Driven to Distraction – Are We Comfortably Numb?

In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one’s own mind.

Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature.

The World Beyond Your Head
Matthew Crawford

Matthew B. Crawford (Matthew B. Crawford website, Wikipedia)
born 1965

Matthew Crawford is an American writer and research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He earned a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, specializing in ancient political thought. He is a contributing editor at The New Atlantis journal, and is also a motorcycle mechanic.