Çalınan Dikkat (Stolen Focus)

It came out in Britain in January 2022 from Bloomsbury, and in America the same month from Crown. About three hundred and fifty pages. Its full title is Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention, and How to Think Deeply Again.

The Turkish edition came out from Metis Yayınları under the title Çalınan Dikkat: Neden Odaklanamıyoruz?, translated by Barış Engin Aksoy, 320 pages. The sources do not agree on the year of publication. Kitapyurdu shows 2024, a library record and a published review give 2022, and another record mentions a third printing dated 2023. That is why I am not giving the year.

This is not an ADHD book. But it circulates widely among readers with ADHD, and one chapter is devoted directly to ADHD. That chapter will be the most important part of this piece. This review is based on the book's table of contents, the publishers' descriptions and published reviews. I can describe what the chapters argue only as far as those sources allow; I will not write as if I knew every sentence of the book.

The author

Johann Hari is a British journalist born in 1979. He studied social and political sciences at King's College, Cambridge, and wrote a column for The Independent. Before this he wrote Chasing the Scream (2015), about the drug wars, and Lost Connections (2018), which discusses the social roots of depression. All three follow the same pattern: he starts with his own trouble, talks to experts in every corner of the world, and in the end shows the social cause behind what looks individual.

There is a known stain in Hari's past, and it would not be honest to pass over it. In 2011, accusations of plagiarism and fabrication came up; he admitted some of them, was suspended from the paper and later left. The Orwell Prize he had received in 2008 was taken back. In September 2011 he also admitted that he had edited the Wikipedia entries about himself and about journalists he was in conflict with, using a fake account. None of this disproves the content of the book by itself. But it is a good reason not to accept the studies a journalist passes on without checking them, and reading this book calls for that habit.

The starting idea

The book opens with a confession: Hari sees that his own attention is falling apart. The introduction begins with a scene set in Memphis and is built around his godson Adam, who cannot pull himself away from screens.

Then he runs an experiment. He goes to the town of Provincetown in America and lives for three months without a smartphone and without a computer connected to the internet. The experiment was planned as a personal test. When he comes back, he realizes that the matter does not end with switching off the phone and pulling yourself together. He interviews hundreds of experts, and his thesis settles: attention is experienced as a matter of willpower, but it is actually a matter of environment. There are twelve separate causes, most of them out of the individual's hands, and most of the solution is social.

This thesis does something powerful: it takes the guilt from the reader and puts it somewhere else. As an adult with ADHD I understand this appeal very well. A book saying "it's not you" feels good regardless of its evidence, which is why we have to keep our own sense of measure.

Inside the book: speed, flow, sleep

The main body is made up of twelve causes. There are fourteen chapters, because the sixth cause is covered in two chapters and two solution chapters come in between.

Cause one: speed, switching and filtering. The speed at which information flows. I learned from a review that the book includes the calculation that the amount of information an average person encounters in a day is equal to one hundred and seventy-four newspapers. The real weight is on multitasking. According to Hari there is no such thing as multitasking, only rapid switching, and every switch costs time and accuracy. In the multitasking myth article on the site I wrote about the same mechanism from the ADHD side.

Cause two: the crippling of flow states. It leans on Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow. Flow needs a clear goal, work that feels meaningful to the person, and a challenge a little above their skill. According to a published review, Hari counts looking at a screen among the activities that give the least flow. What I think is good about the chapter is that it does not look for the solution in bans; it tries to bring the person closer to work they are deeply interested in.

Cause three: physical and mental exhaustion. Sleep. It is already known that insufficient sleep damages attention, memory and mood. Hari ties this to artificial light and to work patterns. Practical suggestions such as staying away from screens before bed and keeping the room cool come out of this. In ADHD this subject carries an extra layer. In the ADHD and sleep article I explained how the internal clock shifts.

Inside the book: reading, drifting, being watched

Cause four: the collapse of sustained reading. It describes how novel reading has declined and how reading on screens trains people to skim. The finding that people reading on screens understand and remember less appears in reviews as "screen inferiority." I see the cause of reading difficulty in ADHD less in screens than in working memory and in delayed reward. I opened this up in the article on the site about why reading books is hard with ADHD. The two do not contradict each other; they overlap.

Cause five: the disruption of mind-wandering. It argues that drifting off is not a waste of time but the place where ideas connect to each other. This idea is close to me. As someone who loves walking, the suggestion in the book I could defend most easily is walking without a phone.

Cause six, in two chapters: technology that tracks and manipulates you. This is the harshest part of the book. Shoshana Zuboff's concept of surveillance capitalism, and what former Google engineer Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, known as the person who designed infinite scroll, have to say are here. The logic is this: free platforms turn user profiles into advertising revenue, earnings grow with time spent on screen, and that is why the algorithms push anger and fear to the front. I learned from a review that the book includes the data that each word of moral outrage increases the rate at which a tweet is shared by about twenty percent. My article on infinite scrolling explains why this mechanism works so well in ADHD.

Inside the book: the limits of the individual, stress, the body, children

Cause seven: cruel optimism. In my view this is the book's philosophical backbone. Hari says that individual solutions are not enough on their own, and that the platform that leaves this to the user is also stringing the user along. There is a section that criticizes Nir Eyal's book Indistractable from this angle. The chapter after it, "the first glimmers of the deeper solution," moves from the individual to the system: limiting surveillance capitalism, public oversight of platforms, changes in design.

Cause eight: stress and vigilance. A mind that does not feel safe shifts its attention to scanning for threats. It makes sense, and it is very familiar in ADHD too. It is followed by a chapter describing places that have managed to reverse the wave of speed and exhaustion. I am giving the chapter's name approximately, and I could not verify the examples in it.

