrected or educated on this, is that there just isn't the kind of thing, attention span that can be measured. This is not a failure of psychologists. It's a conceptual failure. We can measure people doing tasks and we can see how attentive they are to those tasks. And we could even measure over time, are they growing less attentive? And so there's a lot of studies where you have someone do a task and then you put the smartphone near them and does that make it harder for them to keep up with that? But that's not an innate capacity called attention span. That's a task specific thing. And weirdly, a lot of the tasks that we measure are people doing things like playing video games as some kind of psychological test that resembles a video game. And I think we can't. My understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that it would not be proper to say if someone, this guy's got an attention span of 3 minutes, whereas she has an attention span of 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Because all attention spans are task dependent, which means there's no kind of central, just like concept of an attention span in the way there would be a concept of someone's height or weight or something like that. Is that different from your understanding?

[Ted]

Fascinating. We don't disagree.

[Elise Hu]

Great. Yeah.

[Ted]

Disappointing. No, I think you're right. I think that this actually, this underscores the point about motivation versus ability. There's no such thing as a fixed capacity for attention in a human brain, because how long you can sustain your attention depends entirely on the task you're doing and. And what you feel about it.

[Elise Hu]

Sometimes when you read these studies and you're like, well, you know, we had people like, track a ball moving back and forth on a screen. And then, you know, we saw how long before they gave up. And I was like, give up earlier? That's a stupid thing to spend time on. Like I wanted to.

[Ted]

Although that makes it really hard then to track what, you know, what raises and lowers attention. But I'm with you there. Okay. So Andrew Juski and colleagues did this meta analysis where they had data across 32 countries three decades, over 20,000 people that are given the same tests of concentration.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

And they ask you to pay attention to various kinds of tasks and then measure basically how long you can sustain your attention in that task. And then what's your processing speed and how many errors do you make? According to the theory that the digital world is destroying our capacity to pay attention, we should see a drop over time.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

And their data span 1990 to 2021. And what they show is that performance has not gone down over those three decades among children, and it's gone up among Adults.

[Elise Hu]

Ooh.

[Ted]

And I just. I read this evidence and I thought, okay, here are psychologists landing at the same conclusion that you reached as a historian.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. I mean, are we having a weird moment with our attentions? Absolutely. We all feel it. Everyone knows this. But the way that we normally say it, which is our attention spans are becoming shredded. We can focus for shorter and shorter amounts of time. We've lost the capacity to do things that would take long amounts of concentration that I find completely uncompelling. And the reason I find it uncompelling is that usually when we phrase that, it's like no one's reading War and Peace anymore. I'm like, okay, maybe that's true. I mean, I'm actually unsure how true that is. War and Peace made it onto the bestsellers list in the 21st century after a TV adaptation came out. But okay, let's just imagine that it's probably true that people are reading fewer 19th century novels, I guess. Have you watched anyone play a video game? Like, that's attention. That is a deep, profound attention. And we might not be excited about what we're paying attention to, but, like the thing that people usually interpret as a lack of attention, which is a teenager on their cell phone, you could just as easily interpret as someone intensively reading.

[Ted]

Yeah. And to your point about video games, the parents who are complaining about their kids usually can't wrestle their attention away from the screen.

[Elise Hu]

The parents are having the attention crisis. They're the ones who are upset about where their attention is going. And kids might have fewer issues about that.

[Ted]

Exactly. Yeah. You're complaining that maybe that your kid is paying attention to the wrong thing, but not that they lack the capacity to pay attention.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. And that's a different complaint. And if that's the complaint we want to make, let's make it an interesting reaction to the article. When I wrote it was a lot of older people wrote in and said, how dare you suggest that a video game is at all an appropriate object of attention, especially compared to an opera? And I was like, okay. I mean, we can have that conversation if you want. But my point is, one of the most popular video games is called Baldur's Gate 3. And this is not unusual in video games. It takes like 75 hours to play through quickly and easily twice that to play through the kind of like, take your time way. You know, we used to say that, like, getting through Wagner's Ring cycle, which is 15 hours, was, like, amazing. We were, like, really impressed when people, you know, I've listened to the entire ring cycle. We're talking here like five to ten ring cycles, and we're talking way more people doing it than ever. Listen to those Wagner operas.

