Why Does a Short Attention Span Make People Easier to Influence?

Robert Greene says a splintered attention span makes people easier to influence. He asks whose interest the programming serves. If the aim is money, constant novelty makes deep focus harder, and advertisements and gimmicks land more easily because independent thought gets weaker. The brain, he says, needs slowness as nourishment: learning bit by bit until new pathways form, so a person is in charge of that landscape. The rhythm other people program is a desert with no connections, and that is the part he finds scary.

Andrew Huberman brings up an Olympic freestyle skier at Stanford, Eileen Gu, whose answer about training her mind was slowness rather than speed. She spends time thinking about her thinking, pressure-tests beliefs, and says she can shape her thoughts and is not finished. Greene's matching case is the quarterback John Elway, who said everything slowed down on the field so he could see where players were moving. Mastery, in Greene's account, is a brain that has learned to slow the game down.