Hello there. According to certain studies, you most likely won’t reach the end of this article. (I’d be extremely delighted, of course, if you take this as a challenge and read the whole thing, but that’s besides the point.) “Studies” show that in the past few years, the human attention span has reduced drastically – from 12 seconds to 8 seconds – and now it’s less than that of a goldfish, which has an attention span of 9 seconds. The increasing production and consumption of short-form content appears to prove this theory. This is widely believed, but how true is it? Experts argue that the attention span of humans has not reduced; we are still better than goldfish. (Or are we?) As it turns out, goldfish is an extremely misunderstood creature which doesn’t have a short attention span or memory as we’d like to believe.
So where does this myth come from? Why is it widely believed that the attention span of human beings is rapidly deteriorating? Well, the Time Magazine, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Telegraph, and various other national newspapers published these stats. And all of these papers have one source – the 2015 report by the Consumer Insights team of Microsoft Canada. While they surveyed 2000 Canadians and studied the brain activity of 112 people, the numbers for human attention span were not a product of their research. Microsoft got this data from a website called Statistic Brain, and their sources are as vague as it gets. In fact, when BBC’s Simon Maybin tried to reach Statistic Brain, there was no response, and there were no records to back up the data at sources they listed.
Experts who have been studying human attention span for decades outright reject the argument that attention span is decreasing. In fact, they say that its features are too complex for it to be quantified within a certain timespan, and they have not noticed any changes in the aspects that can be quantified.
Many experts also argue that attention span is task-dependent, and thus varies based on the task demand. In 1983, Kahenman’s theory posited this very same idea. It proposed that attention span is not static, but in fact varies based on many factors including motivation, reward characteristics of the task, and biological determinants. Therefore, attention span cannot be measured by one particular value.
Dr Maria Panagiotidi dismantles other myths regarding human attention span. Usually, lectures or presentations are suggested to be designed keeping in mind that people lose interest and get distracted after 10-15 minutes. This theory that human attention span wanes after 10-15 minutes came from the misinterpretation of a 1978 paper on the waning attention span of people during a lecture. Neil Bradbury looked into this theory, and it turns out that it has, in fact, no biological basis!
Another theory that is widely believed is about the attention span of a goldfish. This species of fish is quite infamous for its short attention span and memory. However, contrary to what popular culture suggests, researchers argue that goldfish are given too little credit than is due. Prof Felicity Huntingford says that goldfish, like mammals and birds, can perform all kinds of learning. In fact, hundreds of papers over the past many decades are about goldfish learning and memory. They are a model system for studying the process of memory formation.
Why, then, are such myths so widely believed? Well, we humans tend to believe what aligns with our personal worldview, and it is easier to blame our brains for not being able to pay attention than to try and understand why we get distracted so easily. The short attention span myth also works in favour of short-form content and its increased consumption. Dr Panagiotidi calls this the “snackable content trend”.
Over the recent years, content on social media – be it written text or video content – is being tailored to the supposedly reducing attention span of humans, having attention-grabbing and clickbait-y titles. Short-form content is growing increasingly popular also because of the sense of universality it has in its creation and consumption. It breaks down creation and production barriers, and provides increased accessibility to content. However, it also requires people to keep things brief and avoid complexity at all costs. Feed the algorithm. For viewers, such websites turn into a spiralling gyre that pulls you down an unending rabbit hole. And the constant bombardment of content from all sides leaves no room for making sense of what we’re consuming.
Most of us aren’t alien to the continuous doom scrolling of Instagram reels; it is one of the easiest ways to escape whatever it is we want to avoid. I know I did that while writing this article. Sure, we may be getting more easily distracted; but at least you know now it’s not because of our short attention span.
Edited by S Santhosh Mohan
Article 19 