Causes nine and ten: diet and pollution. It describes how sugary and processed food makes blood sugar swing, and how pollutants such as lead affect children's brains. One reader review sees this chapter as the most weakly connected part of the book, because two separate subjects are squeezed into a single chapter. For the place of diet in ADHD, you can look at the ADHD and nutrition article on the site.

Cause eleven: the rise of ADHD. I deal with it separately below.

Cause twelve: the confinement of children. The decline of unsupervised outdoor play, packed schedules, exam pressure. Hari ties free play to the development of attention. It is a chapter I like, but I do not want to endorse this link without knowing its level of evidence.

The final chapter: The Attention Rebellion. Hari lists personal suggestions: precommitting by locking the phone at certain hours, trying to move toward flow instead of scolding yourself when you get distracted, taking a long break from social media, walking without a phone, sleeping. Then he says these are not enough and puts forward three social demands: banning surveillance capitalism, a four-day work week, and free play for children.

Its strongest points

The book names a condition, and that is worth a great deal. Being constantly scattered is experienced as one's own weakness; Hari shows that it is the result of an environment. As someone who thinks arranging the environment does more than willpower, I embrace this framework.

Second, it forces you to think about the individual and the system at the same time. There are individual suggestions, but the book does not say "these are enough." A Turkish review wrote that the book does not reach a clear decision on whether the individual or the system should come first, and that this leaves the reader undecided. I agree, but I think this is partly honesty too.

Third, readability. Hari is a good storyteller. He has published the recordings of the scientists he interviewed on the book's website, and at the end of the book there is a list of groups fighting for attention.

Weak points and criticisms

The most serious criticism is aimed at the level of evidence. In his review in UnHerd, psychologist Stuart Ritchie says that the claim that people's attention capacity has declined over time is not supported by real data. What Hari relies on is mostly anecdote, his own digital detox experience and a few small studies. Ritchie also reports that Hari admits in the book that there is no long-term study tracking attention capacity over the years. The same piece also points to an error: Hari wrote that Facebook had no feature showing nearby friends, whereas such a feature had existed since 2014. A small error, but it feeds the concern about checking sources.

Ritchie's second objection is to the tone of certainty. Hari mentions the limits of the studies and the disagreement among scientists in a single sentence and carries on with the same confidence. The third is the economic interpretation, that is, the blame placed on growth and capitalism. Ritchie reminds readers that growth has reduced poverty and disease. This is a political debate, and both sides have a valid point.

Matthew Sweet was harsher in his criticism, which made its way into the Londoner's Diary column. He said that the study behind the claim that young people focus on a task for only sixty-five seconds had been misread, and argued that the book should be withdrawn from publication. Hari replied that he had written that the study was small, that he had used the example only as an introduction, and that broader evidence stood behind it. I cannot decide who is right, but reading both sides gives enough information.

Then there is the book falling into the very thing it criticizes. A Turkish review notes that a book criticizing the internet's information overload also wears the reader out with information. I do not find this exaggerated.

The ADHD chapter

For me this is the most critical part. Hari treats ADHD as one of the causes and reads the rising number of diagnoses largely as an environmental and social picture. According to the Turkish review, he does not ignore the genetic share, and adds that genes can be switched on and off in ways sensitive to the environment. But he argues that the solution is free play, less exam pressure and a more relaxed school system instead of medication, and he frames medication as an individual solution to an environmental problem.

I see serious problems in this framework. In twin studies the heritability of ADHD is found to be around seventy percent, which means the environment is not the only explanation. The effect of medication has been measured in controlled studies; I explained which order the guidelines recommend in the medication or therapy article. A rising number of diagnoses does not count as environmental evidence on its own either; in the is ADHD overdiagnosed article I wrote about the role of awareness and of groups that had been overlooked. If you are looking for a book that discusses overdiagnosis without shouting, The ADHD Explosion is much more balanced.

The decision about medication is made with a doctor, and this book does not replace that. While reading this chapter it is easy to conclude, "ADHD is nothing but the environment, so the problem is not in me but in my surroundings." This conclusion is not fully supported even by the evidence the book itself gives.

Who it is for, and who it is not

A good start for anyone looking for a framework other than guilt for the question "why do I get so scattered." It is also valuable for making you look at subjects such as phones, sleep, play in children and the speed of working life together for the first time.

For a reader with ADHD who has just been diagnosed and still thinks "I am not good enough," its benefit cuts both ways. The system framework is comforting, but the ADHD chapter can pull in the wrong direction. It is better to read that chapter together with a doctor or a source you trust.

It is not suitable for a reader who expects a research report from the book and wants to see a solid study behind every claim. I would advise that reader to keep the source notes at hand.

Its place on the shelf

The closest book on focus on the shelf is Derin Çalışma (Deep Work). Newport looks at how individuals can build their own schedules, while Hari shows what is out of the individual's hands. Reading the two together makes sense: one is the diagnosis, the other the prescription, and both are written in a language that is a little too sure of itself.

In the debate on reading ADHD environmentally, Dağınık Zihinler (Scattered Minds) and ADHD Nation enter through the same door from different directions. Both have their own limits, and reading them side by side is more instructive.

Closing

Çalınan Dikkat should be read not like a research report but like a thesis book. One half of the thesis is sound: the environment shapes attention, and guilt is not a good guide. The other half is loose in terms of evidence, and the ADHD chapter is the loosest part. I would keep the book for the first six causes and read the rest by going back to the sources.