Attention: A Love Story

by Casey Schwartz Narrated by Casey Schwartz

Overview

"A rich inquiry into what it means to pay (and maintain) attention in a world increasingly permeated with distraction and interference.” -Publisher's Weekly

Combining expert storytelling with genuine self-scrutiny, Casey Schwartz details the decade she spend taking Adderall to help her pay attention (or so she thought) and then considers the role of attention in defining our lives as it has been understood by thinkers such as William James, David Foster Wallace, and Simone Weil. From our craving for distraction to our craving for a cure, from Silicon Valley consultants and psychedelic researchers to the findings of trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté, Schwartz takes us on an eye-opening tour of the modern landscape of attention.
*
Blending memoir, biography, and original reporting, Schwarz examines her attempts to preserve her authentic life and decide what is most important in it. Attention: A Love Story will resonate with readers who want to determine their own minds, away from the siren call of their screens.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

12/09/2019

Journalist Schwartz (In the Mind Fields) presents an insightful hybrid of memoir and academic study on the subject of attention. She approaches her topic from the perspective of a person who began abusing Adderall in college, recounting her multiple attempts at quitting—she finally succeeded after a decade of use—before moving on to others’ stories. These include a psychiatrist who, with intent focus, learned to interpret the initially indecipherable communications of an aphasiac stroke patient, and famous authors who have written about the subject, such as David Foster Wallace and Aldous Huxley. Thankfully, Schwartz goes light on the overexposed subject of the internet’s effects on the attention span. When she does discuss this, it’s with thought-provoking research, including work done by Tristan Harris, Google’s “design ethicist,” who writes about how apps and websites are engineered to monopolize their users’ attention. The narrative takes an odd turn near the end, as Schwartz recounts dealing with a family crisis with no particular bearing on the subject of attention, before visiting a spiritual retreat in Central America. Nonetheless, this is a rich inquiry into what it means to pay (and maintain) attention in a world increasingly permeated with distraction and interference. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

"Casey Schwartz’s new book, out in April, is helping me reevaluate my relationship with screens at a moment when I’ve never been more dependent on them ... Closing the laptop, putting the phone in the other room, and curling up with this book has been the best part of my day."—Vanity Fair

"Attention: A Love Story had me rapt. Casey Schwartz is a formidable reporter, a rigorous researcher and a true artist of prose. She makes complicated information easily understood and elevates seemingly simple observations to a richer plain of meaning. More than that, though (and this is the toughest job in the business) she is an honest broker when it comes to telling her own story. Unflinching yet never confessional, this book took me to uncomfortable places but always in the most capable hands. It’s the finest of its kind I’ve read in ages."—Meghan Daum, author of The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars

“An extraordinary and moving treatment of that most ineffable of topics: our own attention and how we spend it.  Schwartz has successfully mixed her own experiences with Tom Wolfe-like journalism to create an utterly engaging read."—Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants

"Schwartz’s book brims with ideas ... Schwartz is unusually self-aware, though she may not always think so. She is honest about her own vulnerabilities and self-doubt ... By personalizing her account, and her journey, she makes it a vivid, memorable thing, not simply instructive."—Post and Courier 

"An antidote to the countless manuals devoted to attention-hacking and technology detox, the tired denouncements of our iPhone dependence ... It is consistently interesting and beautifully written."—New Statesman
 
“An insightful hybrid of memoir and academic study ... Thought-provoking ... This is a rich inquiry into what it means to pay (and maintain) attention in a world increasingly permeated with distraction and interference.”—Publisher’s Weekly

“A personal and professional study of the struggle with attention in an age of distraction ...  Unfailingly honest ... By personalizing her account, and her journey, [Schwartz] enhances the book's potency without diluting its authority ... Being attentive is an acquired skill. Schwartz helps us think deeply and clearly about what it offers us.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Essential ... Attention: A Love Story asks two simple questions: ‘Why are we so susceptible to all the escape routes our technologies offer us in the first place?’ and ‘What are we fleeing?'”—Bitch Media

“With fascinating research and illuminating interviews, this is ruminative, provocative, and discussion worthy.”—Booklist

Library Journal

04/01/2020

Expanding an article for the New York Times Magazine, Schwartz (In the Mind Fields) explores the nature of attention. The most fascinating part of the book is Schwartz's exploration of her ten-year addiction to Adderall. An example of memoir at its best, this section of the book universalizes the personal. Unfortunately, the rest of the book does the opposite, with Schwartz constantly making assumptions about society in general. She is easily distracted, therefore, she concludes, we as a society are easily distracted. Nonetheless, she does take readers on detours through the lives and thoughts of writers who explored the idea of attention—David Foster Wallace, Aldous Huxley, William James, Simone Weil—which are worth reading. VERDICT Overall, an average memoir about one woman's struggle with addiction and subsequent attempts to find acceptance.—Derek Sanderson, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-12-01
A personal and professional study of the struggle with attention in an age of distraction.

