Pay Attention!

A few years ago there was a flurry of reports that dissed us as not being able to focus. Based on dubious unsourced studies funneled through Microsoft, and reported by everyone from The Daily Telegraph to TIME Magazine, we humans purportedly had an attention span shorter than a goldfish, which clocked in at an average of 9 seconds. It made for good copy, but it was bupkis. Follow-up by numerous fact checkers found there being no real basis other than some cherry-picked facts which didn't actually say that. Even the anecdotal evidence disproves it: I won't point out that you've already done better than the goldfish just by reading this far, not to mention binge watching "The Last Kingdom" or an entire season of "The Great British Bake-Off." 

However, if not an actual complete kernel of truth, there is some veracity to the underlying idea. The reality is that over the last 20 years our attention spans have shrunk. You can blame your phone or your iPad or Twitter or TikTok or your email. All of them are clamoring for you to look at them. And that has meant that while 2 decades ago our focus on screens averaged two and half minutes, these days it is closer to 47 seconds. 

Research by Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine shows that not only do we only focus for less than a minute on a screen, but that it takes us about 25 minutes to circle back to the original task. It seems we spend about 10 minutes before we get interrupted on a task (vs a screen) and switch to another chore, and then the same thing repeats. The net result is it takes nearly half an hour before we come back to job one and continue. That doesn't mean you're doing nothing in the intervening time, you're just not focusing on where you started. And mind you that is switching, not multitasking. Walking AND chewing gum at the same time is multitasking; tuning out the meeting you are sitting in so you can read your email on your phone isn't multitasking, it's picking one over the other.

For sure there are stimuli that cause us to toggle from one to another, such as a vibration or a pop up indicating that something new is at hand. But even if we turn off these external drivers we still do it to ourselves with no prompting. The research shows more often than not that it's not an alert or notification that causes us to jump to another task, but our own internal impulses. It might be an urge, a memory or simply a feeling that we're missing something. We have always been distractable; the lure of the internet, social media and our many devices that can access all of that anywhere anytime has just turned that up to 11.

And while scientists still don't have a perfect understanding as to how the brain actually works, they note that the design of the internet mimics it. There are nodes and spokes that lead from one piece of data to the next, much like the synapses in our head. The hyperlinks in a newspaper article lead us to a concert listing lead us to a Spotify link with a song. We do the same in our heads, when a piece of music as we walk through a mall leads us to recall hearing it at a party which leads to remembering an old friend and the funny tee shirt they were wearing. Is it any wonder that crawling into the web feels like home?

It is interesting to wonder about the chicken and egg relationship between all this and the growth of the online world. Can we not focus because of the design of the internet is short little bits that continually lead us elsewhere, or have we evolved to where we can process information so quickly that the internet had to change to be made up of shorter and shorter bits? As one person pointed out, on the internet the credits never roll.  Put another way, to paraphrase Walt Kelly's iconic Pogo comic, we have TikTok'd the enemy, and he is us.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is able to focus at least long enough to write this essay. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.