Is Our Attention Span Really Shrinking With Time?

If you are a millennial, you must have heard a social belief that our attention span has evidently reduced over generations. This may have come up randomly when you pick up your phone to multi-task in front of your parents or in general, whenever you choose to take a break from studying/working.

We have been wired to believe that we are ‘too distracted’ and ‘finicky’ while carrying out a single activity for a stretched period of time. Some say we are working our way towards being similar to goldfish but strictly in the context of attention spans, of course.

To see whether my frequent work breaks could be blamed on the generation as a whole, I tried researching a little. After going through a considerable amount of credible articles, it seems that this fact has raised contradictions in various professional beliefs too.

Human attention spans aren’t really reducing in time but are actually evolving.

We are multi-tasking beings by nature and with more tasks being handled at once, our brains have automatically wired themselves to prioritise the tasks at hand. We have become much more selective about choosing what task is to be done according to a mental time schedule. For example, which watching a movie with full focus, you might check your phone for the latest notification. This is not because the movie has lost your attention but because your brain has automatically prioritised that notification over the task at hand. This could be because subconsciously you might be waiting for a specific text or maybe because there is a possibility that something from work might have come up. Hence, its simply a matter of your choosing to give importance to work than the movie because “the movie can wait but my boss cannot”.

Another evidence negating our long believed notion, is the concept of ‘average attention span’ altogether. Studies have shown that attention pretty much entirely depends of the task at hand and what the task demands. We choose to provide a task the amount of attention it requires according to our brain. And hence, to quantify this can be a task of inaccuracy due to its nature itself.

So for example, many driving accidents happen due to divided attention. Texting or calling while driving has definitely caused accident but not because the driver just “lost attention”. They just miscalculated the balance of attention between task and hence gave the wrong task priority.

So it is safe to say that it’s not really the generation gap that’s making all the difference. It just all boils down to our priorities and choices in the end.

So we aren’t really becoming fish, thankfully? Besides, there is good reason to believe that goldfish don’t have a specifically short attention span either, compared to other fish. They are perfectly capable of learning and carrying out what any other fish is capable of. So I guess that’s two myths we’ve busted today.