After recounting her decadelong addiction to Adderall, journalist Schwartz (In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis, 2015) goes in search of attention in all its rather elusive manifestations, investigating its power to define a human life. In the process, she began to realize that the way all of us pay attention in this technological era had changed. Splintered attention and perpetual interruption are the norm. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Schwartz asks questions of singular significance: "Why are we so susceptible to all the escape routes our technologies offer us in the first place? What are we fleeing?" With a critical and open mind, the author assesses the works of such disparate writers as David Foster Wallace, Simone Weil, William James, and Aldous Huxley, and she applies no less rigor to exploring attention with such avatars of expanded consciousness as Stanislav Grof and Gabor Maté. Schwartz writes that the chief ingredients of attention are curiosity and joy and that attention is not only about having a meaningful life, but being in the moment, deriving pleasure from the very act of being absorbed in one's observations rather than burying one's self in a device. The author is unfailingly honest about her own addiction to the iPhone and her vulnerabilities and self-doubt. By personalizing her account, and her journey, she enhances the book's potency without diluting its authority. While techno-distractedness is not the sole province of the young, those who have known no other reality in their brief lives would seem to be most susceptible to the allure of Silicon Valley's steady stream of creations, each designed to be irresistible. Even though the author has "yet to enroll in a digital detox," she points the way toward "helpful digital minimalism strategies."

Being attentive is an acquired skill. Schwartz helps us think deeply and clearly about what it offers us.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940179013839
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Part III: A Brief History of What Matters

Chapter 5
 
So what, then, is the point? What is the reason to cultivate and devote one’s single-minded attention? Is this kind of attention even still a possibility? Was it ever? In the years after Adderall, these were the questions I often thought about.
 
I approached from all angles. Walking the loop in Prospect Park, I listened to attention self-help books through my headphones, books such as Deep Work by Cal Newport and Hyperfocus by Chris Bailey. I was listening not in order to help myself (or so I believed), but, rather, to get a sense of the latest advice, and the language in which attention was now commodified. Bailey, speaking in existentially unruffled tones, offered many useful suggestions: Leave your phone in the other room when you need to get work done. Drink more caffeine. “We are what we pay attention to,” he reminds us. Then he said something that surprised me: “Letting your attentional space overflow affects your memory.”
 
Indeed, I soon discovered that this is a classic finding of memory research, known for decades: distraction breeds forgetting. To say it another way, the way the neuroscientists say it, interrupting someone’s attention by introducing a “secondary task” (responding to a text message, for example) means this person will not “encode” their present circumstance in all the rich, associative detail necessary for a memory to form and hang around awhile. Attention, it turns out, does not concern only our present circumstance. It bears directly on both our past and our future. What will fail to make it into my memory bank because I’m too busy scanning headlines and replying to text messages to pay attention to my life? And yet, even in the midst of that very train of thought, I go ahead and pull my phone out of my pocket, for no particular reason.
 
That’s how it is. We have entered into a situation where the gadgets we carry around with us—and the cognitive rhythm they dictate—are pitted against the possibility of deep engagement, or thorough “encoding.” They ask us to be anywhere but here, to live in any moment but now. What struck me was this: we treat such changes as inevitable, even while we lament them, seek antidotes and alternatives, enroll in meditation classes, digital detoxes, silent retreats. I wanted to understand why we choose to pixelate our own attention spans, then hungrily search for ways to patch ourselves back together.
 
I found that I was still asking such basic questions as: What do we mean when we talk about attention? Perhaps it was inevitable to ask such questions now, in our Silicon age, glued to our screens as we are, our attention in pieces, forever divided among the countless demands our devices ask of it. In any event, these were the questions I found myself asking, found myself stuck with. In the years after Adderall, these questions became the quest I embarked upon.
 
In the beginning, I did not see how desperately personal this whole thing really was. After all, what is the question of attention really about, if not this: What is worth paying attention to? Hanging on to? What matters?

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