The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

Chronic distraction, from which we all now suffer, kills you more slowly. Meyer says there is evidence that people in chronically distracted jobs are, in early middle age, appearing with the same symptoms of burn-out as air traffic controllers. They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage. But the damage is not caused by overwork, it’s caused by multiple distracted work. One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year. Yet the rabidly multitasking distractee is seen as some kind of social and economic ideal.

We were trained in mulitasking to be able to cope with all the information that flows in and out of our offices. It's a work trend, which was popularized in the media in tune with the Internet development. Meyer is right; we're living lives consisting of endless distractions, dressed up as entertainment, to keep us busy on social details instead of seeing the larger picture and participate with the raw force of nature. We can google every concept we run into, but do we have the patience to complete a novel, compose a symphony, rearrange the garden, or teach the kids to read?