In his new video above, the writer Daniel Pink pro­pos­es the fol­low­ing exer­cise: “Grab a book and time your­self. How long can you read with­out get­ting up or check­ing your phone? Real­ly try to push your­self, but don’t judge your­self if it’s only a few min­utes. Write down your time; that’s your base­line.” From there, you “train your atten­tion like a mus­cle: build it by start­ing small and grad­u­al­ly stretch­ing it.” This is just one of five strate­gies he rec­om­mends to “fix your atten­tion span,” a repair of which more and more of us feel in need the deep­er we get into the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. If even open­ing up a book sounds like a bit much, first take up Pink’s chal­lenge of watch­ing this four-and-a-half minute video “on full screen, 1x speed, with no dis­trac­tions.”

As with any endeav­or, it’s impor­tant to start small. Once you have your base­line, how­ev­er you’ve mea­sured it, you can set about improv­ing it. In order to place your­self well to do so, Pink rec­om­mends elim­i­nat­ing dis­trac­tions from your imme­di­ate envi­ron­ment, which has already been “rigged against you,” not least by social media com­pa­nies: hence the impor­tance of cre­at­ing a “no phone zone,” or at least per­ma­nent­ly turn­ing off noti­fi­ca­tions.

Draw­ing on the work of Cal New­port (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), he also sug­gests cre­at­ing cues — using cer­tain phys­i­cal move­ments, cer­tain music, cer­tain scents — that sig­nal your brain to go into work mode. But even in work mode, you should make sure to take breaks, delib­er­ate­ly, every 90 min­utes, or at what­ev­er inter­val your brain starts per­form­ing like a tod­dler in a melt­down.

On the high­est lev­el of all, we must “recon­nect atten­tion to mean­ing.” In oth­er words, we have to under­stand the rea­sons we’re doing a task, if any, before we can hope to con­cen­trate on it. “I learned this myself on my last book,” Pink says. “I was strug­gling. I was dis­tract­ed. I was on my phone and watch­ing sports high­lights rather than my work, and I real­ized the prob­lem was that I did­n’t know why I was writ­ing this book. I did­n’t have a pur­pose.” Only when he final­ly artic­u­lat­ed the ben­e­fit of doing that work, and then post­ed that artic­u­la­tion above his desk, did it start to flow. When next you find your­self unable to stick to a task on the job, a per­son­al project, or a book — whether you’re read­ing or writ­ing one — ask your­self: Why am I doing this? Maybe the answer will empow­er you to attend to it. Or maybe you’ll be bet­ter off doing some­thing else entire­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Cal New­port

The Sur­pris­ing Pow­er of Bore­dom: It Lets You Con­front Big Ques­tions & Give Life Mean­ing

Why You Should Only Work 3–4 Hours a Day, Like Charles Dar­win, Vir­ginia Woolf & Adam Smith

How to Read Five Books Per Month & Become a Seri­ous Read­er: Tips from Deep Work Author Cal New­port

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

In the two-thou­sands, the magi­cian-come­di­ans Penn and Teller host­ed a tele­vi­sion series called Bull­shit! In it, they took on a vari­ety of cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na they regard­ed as wor­thy of the tit­u­lar epi­thet, from ESP to Area 51, exor­cism to cre­ation­ism, feng shui to haute cui­sine. Their sar­don­ic argu­ments were enriched by clips of assort­ed inter­vie­wees —speak­ing in defense of the top­ic of the day. Penn once addressed the view­ers, say­ing that we might won­der why any­one agrees to come on the show, giv­en how they must know it will make them come off. But every­one, he explained, con­fi­dent­ly believes that their own ideas are the cor­rect ones.

That episode came right to mind while watch­ing the new Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, which deals with the phe­nom­e­non of over­con­fi­dence. Like the oft-cit­ed 93 per­cent of Amer­i­cans who believe them­selves bet­ter dri­vers than the medi­an, we all fall vic­tim to that afflic­tion at one time or anoth­er, to one degree or anoth­er; the more inter­est­ing mat­ter under inves­ti­ga­tion is why that should be so.

One can always point to what T. S. Eliot called “the end­less strug­gle to think well of them­selves”: want­i­ng to believe that we know it all, we take pains to present our­selves as if we do. But as explained by the pro­fes­sors inter­viewed here, Carnegie Mel­lon’s Baruch Fis­chhoff and Berke­ley’s Don A. Moore (author of Per­fect­ly Con­fi­dent: How to Cal­i­brate Your Deci­sions Wise­ly), the research has also revealed oth­er poten­tial fac­tors in play.

