Attention Span

There is no good evidence that our attention spans are changing because of technology, or social media, or smart phones, or whatever.  That "young people" have much worse attention spans is widely believed, and interestingly, almost as many people believe it about themselves, but no studies clearly document this. The news stories you read about "attention span" dropping from twelve seconds to eight seconds, or is "only" sixty-five seconds now all have small sample sizes, poorly defined terms, few controls or none...the whole usual array of worthless study problems.

The usual fallback is that it is true nonetheless, we just haven't figured out how to measure it properly yet. I recall similar things being said about watching television in the 60s, the availability of cheap paperback novels in the 19th C was believed to be causing women to neglect and even abandon their children, and Plato believed that widespread reading was ruining people's memories.  It's just the sort of thing we just want to believe, over and over again, without evidence. We even shamefacedly believe it about ourselves. But the difference between being distracted and I just like doing this rather than that has no clear meaning. 

Think about it.  Psychologists are doing studies about attention all the time, and have been for decades. If there is something to this, wouldn't it have shown up by now?  Wouldn't there be a promising lead or two? There are plenty of books insisting it is true, and even academic papers purporting to show it, but they crumble to dust upon examination. We like buying those books, apparently. Stolen Focus by Johann Hari has a 4.4 star rating on Amazon, and is an editor's choice for nonfiction. It debuted earlier this year on the NYT bestseller list. But "Johann Hari was suspended from The Independent and later resigned, after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001 and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct." Such things have been going on for years. 

It still might be true that our attention spans are worse and one or more of the popular suspects is the cause.  It might. It's just that there is to date no evidence for this, despite everyone believing it. Many of us even have anecdotes and comparisons with our past selves that illustrate our own deterioration, or that of "children now." Yet at this point, with all this effort, we should at least be able to say that even if this turns out to be slightly true, we can be confident it is not massively true.

My current source is Stuart Ritchie's "The Studies Show," Episode 17, Your Shrinking Attention Span. 

There's just no evidence that our focus has been stolen or that our attention has declined in long-term fashion. And also there's no particularly evidence that people's attention is particularly correlated with how much  they multitask or how they use different media...it doesn't look like there's room for this massive societal collapse in focus and attention.

They recommend Peter Etchell's new book, almost out in publication Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time.

Professor Pete Etchells studies the way screens affect our brains. In UNLOCKED, he delves into the real science behind the panic about our alleged device addiction and withering attention spans. Armed with the latest research, he reveals how little we have to fear, and the great deal we have to gain, by establishing a positive relationship with our screens and asking ourselves some essential questions about how we use them.

Recommended by the show were two unrelated articles in publications they also write for, "Making Architecture Easy," in Works in Progress, claiming that the disagreements in public architecture are not between modernist and traditionalist, but between easy and challenging styles.  It was fun. As was  an article in the i, a nonpartisan news site in the UK, about European cities you can reach on a sleeper within 24 hours, which is oddly sometimes behind the paywall and sometimes not.

Although the i does have the article Easy ways to improve your memory after 50, including no multitasking and walking 4,000 steps, so they might not be getting everything right.