When I began my draft of this article, the first thing that I searched up for research was the causes of distraction. One click led me to a website about combatting attention span loss, and another led me to why I should care. On the left-hand side of the website, in a small corner, was an advertisement about 8-Ball Billiards.
Thus, the sliver of attention that I had at the start was diverted, and I embarked on different avenues of the internet, with distraction eventually pulling me away.
My experience is not uncommon; in fact, this happens all too often to everyone, a byproduct of the society in which we live. While people’s attention spans have never remained consistently high, the start of the twenty-first century has brought about an exponential decline in our focus.
Some have referred to the significant decline in length of attention spans as an “epidemic,” one that is often overlooked and requires your immediate attention.
The Initial Decline
Gloria Marks, a Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University, has been looking into attention spans since 2004. With her team at University of California, Irvine and Microsoft, Marks began a process to understand and calculate the average person’s attention span. When she started out, the process was not as easy as it is today, and technology was the sole reason to blame. Twenty years ago, scientific technology was less advanced, so experiments, much like the one Marks did, often followed through a grueling and time-consuming procedure.
To achieve results that would best explain their hypotheses on attention span, Marks and her team shadowed a select number of individuals as they went about their day, carrying stopwatches in one hand, following closely behind. Once the subject would begin their task, the watch started simultaneously. The moment the subject finished their task, the watch would stop.
According to their research, the average attention span in 2004 was around two and a half minutes, which to them was known to be relatively mediocre compared to the rates now. However, eight years later in 2012, after using computer-logging techniques, the average attention span was a little more than a minute, at 75 seconds. The most recent data from Marks’ team found the average attention span to be 47 seconds.
Over the past twenty years, the rate at which we consume and store information within ourselves has increased tenfold. With every passing day, the attention span statistic declines further.
The Correlation Between Attention and the Brain
To recognize how dire a decrease in attention span may be, it is important to understand the roots of attention within the brain. Contrary to what some may believe, there is no single type of attention; in fact, there are far more intricacies than what one might expect.
The front part of the brain, behind the forehead, is known as the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is responsible for decision-making, organization, planning, and in our case, paying attention. But, the frontal lobe is not the only part of the brain responsible for attention and memory. There are many overlaps between the various lobes and circuits in the brain, generating a homeostasis in the way that we capture the information around us.
With that being said, there are also two different types of attention, focused and flow. The type you are using depends on the task that requires attention. If a task is challenging and does not engage your passions in any way, you will immediately experience a loss of attention due to the difficulty of the task. However, if you exhibit focused attention, you will be undeterred from completing challenging and engaging tasks.
Flow is considered to be the optimal state of attention in which there is sufficient immersion in a task where time does not matter. Flow is beneficial because individuals can exhibit peak performance while experiencing a degree of challenge, allowing them to apply skills of their own.
Media and the Attention Span
The media plays an important role in the decline of our attention spans and is simultaneously impacted by the feedback loop that it presents.
We as humans have found a new normal, present in the ways in which we consume and communicate through media. In a conversation with Kim Mills at the Speaking of Psychology podcast, Marks discusses how, from the past, media has shrunken into bite-sized videos with a quantified amount of information.
But this is not necessarily always intentional. Directors and producers behind advertisements and video production are not driven by an intense desire to pack content into a short bit of time but rather influenced by their own shortening attention spans. As their attention spans begin to decrease, so does the capacity for the amount of footage shot and published. This is especially noticeable in films and YouTube videos nowadays which tend to be jumpy. Previously, the effect of natural pauses was included within these videos; however, these pauses are now cut out.
On the other end, with financial constraints and considering the attention spans of audiences, directors and producers may choose to take the intentional route of creating shorter and digestible content.
Lasting Effects on Youth
It seems as though the “new normal” does not exist just for adults but also for growing children. Marks has long warned that it would be especially harmful for children to be on the receiving end of shortening attention spans at a young age, something to which they have already fallen victim.
According to studies that Marks has conducted along with others, children as young as two to four years old interact with the internet for about two and a half hours per day. However, as they grow older, surpassing their toddler years and moving onto their lives as children, media exposure also increases, up to three hours a day, which can be especially detrimental to children growing up in a digitalized world.
Some believe these children will not be able to understand the most effective methods needed to navigate the world. Instead, they will view a world with phones as their normal outlook on life, something that Gloria Mark feels is problematic. “We are putting our children into a digital world before some very critical mental functions are fully developed. I don’t think kids are really ready for that,” Mark said.
At the same time, it is almost impossible to avoid a digitalized world since remote learning options are being adopted into the school curriculum following the Coronavirus pandemic. “It is hard to remove something that has become so normalized, because there are not many options available to offer,” said Effat Tayiba, a senior at the Hunter Bellevue School of Nursing. Remote learning is simply one factor out of many, making it incredibly difficult to disconnect from a digital world.
Factors Influencing Attention Span and Antidotes
Many facets of life influence attention span, including mental functioning, stemming from sleep. When one does not receive a sufficient number of hours catered to their sleep schedule, they accumulate sleep debt, denoting the number of hours that are missed as a result of sleep deprivation.
In turn, this can impact what individuals gravitate towards when they accumulate copious amounts of sleep debt. This includes lightweight activities such as scrolling through social media and staying away from activities that challenge their brains. This cycle continues and amplifies over time, shortening attention spans everywhere.
Additionally, a lack of self-control or self-regulation towards distractions that come our way can be one of the many reasons why we lose attention. When we consume a large amount of information on the internet, our sense of control begins to slip away.
From this, laziness and procrastination emerge, leading to a pile-up of work that awaits us in the future. All of the responsibilities that had been put aside previously are now directly within our reach, which leads to imminent stress from the multi-tasking that needs to be done.
There’s still hope! These factors can be contained. We can control the number of hours we sleep and strive to decrease the sleep debt accumulated over the week. From there, our mental productivity may rise and provide us with energy to move through other daily tasks.
Additionally, exposure to social media and the vast bouts of information on the internet can be impactful as a vehicle for losing control. But, notifications and the algorithm should not, and are not, the sole contributors.
We must build up the awareness that it takes to move ourselves away from distractions that steer us away from tasks. But a common struggle may be that people are so accustomed to being interrupted by external interference. When there is nothing stopping them from doing their work, self-interrupting out of habit comes naturally.
Instead, we should exhibit self-control and forethought, glancing into the future and making note of how our present actions may impact future ones. In doing so, we are not giving in to digital temptations as well as distractions of our own. This will further enable us to be more productive figures in our lives and bestow that understanding upon others.
Understand that it is important to take breaks from your work and to take the right ones. Rather than working until reaching a breaking point, identify the ‘break point,’ the natural stopping point in a task, and allow the mind to replenish itself, shifting energies more effectively and increasing maximum attentional capacity. What this all comes down to is agency. When we develop more control over our own intentions and actions, striking a balance between the two, more fulfilling growth will be seen overall.
Did I finish my article?
In the end, I slept enough to wake up early the next morning and practiced enough self-control to finish my draft in two sittings. With this, I found that my mind sharpened and the way that I approached the world was put into focus. While navigating through our new attention span will be a learning experience, and moreover, a learning curve, it is important to recognize that agency may be what it takes to erase one name from this epidemic of inattention.
While navigating through our new attention span will be a learning experience, and moreover, a learning curve, it is important to recognize that agency may be what it takes to erase one name from this epidemic of inattention.