GoKawiilA century before social-media bans and advice to disable device notifications, the inventor and science-fiction writer Hugo Gernsback proposed a more extreme way to avoid distraction: an isolating wooden helmet. Outside influences, he said, were “the greatest difficulty that the human mind has to contend with”. Gernsback’s isolator device — part diving suit, part monastic cell — did help him to work, he said, but it came with a risk of suffocation. He later installed an air supply.
Concerns that sustained thought is under assault have become even more acute in the digital era. Smartphones buzz, Internet tabs multiply and television episodes carry regular reminders to help people keep track of the plot. Surveys suggest that we feel less able to concentrate, teachers report distracted students and headlines declare that our attention spans are shrinking.
Inventor Hugo Gernsback wearing his ‘isolator’ wooden helmet.Credit: Bettmann/Getty
Research across psychology and neuroscience, however, has built up a more nuanced picture of what is happening to our attention spans. The results suggest that people do flit from one task to another more frequently than they did in previous decades, and that this switching is often detrimental to performance. But there is little evidence that the brain’s fundamental ability to concentrate has been impaired. This suggests that if we can shut down the distractions of our environment, it is possible to recover focus.
“I think there’s a huge disconnect between what we feel like is happening and what is actually happening,” says Monica Rosenberg, a psychologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
The attention-span confusion
“There is a whole flurry of people reporting that they feel like they can’t pay attention,” says Nilli Lavie, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. “They say they are constantly distracted, their attention jumps from one thing to another, and they can’t concentrate.”
In a 2021 survey of more than 2,000 UK adults, almost half said they felt their attention span was shorter than it used to be (see go.nature.com/4dfz8yc). And two-thirds thought that the attention span of young people has declined (see ‘Are attention spans waning?’). Teachers and schools around the world have responded to this perception with modular lessons that break topics into digestible pieces. Some students now study literary extracts rather than full novels. When the novelist Elif Shafak questioned why TED talks were becoming shorter, she said last year she was told that it was because “the world’s average attention span has shrunk”.
Source: KCL Policy Inst./Centre for Attention Studies
The idea of an average attention span carries intuitive appeal. But the way it’s discussed can tangle distinct concepts. Researchers distinguish between people’s capacity to pay attention, that is, their underlying ability to concentrate on a particular task, and their real-world behaviour, or what people actually focus on from moment to moment.
... continue reading