[Ted]

Yeah. We did a whole podcast with Ash Brandon about the science on video games. And I don't know that there's any other activity that as reliably builds self control, focus, grit than a video game where you lose and you immediately then have to regroup and figure out how to improve and try again after you failed and manage the emotions of frustration when you don't hit your goal there. There are a series of cognitive benefits too. And I think, I guess it makes me wonder, what are people attributing to the opera that a video game lacks? There's the sort of the sense of class and refined taste that you're describing, but you're also sitting there a little bit less interactively when you're listening to music than you are playing a video game. And to me, that's a point against the opera, not a point in favor.

[Elise Hu]

It's genuinely unclear how interactive our art should be. Right. Because you can make the argument I want art that gives very little, like a poem. Right. So, like, you have to put in a lot to make that work in your mind. And there's a great joy in that. But also you get bored, your mind wanders. You know, a lot of people don't really like poetry that much. And, you know, you can make a gesso story about like, why the opera is like, cognitively or spiritually better. It's just not obvious to me that you can't make a similarly compelling case about a video game.

[Ted]

So I think that underscores your point then, that if we're gonna panic about something attentional, it should be that we're paying attention to the wrong things, not that we can't pay attention anymore.

[Elise Hu]

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And then the case becomes a little harder to make right because you have to say things like opera is better than a video game. And then you have to explain why. And maybe that's a little hard to do. Weirdly, you also have to explain why it's bad. Like, one of the things that the Internet does is create these sort of participatory feedback loops. So it's not just that you're watching something on the idiot box or that you're like participating in a TikTok trend. There's all kinds of ways that technology not just elicits, but has profit models that run on our participation. And so you also have to explain why this kind of upsurge of certain forms of democratic participation is a bad thing. That's a harder choice to make.

[Ted]

Yeah, you can call it creative self expression and opportunities to gain status and influence. You can also say you now get to become the idiot box.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah, but all the complaints about TV was that it turned you into a passive zombie. I think we just have to acknowledge that is not what the Internet has done to us. I mean yes, there are moments we've all had like you know, the like, you know, doom scrolling like a little thin thing of drool coming down from your mouth, but like we've also had moments or seen others have moments where the Internet like riles you up into this like weird frenzy of like do your own research and like having all kinds of heterodox opinions. Which is exactly what the idiot box was supposed to prevent.

[Ted]

That's such an intriguing way to reframe and and rethink the conversation we're having about attention.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

This episode is sponsored by Greenhouse, the leading hiring platform helping companies get measurably better at hiring. In today's world of work, time is precious and talent is everything. But too often hiring gets bogged down in administrative tasks that slow teams down. That's where Greenhouse AI comes in. Greenhouse AI automates the tedious parts of the hiring process so recruiters and hiring managers can spend more time doing what they do best, finding the right people for the right roles. With Greenhouse, you can pinpoint and engage top talent with precision, streamline interviews using AI tools that handle the busy work and make faster, more confident hiring decisions. In a competitive talent landscape, having the right tech isn't just helpful, it's essential for building teams that thrive. Book your demo today to learn more about Greenhouse [e-mail] this show is sponsored by Range Rover Sport. It's not just what you say, it's how you say it.

[Ted]

To truly make an impact, you need.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

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[Ted]

We talked about novels earlier.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ted]

And my read of the data is that novels do have benefits that other forms of reading don't.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, let's talk about that.

[Ted]

So I think the clearest findings have to do with empathy. Reading a novel versus more traditional nonfiction or watching TV or a movie, it puts you in the protagonist's mind.

[Elise Hu]

It's an empathy machine.

[Ted]

It is in a way that, you know, watching as an observer on a screen, it's hard to imagine yourself in somebody else's shoes. And that perspective taking, the theory of mind that comes from that, it's not a large effect, but it is a robust one. I don't want to lose that. And I hear all these teachers saying our students won't finish a novel anymore. How do you think about that problem?

