Battles of the Brain: Early Christian Monks Versus Distraction

Bio: Jamie Kreiner is a historian of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages and holds the Wellman Chair in Medieval History at UCLA. Her books include How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction and The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction.

 

Presentation Description: Distraction might feel like a new problem, born of smartphones and social media. But almost two millennia earlier, Christian monks struggled to concentrate, too. This talk highlights the monks' frustrations with distraction and the creative strategies they developed to combat it, to put our own crisis of attention in perspective.