One impor­tant can­di­date is, as ever, stu­pid­i­ty. Much has been made of the Dun­ning-Kruger effect, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, which holds that the less com­pe­tent peo­ple are at a task, the more con­fi­dent they tend to be about their abil­i­ty to per­form it. That would seem to accord with much of our every­day expe­ri­ence, but we should also con­sid­er the role played by the basic cog­ni­tive lim­i­ta­tions that apply to us all. Our brains can only process so much at once, and when they come up against capac­i­ty, they default to sim­pli­fied, and often too-sim­pli­fied, ver­sions of the prob­lem before them. It all becomes more dif­fi­cult if we’re insu­lat­ed from direct, objec­tive feed­back, a con­di­tion that often results from the kind of suc­cess and esteem that can be achieved by pro­ject­ing — you guessed it — con­fi­dence.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Com­pe­tent: The Dun­ning-Kruger Effect, Explained

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

To many of us, the con­cept of soli­tary con­fine­ment may not sound all that bad: final­ly, a reprieve from the siege of social and pro­fes­sion­al requests. Final­ly, a chance to catch up on all the read­ing we’ve been mean­ing to do. Final­ly, an envi­ron­ment con­ducive to this med­i­ta­tion thing about whose ben­e­fits we’ve heard so much. (Per­haps we made those very assur­ances to our­selves when the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic set in.) But accord­ing to the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above, writ­ten by psy­chi­a­trist and cor­rec­tion­al men­tal health expert Ter­ry Kupers, the neg­a­tives of the expe­ri­ence would well out­weigh the pos­i­tives. It all comes by way of answer­ing the ques­tion, “What hap­pens to your brain with­out any social con­tact?”

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, per­haps, iso­la­tion takes its great­est toll when imposed against the will of the iso­lat­ed, and even more so when imposed for an indef­i­nite dura­tion. “Ear­ly on, stress hor­mones may spike, and as time pass­es, that stress can become chron­ic,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor.

With­out the avail­abil­i­ty of social inter­ac­tions as “a sound­ing board where we can gauge how ratio­nal our per­cep­tions are,” one’s “sense of iden­ti­ty and real­i­ty becomes threat­ened.” The stage is there­fore set for “depres­sion, obses­sions, sui­ci­dal ideation, and, for some, delu­sions and hal­lu­ci­na­tions.” Sleep­ing dif­fi­cul­ties can man­i­fest on the more strict­ly phys­i­cal end, poten­tial­ly accom­pa­nied by “heart pal­pi­ta­tions, headaches, dizzi­ness, and hyper­sen­si­tiv­i­ty.”

While trav­el­ing in the Unit­ed States, Charles Dick­ens bore wit­ness to the pun­ish­ment by soli­tary con­fine­ment already in effect in Amer­i­can pris­ons, com­ing away with the impres­sion that it was “worse than any tor­ture of the body.” He wrote that after a vis­it to a Philadel­phia pen­i­ten­tiary, whose very name reflects the the­o­ry, held by the Quak­er groups who intro­duced the prac­tice in the late eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, that it could “bring about reflec­tion and pen­i­tence.” After much research on the mat­ter, Kupers has come to the con­clu­sion that, in fact, it “does immense dam­age that is con­trary to reha­bil­i­ta­tion, while fail­ing to reduce prison vio­lence.” If you’re read­ing this, you may not be espe­cial­ly like­ly to be sen­tenced to invol­un­tary con­fine­ment. But the next time you start feel­ing out of sorts for rea­sons you can’t pin down, con­sid­er how long it’s been since you’ve spent real time with real peo­ple.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Hap­pens When You Spend Weeks, Months, or Years in Soli­tary Con­fine­ment

How Lone­li­ness Is Killing Us: A Primer from Har­vard Psy­chi­a­trist & Zen Priest Robert Waldinger

Mod­ern Art Was Used As a Tor­ture Tech­nique in Prison Cells Dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War

What an 85-Year-Long Har­vard Study Says Is the Real Key to Hap­pi­ness

On the Pow­er of Teach­ing Phi­los­o­phy in Pris­ons

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.