Hi, I'm Anne Strange Champs, and today I'm asking you for your most valuable resource, your attention.

Attention came on, shopper.

Attention. Oh, attention must be paid.

Attention must be paid. Intrusive advertising is just the tip of a larger cultural iceberg.

It's hard to open a newspaper or magazine these days without reading a complaint about our fractured mental lives,

diminished attention spans, and a widespread sense of distraction.

Often the occasion for such a story is some new neuroscience finding

about how our brains are being rewired by our habits of information grazing and electronic stimulation.

It is clear that attention has also become an acute collective problem of modern life, a cultural problem.

So here's what it's like to live in an attention economy.

From the moment you wake up, until the time you go to bed, you're bombarded by viral videos,

news alerts, things trending on Facebook, exploding on Twitter, and popping up everywhere.

On top of everything are the ads.

So how does it feel to know that the commodity everyone wants is inside your skull?

Today, onto the best of our knowledge, we'll focus our attention on attention.

We'll find out how attention merchants are capturing our most

valuable resource and reselling it to advertisers. But first, what's the perfect drug for a culture

of distraction? Adderall. Sales of the prescription stimulant have increased exponentially,

and not always legally, especially to young adults.

Casey Schwartz spent her 20s gulping down prescription stimulants to help her get through school and start her career,

and she wrote about it in a story for the New York Times magazine called Generation Adderall.

I took my first Adderall towards the beginning of college.

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