Depreciating Attention Spans in Humans
By. Stella Eu
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A typical day of a student from the 1900s would be to attend public school, arriving by eight AM and leaving at three, while sitting in a cramped room, with dozens of different students. The majority of their classes, ranging from 6-8 full-time hours of lectures, required a typical student to pay attention to class for a maximum of three hours.
If that wasn’t comparable enough, years before, typical congressmen would sit, listening to meetings that took up a maximum of a whopping 6 hours.
Despite our ancestors being able to withhold great focus on what they were doing, the generation of today is amazingly capable of only being able to listen to an average of two minutes in a single YouTube video before clicking off. Compared to the people of the past, our generational attention spans are vastly different. This leaves questions on how and why such a huge disparity in attention spans was left in the first place.
Humans were always prided by the fact that their minds are capable of things that other mammals are incapable of doing- expressive emotions, great cognitive activity… It is to be expected that the human brain is one of a kind.
But as of 2015, it wasn’t expected that humans would ever have anything “lesser-than” compared to the most simplest animals on earth: the goldfish.
In the 2000s, humans held an average attention span of 12 seconds. That was until 15 years later, in 2015, when our attention span dwindled to only 8.25 seconds. In fact, this attention span is less than a goldfish’s, whose attention span is a second longer than a human's in 2015.
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Another UK study states that 50% of the country’s adults believe their attention spans are shortening. Adam Brown, co-director of the Center of Attention, Learning, and Memory at St. Bonaventure University in New York, claims how on our own, a new “epidemic” arises.
And the real question he sought to answer in the first place is– why?
One of the biggest speculations is technology. In the past, technology was a form of simple communication, a contribution to display, and a formal way of distributing information. But now, technology serves a new area of importance: entertainment. As Brown has claimed, “At a neurological level, I wouldn’t guess there’s this massive thing happening…such that people have shorter attention spans,” Brown says. It’s “the environment we live in. It’s the phones.”
The distractibility of one’s surroundings may cause a chronic attention span issue, especially in the modern world. Sibley, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, states that “in modern life, we’re essentially living in a room filled with distractions all the time, thanks to the competing demands of work and home life, societal stressors like the pandemic, and the constant temptation of phones, social media, and the internet.” As sad as it seems, the constant enjoyment of short-term videos may contribute to the shortening of attention spans.
The most famous social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, all inhabit the same feature: reels. This new addition is a quick and easy way to acquire viewership, but also a steady road towards our decrease in focus.
On average, a random teenager may spend 4.8 hours on social media alone. And in every social media platform, the maximum number of seconds a reel can hold is 90. Taking this information into account, an average teenager watches 192 reels a day, all while scrolling for almost 5 hours.
It is no wonder the average attention span has been decreasing. Most people don’t know that a gradual decrease in attention spans is the effect of the intelligent algorithms and features of social media today.
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, claims that the internet was made to manipulate this corner of the human mind. “It’s not just the fact that there’s algorithms catching our attention,” Mark says. “We have this sense that we have to respond, we have to check.”
From the very beginning, humans were branded as intellectuals who were capable of great cognitive activity. They were provided by the fact that they could remember more, memorize better, and recollect their thoughts. But as the years pass it becomes increasingly more prevalent that the human mind may be simpler than what was previously thought. It comes to our attention that the very things that humans surround themselves with are the root of the decrease in the human’s attention span. But as Brown has already stated, this depreciation of attention is merely just an epidemic. Although it may impact our generation now, we must heed Brown’s words that “It’s an epidemic we have the power to reverse.”
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