保护你宝贵的专注力Protect Your Precious Focus
Is technology for you or against you? If you want to guard your valuable ability to focus, the first step is to realize that it is vulnerable.
科技是你的盟友，还是敌人?如果你想守护宝贵的专注力，第一步是意识到它其实很脆弱。
Ten years ago I found it difficult to read books. When I got to a passage that required more intense focus, I put the book aside and reached for my cell phone. As literature has always been an important part of my life, I was both disappointed and surprised. Why had my lifelong interest suddenly become difficult?
十年前，我发现自己很难专心读书。当读到需要更高集中力的段落时，我就会放下书，拿起手机。文学一直是我生活中重要的一部分，这种变化让我既失望又惊讶。为什么我一直以来的兴趣突然变得困难了？
When I put the cell phone in another room, it was then possible to read as usual. As a psychiatrist with an interest in what shapes our behaviors, I wanted to understand what made the phone so seductive that it trumped my passion for books.
当我把手机放在另一个房间后，我又能像以前一样阅读了。作为一名对人类行为成因感兴趣的精神科医生，我想弄清楚，手机为何如此有吸引力，甚至胜过我对书籍的热爱。
The few studies that have been published suggest that the phone’s ability to capture our attention is due to it hacking a number of deep-seated psychological mechanisms, mechanisms that have helped humans survive.
一些研究表明，手机之所以能牢牢抓住我们的注意力，是因为它激活了我们人类赖以生存的一些深层心理机制。
It made me think of the Nobel Prize-winning researcher Nikolaas Tinbergen’s experiment with herring gulls. Herring gulls have a red spot on their beak. When the chicks are hungry, they peck at the parent’s spot and are fed. Tinbergen painted a red spot on a pencil, a spot larger than the one on the beak. When he put the pencil in the nest, the chicks stopped pecking at their parents and pecked at the pen. Even though they were hungry, even though the parents were in the nest and even though the pen didn’t give them any food, they chose the pencil again and again. Tinbergen called the large red spot a “superstimulus”—a stimulus so strong that it trumps what nature has developed. I realized that the mobile phone is such a superstimulus, as there is nothing as rewarding in the real world as the screen.
这让我想起了诺贝尔奖获得者尼古拉斯·廷伯根（Nikolaas Tinbergen）关于银鸥的实验。银鸥的喙上有一个红点，雏鸟饿了就会啄那个红点，从而得到喂食。廷伯根在一支铅笔上画了一个比喙上红点更大的红点，当他把铅笔放进鸟巢时，雏鸟们竟然不再啄父母，而是选择了那支铅笔。即使它们很饿，即使父母就在巢中，即使铅笔不能提供食物，它们还是一次又一次地选择了铅笔。廷伯根将这个大红点称为“超级刺激物”——一种强大到可以战胜自然本能的刺激。我意识到，手机就是这样的超级刺激物，在现实生活中没有什么像屏幕那样令人即时满足。
In the decade that has passed, many have had similar experiences. Adults spend an average of four hours per day on their mobile devices and teenagers closer to six hours. In fact, screen time increases so quickly that surveys quickly become outdated.
在过去的十年中，许多人都有类似的经历。成年人平均每天花四小时使用移动设备，青少年则接近六小时。实际上，屏幕使用时间增长如此迅速，以至于调查数据很快就过时了。
Parallel to time spent on screens, our ability to focus has deteriorated. Psychologist Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine measured how often people jump between tasks at work. In 2004, they spent an average of 150 seconds on one task before switching. By 2022, focus time had dropped to 47 seconds.
与此同时，我们的专注力也在下降。加州大学欧文分校的心理学家格洛丽亚·马克 (Gloria Mark)研究了人们在工作中切换任务的频率。2004年，人们平均在一个任务上停留150秒；到了2022年，这一数字下降到了47秒。
The most valuable thing on earth is not gold, dollars or yen but human attention. Through increasingly sophisticated technology, companies like Facebook and TikTok have managed to hack our attention and thus become some of the most powerful and highly valued companies in history.
