Skinner became convinced that this principle explained human behavior almost in its entirety. You believe that you are free, and that you make choices, and you have a complex human mind that is selecting what to pay attention to -but it’s all a myth. You and your sense of focus are simply the sum total of all the reinforcements you have experienced in your life. Human beings, he believed, have no minds —not in the sense that you are a person with free will making your own choices. You can be reprogrammed in any way that a clever designer wants. Years later, the designers of Instagram asked: If we reinforce our users for taking selfies — if we give them hearts and likes — will they start to do it obsessively, just like the pigeon will obsessively hold out its left wing to get extra seed? They took Skinner’s core techniques, and applied them to a billion people.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari