The World Beyond Your Head

On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

By: Matthew B. Crawford

Narrated by: Robert Fass

In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.

We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.

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 makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.

©2015 Matthew B. Crawford (P)2015 Macmillan Audio

Sharp thinker, especially when thinking with his hands.

The book is sharp. He scratches to get past the surface of embodied cognition - even as it is distributed across the body of a group.

Excellent philosophy.

More detail oriented than "shop class as soulcraft" but as usual, Crawford delivers a well perceived and articulated view of the work we live in by examining our work ethic and, in this particular book, our interactions with others and culture.

What a world view

Stick with this ... It requires your attention, and, at the same time, helps you understand how to employ your attention in the world. You've heard countless simplistic criticisms of our technology obsessions. This is is a sophisticated account of how letting technologies mediate our interactions with the world distanced us from real living.

Almost—but not quite—beyond my head!

My brain is still reeling! It's ironic because this book, about attention, made it painfully obvious to me that I need to put some attention into my listening and comprehension skills!

It's not beyond me intellectually, but there is so much information going by at a good clip that it doesn't all sink in in one listen. So I think what I need to do is buy it in print, so I can re-read certain sections more slowly.

The narrator did a fabulous job. (I have watched the author in interviews and his speaking is way less engaging than the narrator!) His and rhythm were perfect—naturalistic and expressive and inflected with humour in all the right places. So it is not his fault that my retention is poor; it is my own brain I blame, in this age of distraction.

This book is brilliant. And it's like a hybrid of Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" and something by Oliver Sacks. I hope that Matthew Crawford gets the accolades he deserves.

Excellent and insightful

Very interesting account of the importance of being situated in life. Linking various topics and theories (and motorbikes and pipe organs) the author describes a very interesting discussion on why attention is so important