Where did our attention spans go, and can we get them back?
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20 years ago, Gloria Mark had just taken on a new role, professor. I had so many different deadlines and people that I was interacting with. And I found that it was just really hard to pay attention on any one single thing. Her struggle to focus made her wonder, was she the only one experiencing this?

So she started to study a very particular set of people. Office workers sat at computers. We started following people around with stopwatches. So we were shadowing them in their workplace.

Every time one of the workers switched their attention away from a screen, Gloria would be standing behind them, logging the time with her stopwatch. And you can imagine how labor-intensive that was. It was really quite a lot of work.

But then not too long after, software was developed that could log people's screen changes automatically. And across the 20 long years Gloria has been monitoring workers' attention spans, she's witnessed something dramatic. When we started out doing this with the stopwatches back in 2003,

We found attention on any screen, you know, before those screen content would change, to average about two and a half minutes. And then in 2012, we found it averaged 75 seconds. And then starting from around 2016 through 2020, right before the pandemic, we found it averaged 47 seconds. 47 seconds!

That sounds familiar. You're not alone. In fact, so many of us feel our attention spans have been hijacked that the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year for 2024 was brain rot. So today on Science Weekly, are our brains rotting and our attention spans irredeemably damaged? And if they're not, how can we win our focus back?

From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay and this is Science Weekly.

Gloria Mark, you're a psychologist, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and you're also the author of the book Attention Span, Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life. And I love this image of you standing behind office workers with a stopwatch, but the results that you got are pretty sobering. What do you put that drop in our attention spans down to? I mean, is it really because...

our attention spans have decreased? Or is it because the nature of our jobs has changed? You know, we answer more emails, we've got all different kinds of software programs running at the same time. We all do kind of more multidisciplinary work. Certainly the technology has changed. So we have a lot more emails now than we did back in 2003.

Smartphones have been invented, right? Smartphones came along. There's also social media. And many of the people we study say that their biggest distractor is social media. Algorithms on social media have become more sophisticated. So notifications are targeted more towards people's interests.

And there's also this social component because we're social creatures and the tech is designed to tap into our social natures. We can't resist if someone contacts us, say through text, you know, we want to maintain social capital. So we want to answer them.

Now, sometimes this can feel very frustrating when you just can't stay concentrated on something or different notifications are pinging that are distracting you from what you should be doing. But is it necessarily a bad thing? You know, are workers less productive if they are switching between tasks much faster than they used to be? They may not necessarily be less productive.

but they certainly have more stress. And we also can document that people make more errors when they switch so rapidly. And we also know that the faster they switch, the greater is their stress. And that's as measured in higher blood pressure. People subjectively report having greater stress and

And in our work, we've used heart rate monitors that people have worn, and we look at the timestamps of when their attention is switching. And we see, as measured by heart rate variability, that as switching goes up, their stress goes up.

So there's all these physiological changes happening in our body when we are doing this kind of switching. But what's happening in our brains? Well, our brains get fatigued. So there's a part of our minds that's called executive function.

And it's known as the CEO of the brain. So it handles all these important functions. It handles decision making and it helps filter out peripheral information. And when our minds get tired from doing all that switching and from stress,

Executive function can't do its job. And so we have a harder time filtering out peripheral information. In other words, we get distracted more easily. And so we get into this vicious cycle where we're more susceptible to interruptions and the more we're interrupted, the more fatigued we get and the more stressed we get.

So, Gloria, your research shows what we probably all intuitively feel, that our attention is being pulled in all sorts of different directions all the time. But do you think we're actually losing our fundamental ability to concentrate and pay attention for extended periods of time? Or are we just surrounded by it?

by temptation? You know, personally, my phone is rarely more than a meter away from me. I think that we've developed habits and these habits are interfering with our ability to pay attention.

Seeing your smartphone triggers us. It's an automatic kind of habit, and it triggers us to want to pick it up. So I don't believe that our basic ability to pay attention has changed, but there are some things that have changed. For example, our ability to navigate.

So since people have relied so heavily on GPS, people have lost their spatial ability or they've reduced their spatial ability. We have seen changes in regions of their brain, right? The hippocampus due to relying so much on GPS. So there are most definitely things in the brain that have changed, but our ability to pay attention, right?

I believe, would revert back when people are removed from their screens.

And it does seem like there are some, frankly, weird people out there who have an ability to ignore their phone. So what part does our individual personality play in all of this? Oh, it plays a large role. Certainly, there are some people who have an ability to self-regulate, very strong ability. There are others who have very weak self-regulation.