[Elise Hu]

First of all, I am one of those teachers, so I know that feeling. What my students will permit for assignment length is about half of what I read when I was an undergraduate. We can talk about why that as.

[Ted]

If the students are in charge.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, because you know, in some way they are. Like, it is an actual democratic feedback process. You can give students longer assignments than they will allow, but pedagogically, it's going to be a mess. They won't do it. They'll randomly read half the stuff you assigned, but not the half you wanted, and you lose a lot of control and they learn less. So you can push. But there's some Negative consequences for the thing you're trying to do, which is teach them stuff. But it seems like people are paying less attention or less appreciative of long texts and more interested in long audio and video. And you could argue that audio and video podcasts, they give you an affective dimension. You get to hear someone's voice, you get to see what someone looks like, you get to see the visual presentation. And that might be meaningful. You might argue that text in the novel is actually a fairly lossy medium and that just someone talking to you on TikTok, you're getting a sort of real hit of someone else's point of view in a way that it's harder to access through a novel. Is that too much? Would you agree with that? I don't know.

[Ted]

No, to your point, I think you're illustrating a trade off that has some data behind it. Listening is better for immersion and engagement, or watching for that matter. But reading is actually better for critical thinking for the very reasons you described. There have been a whole series of experiments that show that you're better at retaining information when you read it than when you listen to it because you have to work harder to process it. And also you're more likely to stop and reread or to pause. It's a little bit less natural to do that in an audio or a visual medium. And so there is a risk to the quality of our thought if we lose words on a page.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ted]

Now let me get your reaction to something that I found puzzling from an attention perspective, which is lots of members of Gen Z not wanting to read a novel.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

On the other hand, there's also seemingly a generational trend to have subtitles on when watching TV and movies. Oh yeah, what is that?

[Daniel Immerwahr]

What's going on here?

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, that's really good. They're reading really good. Yeah.

[Ted]

They're choosing to read when they don't even have to.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ted]

I want to know why. How do you make sense of that?

[Elise Hu]

It is really true in ways that I think a lot of the, like reading crisis people haven't acknowledged that, like we are seeing a recursion to text and that videos are more likely to have text as part of them and maybe as subtitles, but maybe just like as an inbuilt part of it. And it seems like the idea that all we just want to do is watch the Honeymooners like the dumbest form of tv. No, it turns out that we're interested in all kinds of complex relationships between text and videos. And we haven't descended to the point where all we're doing is watching three second clips of the most sensationally in your face things that you can imagine. That's not where this is going. And it doesn't seem like it's headed in that direction. I mean, I guess I want to ask what are your worries?

[Ted]

Mine?

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

I think I have two worries. One is that people will regret where they place their attention, that there are better uses of my scarce focus. I didn't keep them in view. And the other is that the perception of an attention crisis becomes a self fulfilling prophecy people just take for granted. Well, attention spans are shortening. There's not a lot we can do about that. And so we should give up on, you know, on encouraging kids to read novels as opposed to being creative about how we engage with them.

[Elise Hu]

Do you, do you have like individual practices that are about attention and like sculpting your attention?

[Ted]

Yeah, many. My, my favorite one is just a simple to don't list. So my, my to don't list includes don't turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch.

[Elise Hu]

Ooh, yeah. Yeah.

[Ted]

More recently, don't scroll on social media unless there's nothing else I could be doing. Like if I'm sitting on a plane waiting for takeoff.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ted]

And those, those practices are really simple, but they're set up in advance and they give me freedom to control my attention in ways that I didn't have before I created them. And they seem like micro versions of your macro. No WI fi at home.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah. I took a theater class a while back with someone about like storytelling and that kind of stuff. And he told this story. He was like, I went to a doctor's office and I sat down and I turned the television off and I sat down and I didn't take out a phone and I didn't do anything. I just sat down and he's like, at the desk. They freaked out. They were like, do you need a magazine? He was like, no. And just the idea that he was like, no, I just want to sit here. I just want to sit here and think thoughts was like very upsetting enough that other people felt like they had to mobilize around it.

[Ted]

Wow.

[Elise Hu]

And I've thought about that a lot. I'm like, oh, is this a moment? Like I'm waiting for someone? Is this a moment I should just sit down? Like, maybe that would be okay.