这个世界上最宝贵的资源不是黄金、美元或日元，而是人类的注意力。通过日益复杂的技术，像Facebook和TikTok这样的公司成功地“入侵”了我们的注意力，成为历史上最强大、估值最高的公司之一。
Our impaired concentration is therefore not a coincidence. You have a hard time concentrating on this text because someone is making money off that. Someone has stolen your attention.
所以，我们专注力的减弱并非偶然。你之所以难以专注阅读这篇文章，是因为有人正从中获利。你的注意力被偷走了。
This development extends beyond the last decade’s era of smartphones and social media. The British author Johann Hari shows in his book Stolen Focus how a development that has been going on for 200 years has been put into turbo gear in the last decade.
这种发展趋势并不限于近十年来的智能手机和社交媒体。英国作家约翰·哈里（Johann Hari）在其著作《被偷走的注意力》中指出，这种趋势已持续200年，只是在过去十年被大大加速了。
As a psychiatrist, I know it’s not that simple. Our well-being rests on three pillars: sleep, exercise and—most important—other people. These three protective factors against mental illness are being eroded in today’s society.
作为一名精神科医生，我知道事情并不简单。我们的幸福依赖于三大支柱：睡眠、运动，和——最重要的——人与人之间的联系。而这三种心理健康保护机制正在被现代社会不断侵蚀。
Further, it is not so simple that we perceive the time on the screen as valuable. According to a survey, almost half of Swedish teenagers wish to spend less time on mobile and social media. They try to cut back but fail. There are many of us who, like Tinbergen’s gulls, try to stop picking at the pencil without succeeding. There is every reason to believe that it will become even more difficult for us not to pick the pencil. With artificial intelligence, companies can now create content so tailored to each of us that it becomes even more difficult to ignore. So what can we do? To begin with, we need to be aware that every time we log into Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube, an artificial intelligence worth billions is trying to keep us there. But we must also remember that it is not only our fault.
此外，问题也不仅仅在于我们是否觉得使用屏幕的时间有价值。一项调查显示，几乎一半的瑞典青少年希望减少使用手机和社交媒体的时间。他们尝试减少，却屡屡失败。我们中有很多人，就像廷伯根实验中的雏鸟一样，努力想停止“啄铅笔”，却始终无法成功。我们有充分的理由相信，将来我们会更难“放下那支铅笔”。借助人工智能，公司可以为每个人量身打造内容，使其难以抗拒，进一步侵蚀我们的注意力。那我们能做些什么呢？首先，我们要意识到，每次登录Facebook、TikTok或YouTube，背后都有一个价值数十亿美元的人工智能系统在努力让我们不要退出。但我们也必须记住，这并不全是我们的错。
Regulations are needed. I am convinced that future generations will find it naive that we implemented such powerful and addictive digital products with virtually no regulation. History is full of examples of the introduction of a new technology of communication. It is the first generation that pays the price. Having said this, one cannot turn a blind eye to the enormous benefits of our digital tools. The discussion is not about whether we are for or against technology, but whether the technology is for or against the users.
How to Protect Our Focus
If you want to guard your valuable ability to focus, the first step is to realize that it is vulnerable and needs to be protected.
我们需要监管。我坚信，未来的世代会觉得我们在几乎毫无监管的情况下引入如此强大且易上瘾的数字产品，是非常天真的做法。历史上每次通讯技术的革新都是由第一代使用者付出代价，这一次也不例外。话虽如此，我们也不能忽视数字工具带来的巨大好处。讨论的核心不在于我们是否支持科技本身，而在于科技的发展是为了用户，还是为了控制用户。
如何保护注意力
如果你想守护自己宝贵的专注力，第一步就是意识到它是脆弱的，需要刻意保护。
A very simple tip that works for me: keep the mobile phone in another room. And if you want to understand a book in depth, read it slowly.
一个对我非常有效的小建议是：把手机放在另一个房间。如果你想深入理解一本书，就慢慢读。
If you read it as an audiobook, don’t increase the tempo to 1.5, reduce it to 0.5.
如果你用有声书阅读，不要加快播放速度到1.5，反而要调慢到0.5。
Let the flood of information flow slowly and deeply, not fast and superficial.
让信息如溪水般缓慢而深入地流过，而不是像洪流般快速而肤浅地掠过。