There are people who score high on a personality dimension that's called conscientiousness. These are people who tend to check their email more often. They want to make sure that nothing gets through the crack, that they're on top of all their emails. There are people who vary in another personality trait that's called neuroticism.

And neuroticism is when people tend to replay things over and over in your minds. So you just had a conversation with your colleague, your boss, or your significant other, and

And oh, maybe it didn't go quite right. So you replay it over and over in your mind. That's what neurotics tend to do. They tend to have thoughts that just pop into their heads. And that interferes with their ability to pay attention. So people who score high in neuroticism have the shortest attention spans. And that idea that being conscientious means that you're going to

check your emails more often gets to one of the points that I wanted to ask you about. Because in your book, one of the myths that you want to bust is this idea that we should be striving for unbroken focus and that we should feel guilty if we can't manage it. So how should we actually be thinking about our attention spans across a typical day? That's such a great question. We need to think of

us as having a limited amount of attentional resources or attentional capacity. You can think of it that way. And there are things we do during the day that can increase that capacity. There are things we do that diminish that capacity. And if you start the day with a really good night's sleep, you're starting the day with a full tank of resources.

And then when people try to focus for an extended period, they're using up these cognitive resources. And so what can people do? They need to take breaks so that you can let your resources replenish. And

When you say, you know, we should give ourselves a rest in terms of our attention, you know, if one was to sit on the sofa and mindlessly scroll through social media, does that count? Well, the best break to take is to go outside in nature.

it creates a different kind of stimulation. And our minds can wander. We take in all kinds of various stimuli. Now, if it's not possible to go outside in nature, then there are other things we can do. Sit quietly and contemplate or meditate. There are some people who do what I call rote activity activities.

which is kind of easy, engaging, repetitive activity such as knitting. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that his road activity was peeling potatoes.

And of course he had to be engaged because, you know, otherwise he would cut himself. But he claims he got his best ideas from doing this simple, what we might think is mindless activity of peeling potatoes. But his mind was still working in the background. His poor family, I wonder how many potatoes they were forced to eat every day.

And so, Gloria, for anyone listening who really relates to that feeling of not being able to focus as they would want to and would like to improve things, what are your top tips for creating that kind of environment where we're able to change our habits and improve our attention spans? The first thing I would say is to realise that

that so many things we do when we're using our screens are automatic. Like when we see our phones, we pick them up and swipe them open. And the first step is to probe yourself and become aware of the actions we're doing that are automatic. And so when I am about to go to social media or go to email or go to read news,

I recognize that and ask myself, do I really need to do that right now? Chances are no. And I've also probed myself to understand reasons why I do that. And it's usually because I'm bored or because I'm procrastinating. So once you make an automatic action more conscious,

then we can become more intentional. Gloria also says that practicing something called forethought can really help. And forethought is imagining our future selves at the end of the day and how you want to feel.

And I know I want to see myself probably lounging on the couch. I want to feel fulfilled and rewarded that I accomplished everything I planned to do. And that visualization is enough to

keep people in their tracks. Gloria also recommends figuring out when your concentration is at its peak during the day and planning around it. And finally, setting some goals. The problem is that goals slip out of our minds very, very fast. Goals are very slippery. And so the challenge is to keep goals in mind. Write it on a post-it note, put it in your field of view,

Put it someplace where you can see it posted on a wall so that you're reminded of what your goals are for that day. That's all really great advice. And I'm going to go out and buy myself a bag of potatoes after this. So, Gloria, thank you so much. It was my pleasure. Thanks again to Gloria, Mark.

To support The Guardian, you can order her book, Attention Span, Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life, via guardianbookshop.com.

The Science Weekly team is planning an episode all about how to get healthy in 2025. And for that, we need you to send us your questions. It can be anything you're curious about, from whether there's anything in the keto diet, how much strength training is needed to keep your muscles, to how to stave off the winter blues as January and February drag on.

We'll choose our favourites and bring you answers backed up by science. So just email scienceweeklyattheguardian.com. This episode was produced by Josh and Chana. The sound design was by Tony Onuchukwu. And the executive producer is Ellie Burey. We'll be back on Tuesday with our predictions for the year ahead in science. See you then. Hi there, Jonathan Friedland here, columnist at The Guardian and host of our Politics Weekly America podcast.

I want to ask for your help. Guardian podcasts depend on the support of you, our listeners, to help fund coverage, especially in years like this one. We don't have a billionaire owner or shareholders holding the purse strings, which is how we stay independent. To support The Guardian, just click the link in the episode description. And once again, thank you. This is The Guardian. The Guardian.

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