[Ted]

Yeah. It's fascinating to think about people being troubled by the fact that you might just be Willing to sit there and let your mind wander or let your attention go wherever it goes. Okay, so, Daniel, just zooming out a little bit. We were talking about what may be a moral panic. I think more likely than not, you know, overblown, like, attention is not a crisis.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

At least in the way we're talking about it. I feel fairly confident in that thesis, like 68%.

[Elise Hu]

So it's gonna get really got more than two thirds. Keep going.

[Ted]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's real conviction for me. I think it raises kind of a broader question of. I've been told by historians who study the American presidency that they don't evaluate presidential effectiveness or greatness until at least 30 years have gone by because there's so much context they're missing and so much information to be released that it would just be premature to judge. It seems like evaluating crises and panics is subject to a similar constraint, which is it's almost impossible to know whether you're in one in the middle of it.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ted]

And yet I think you are remarkably good at addressing that question, or at least challenging us all to think harder and more carefully about how to answer that question. So can you explain to me how you think about evaluating a current event through a historical lens that allows for the perspective that you bring so. So skillfully?

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. So first of all, you know, let's talk about why historians have a kind of 30 year rule before they are often willing to weigh in on something. It's partly because it takes a while for all the documents to shake out and the things to get declassified. Although, you know, at the rate things are getting declassified now, we shouldn't be able to do anything before the 60s. It is more for the deeper reason, which is that 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. So are we in a panic? I mean, there's a lot of things that we're really concerned about, and the question is, are they panics? Panic is usually the term we use for like, well, we got a little overexcited about that one, didn't we? Or are we in an emergency? In which case freaking out is exactly correct. I mean, if you were asking me, I would say, okay, climate change, that's an emergency. Short attention spans, that's a panic. But other people clearly feel differently. So I think the question that you have to ask, which is hard to do, is to be like, all right, what are the things that I'm worried about. Let me just take each of them one by one. If I were paid to argue the other side of it, what would I come up with? And could I come up with something that actually, now that I've done it, said it out loud, sounds compelling to me? Because I started with this attention crisis thing feeling exactly the same feelings that the people I'm arguing against still continue to feel. Wow, I have all those instincts. I would have said every single one of those things. Because that's how it feels. And that's part of what it is to live through a panic is to just have a kind of intuitive and urgent sense of rightness about a set of propositions which retrospectively you're like, ooh, maybe this weren't so correct.

[Ted]

So you really just. You just took the null hypothesis seriously instead of straw manning it. You really went with the steel man and changed your mind along the way.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah. No, that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. One thing the past is really good at, one thing that is cool about being historian is that it allows you to look at a maybe similar situation without the same overriding sense of what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong. And so that sometimes can give you a helpful perspective.

[Ted]

Okay, so let's take an example. This is not my view disclaimer.

[Elise Hu]

Great.

[Ted]

But I think I know people in Hollywood who would subscribe to this view. So comic books were on your list of things that people freaked out about once upon a time?

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ted]

And then we decided, eh, probably not that big of a deal.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Ted]

And yet some of my Hollywood friends would say, no, the second order consequence of comic books is that they gave us Marvel movies and ruined cinema.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ted]

And we underreacted.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. I mean, the comic book. What is, by the way, interesting about the comic book thing is that there was a guy called Frederick Wertham who wrote a book called the Seduction of the innocents in 1954 that was like the anti comic book book. We've now had, you know, decades with comic books. And of all the things that make us dumb and awful, like, comic books seem pretty low on the list. And so it seems silly if you go back and look at what Frederick Wertham was complaining about. He was complaining about the racism in comics books. He was like, these things are crazy. And he was not wrong about that. And so looking back on that, you're like, okay, the medium itself wasn't really the problem, but there is something, to our eyes, objectionable about rendering really gross racial stereotypes in visual form. And then feeding them to children without any parental supervision. Yeah, I get it.

[Ted]

Agreed. Okay. And then what about Marvel movies?

