Casey Niestat

That is the eeriest part of these videos — the parents are barely interacting with their kids. Instead they are relating to a mirror image of their children that they are spreading online. And they are reveling in their power over that image.

Let’s start with one of those insights that are as obvious as they are easy to forget: if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. It is therefore not surprising that those who grow up to be exceptional tend to have spent their formative years surrounded by adults who were exceptional.

( Gerd Gigerenzer -Max Planck Institute for Human Development - Psychological Review © 2017 American Psychological Association 2017, Vol. 124, No. 2, 179–196) Ignorance is generally pictured as an unwanted state of mind, and the act of willful ignorance may raise eyebrows. Yet people do not always want to know, demonstrating a lack of curiosity at odds with theories postulating a general need for certainty, ambiguity aversion, or the Bayesian principle of total evidence.

Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. An edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published on 6 January.