Written By: Hannah Baumel, Drew Newton, and Avni Rajpal
In today’s world, we’re surrounded by screens. According to a research census by Common Sense, teenagers in America spend on average 8 hours and 39 minutes on digital devices every day. Project that number over the average American’s lifespan of 73.5 years old, and that's roughly 26 years of our lives spent entirely on digital devices. When considering this fact, it’s no wonder that people are looking at the impacts of these machines on our physical and mental health. As such, one of the largest discussions is around the attention span.
Areas within the brain’s frontal and parietal lobes have been found to play the main role in regulating the human attention span. This process is incredibly important to our everyday lives, as being able to focus on a single piece of stimulus gives us a much greater ability to accomplish tasks and learn. With so much happening around us, our brains are constantly working, and putting together information like puzzle pieces.
Some researchers assert that attention spans are getting shorter, almost exponentially. A team of Microsoft researchers led by Consumer Insights Lead Alyson Gausby performed a study on 112 Canadian respondents, first asking them to fill out a survey on general digital habits, then tracking activity via electroencephalography while showing them various stimuli. Their conclusions show that “19% of online viewers defect in the first 10 seconds” of seeing a piece of media online (Gausby 23). This article further theorizes that this is due to brain plasticity in the digital age, getting used to processing things in rapid succession. Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and his team of researchers at Technische Universität Berlin found that “in 2013 a hashtag stayed within [Twitter’s] top 50 for 17.5 hours on average, a number which gradually decrease[d] to 11.9 hours in 2016 (Lorenz-Spreen 9)”. With statistics such as these found in a variety of social media websites, they concluded that collective attention spans were accelerating, as social media users switched topics of interest more and more rapidly over time.
Others argue that our attention spans aren’t actually shrinking. Dr. K. R. Subramanian, the Professor of Management for Credait.com, criticizes Microsoft's research, saying “the oft-quoted statistic of the average attention span being down from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds … was a citation from another source called Statistic Brain … BBC contacted … sources cited by Statistic Brain … and neither could find any research that backed up the numbers (Subramanian 3)”. While Microsoft’s electroencephalographic research seems to be thoroughly backed by scientific and journalistic evidence, the sources which they cited in their final conclusions were basically entirely unproven. Deborah S. Carstens, Ph.D., PMP and other researchers suggest in their AIEMS Journal paper “that there is no difference between attention span lengths and the number of social media accounts, frequency of use or mobile versus computer preferences for accessing social media (Carstens 5)”. This conclusion is made after assessing a self-administered questionnaire of 209 participants. The conclusions of the paper further bak the hopeful idea that our attention spans are not shrinking, though it is important to note that people may be biased in administering their own responses to a survey.
While our attention spans may not be technically shrinking, our boredom is growing. As the world continues to develop into the digital age, distractions are being pluralized. It’s up to us to assess our own ability to focus in an honest fashion. Possible paths of action may be to take breaks from social media, and find the right balance between embracing technology and ensuring our minds stay sharp and healthy.
1 A visual way of seeing electrical activity in the brain
2 The brain’s ability to adapt to one's environment over time
3 the National Centre for Biotechnology Information at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, and the Associated Press
4 Association for Industry, Engineering and Management Systems
Works Cited
“A Surprising New Source of Attention in the Brain.” News, 20 Jan. 2021, www.rockefeller.edu/news/26994-new-attention-area-in-brain-discovered/#:~:text=Meticulous%20research%20over%20decades%20has,steers%20the%20spotlight%20of%20attention.
Social Media Impact on Attention Span - Niplav.Site, niplav.site/doc/psychology/attention_span/social_media_impact_on_attention_span_carstens_et_al_2018.pdf. Accessed 30 Oct. 2023.
Subramanian, Dr K. R. Myth and Mystery of Shrinking Attention Span - Ijtrd.Com, 2018, www.ijtrd.com/papers/IJTRD16531.pdf.
Rideout, Victoria, et al. The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens. Canadian Electronic Library, 2021.
Lorenz-Spreen, P., Mønsted, B.M., Hövel, P. et al. Accelerating dynamics of collective attention. Nat Commun 10, 1759 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09311-w
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