[Elise Hu]

Yeah. I mean, they're not amazing, Right? But let's talk about how they're bad, right? They're not dumb. They're actually overly complicated and they go on for a long time and you have to watch all of them to get it. So by a lot of the measures that we invoke when we're talking about good art and can't we get back to a time when we were reading long novels? I was like, well, I got some really good news for you about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is long and complicated and takes an enormous amount of patience and has all kinds of complex illusions. Because then you have to be like, okay, well, the comic book version says this and then the filmic version says that, and then Sony Pictures did it like this. And all the Spider man movies are jammed together because of multiverse, and now they're making knowing jokes about intellectual property when they're combining the different spider mans. Yeah, I mean, are those great movies? Probably not. But also, most movies are not great movies.

[Ted]

Well put.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

This episode is sponsored by IBM. Is your AI built for everyone, or is it built to work with your business's data? IBM helps you integrate and govern unstructured data wherever it lives so your business can have more accurate AI instead of just more of it. Get your Data ready for [e-mail] the AI built for business, IBM. This episode is sponsored by NPR's Life Kit podcast. There's this episode on Life Kit from NPR about making decisions you won't regret. The host, Marielle Segarra, has a gift for taking complex life challenges and breaking them down into actionable steps. What really resonates about Life Kit is how it tackles the stuff we're all dealing with but rarely get real guidance on. They've covered everything from avoiding common financial mistakes, to staying calm in emergencies, to building dating confidence. Each episode gives you concrete takeaways, not just theory, but strategies you can actually implement. Life Kit doesn't just offer quick fixes. It provides thoughtful conversations that unpack both the emotional and practical sides of personal wellness. Whether you're navigating relationships, managing money, or just trying to live with more intention, you'll walk away with a game plan. This isn't another self improvement podcast filled with fluff. It's practical wisdom for the decisions, big and small, that shape our lives. Listen now to the Life Kit podcast from npr.

[Adam Grant]

This episode is sponsored by Lumen. Your metabolism is like your body's engine. It powers everything you do, from how you move to how you feel. And when it's running smoothly, you feel the difference. More energy, Better sleep, Improved recovery. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach that helps you understand what your body is burning fats or carbs just by breathing into it each morning. Then the app gives you daily nutrition guidance personalized to your body's needs. This summer, stay in sync with your metabolism and feel your best, whether you're active, resting or anything in between. The warmer months are coming. Spring back into your health and fitness. Go to Lumen Me ted to get 10% off your lumen. That's L U M E N ME TED for 10% off your purchase. Thank you Lumen, for sponsoring this episode.

[Ted]

What do you think is the worst advice people give about attention?

[Elise Hu]

That everyone should pay attention harder. That if we just try harder, it'll work.

[Ted]

Good riddance. What's the best advice?

[Elise Hu]

Take seriously people's hesitation about attention. Like when people are inattentive to something, don't just berate them for it.

[Ted]

Yeah, there's a reason why they're not paying attention to what you want them to pay attention to.

[Elise Hu]

What a pleasure having this conversation.

[Ted]

Oh, this was a joy for me. Daniel, I can't thank you enough for joining. Your mind is every bit as riveting as I thought it would be, and maybe even more so.

[Elise Hu]

You are being totally flattering, but it's really good to talk about this stuff.

[Ted]

My biggest takeaway from Daniel is that we have not lost the capacity to pay attention. What shifted is our motivation. It's not that we can't focus, it's that we're interested in focusing on different things than we were in the past. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grann.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glaser. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar, our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson, our technical director is Jacob Winick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hylash, Van Vancheng, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong.

[Ted]

And Whitney Pennington Rogers.

[Daniel Immerwahr]

Original music by Hans Dale sue and Alison Layton Brown.

[Ted]

Do you have a hot take? An unpopular opinion you're keen to defend?

[Elise Hu]

Oh God, you're not going to get me that easily. Yeah, what's your terrible idea that you'd like to say out loud?

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[Elise Hu]

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[Elise Hu]

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[Elise Hu]

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[Ted]

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Ah really? Thanks Capital One Bank Guy what's in your wallet?

[Elise Hu]

Term supply See capital1.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC.

[Adam Grant]

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