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Ten years ago, a shocking headline captured the world’s attention: “Human beings now have an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish!”
This claim, though horrifying, was totally bogus. The stat in question – that our attention spans had shrunk to a meagre eight seconds – was founded on two spurious and unverified sources and widely spread by a Microsoft Ads “study” published in 2015.
Still, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on, as the saying goes. The falsehood proved irresistible and was widely reported by global media outlets, including this very publication, before eventually being debunked. Perhaps it was so easy to believe because it backed up what everyone already suspected: that we were, collectively as a species, getting stupider. Or, if not stupider, certainly less adept at concentrating for any length of time.
The inexorable rise of TikTok has seen the proliferation of ultra-short-form content; according to one survey, nearly half of users find videos longer than a minute “stressful”, while analysis has shown that videos under 60 seconds get the most views and up to 15 per cent more engagement than those of a minute or more.
In fact, everywhere you turn, media seems to have undergone an evolution – or perhaps that should be devolution – shrinking down to appeal to our increasingly fractured focus. YouTubers cut out pauses in the edit to make their clips shorter, podcasts and voice notes offer the option to listen at double speed, and the average song length dropped to an all-time low of 3m 12s in 2019. An accompanying “attention deficit pop”-style genre has sprung up, comprised of blink-and-you-miss-them tracks designed for potential viral superstardom as the backdrop to social media posts. Music platforms such as Spotify have even changed the way that songs are being written – artists have to “front-load” a track with the hook to hold the listener’s attention past the first few seconds, otherwise they’ll skip the song.
Meanwhile, movie cuts have become much more rapid and streaming services have started creating “second screen shows”, specifically designed to be consumed by the permanently distracted viewer while they simultaneously scroll on another device. Insiders have claimed that Netflix frequently instructs screenwriters to have characters “announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this programme on in the background can follow along”.
And that’s before we even get into the genre known colloquially as “brain rot”: nonsense, quickfire and often jarring video content with no discernible plot, typified by its repetitive and absurdist nature. One of the most famous examples is now Skibidi Toilet, an online series so popular that the word “skibidi” passed into common parlance (and the Cambridge English dictionary) as a slang word used primarily by children and young people.
Even if we haven’t quite hit goldfish levels, is there some truth to the assertion that human attention spans are dwindling? The short answer is a resounding “yes”, according to research. “We can reliably say, based on empirical, objective measures, that attention spans have decreased over a 20-year period,” says Professor Gloria Mark, a leading authority on the interplay between technology and concentration and author of Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life. Back in 2003, when they started measuring attention spans, the average amount of time that an individual would focus on one screen before switching tasks clocked in at two-and-a-half minutes. By 2012, this had plummeted to one minute and 15 seconds. It’s now fallen once again to 47 seconds.
This shift is very recent in human history and, unsurprisingly, tied to technological advancements. “Things were pretty consistent for a very long time in the course of human evolution, and then, over the last 150 years, every generation has had some kind of fundamental shift in how we engage with the broader world,” says Professor Marian E Berryhill, a cognitive neuroscientist who specialises in working memory, perception and attention. We went from television, to computers, the internet, social media and smartphones in our pockets.
This last development has made distraction a constant companion. “It means that any passing little thought that hits your mind – like ‘Hmmm, I wonder if Tim Burton is still with Helena Bonham Carter?’ – makes you stop what you’re doing and check as if that were an important thing,” says Berryhill. “The fact that the immediacy of finding out is right at your fingertips means most of us fall victim to that kind of intrusive thought all the time.”
Any passing little thought that hits your mind makes you stop what you’re doing and check, as if that were an important thing
Marian E Berryhill
Are attention spans being moulded by the digital world or vice versa? It seems to be a little of column A, a little of column B. “People have these short attention spans, and so they’re being fed content to try to hold their attention,” says Mark. “And that content is short, and then people learn this pattern of not being able to pay attention. It’s a cycle.”
In other words, says Berryhill, “attention spans have become shorter because we have practised shorter attention spans.” It’s a chicken-and-egg affair. Or an attention arms race, you could call it; companies desperate to commandeer our attention have had to become increasingly loud and abrasive to cut through a world filled with competing stimuli.
The phenomenon of the double-screen, meanwhile, is literally changing our brains. Studies have shown that people who regularly use two or more media simultaneously – such as having a series streaming while doing an online food shop – have what’s called “lower cognitive control”. Scans have shown that the part of the brain that’s involved in things like emotional regulation and conflict monitoring is affected. And though rapidly switching attention between tasks might make us feel more productive, it actually impairs our ability to filter out distractions and makes us far more likely to make mistakes.
Likewise, the culture of listening to audio at 1.5 or two times the normal speed might give the impression of efficiency, yet we are “losing so much information”, says Mark. Plus we give ourselves no time to really mull over and digest what is being said; contemplation and deep thinking are fast becoming lost arts.
Alongside all of this, a pronounced decline in reading has been observed. A recent YouGov poll revealed that 40 per cent of British adults had not read a book in the past year, while a separate survey found that more than a third of UK adults have given up reading for pleasure. Young adults were less likely to read than all other age groups; children’s reading is now at its lowest level on record, according to The National Literacy Trust.
Last year, Sir Jonathan Bate, a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, lamented the deterioration in students’ ability to get through books. Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, he described how they used to be able to read three novels in a week; today “many students will struggle to get through one novel in three weeks”. He blamed this shift partly on “the attrition of attention span due to smartphones, six-minute YouTube videos and instant TikTok dopamine hits.”
It’s not just happening in the UK. One American professor told The Atlantic that his students “struggled to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot” when reading novels. Separately, researchers have discovered a 40 per cent drop in reading for pleasure over the last 20 years in the US. “Changes in attention spans, increasing demands on our attentions and frequent distractions are likely to make it harder to read,” says UCL’s Dr Jessica Bone, the study’s lead author.
Best-selling author Ian Rankin even suggested recently that writers should adapt for a modern audience. “We’ve already seen chapters getting shorter in novels, I think possibly to chime with people’s attention spans,” he said in an interview. “Maybe as people’s attention spans change, the literature will have to change with them.”
Maybe as people’s attention spans change, the literature will have to change with them
Ian Rankin
This decrease in reading for fun has also coincided with an alarming drop in literacy levels. A 2024 OECD report concluded that literacy rates were falling or stagnating right across high-income countries.
This matters for obvious reasons. According to Dr Bone, reading can have a huge range of potential benefits for cognition (vocabulary, reasoning, cognitive decline); psychological processes (emotional intelligence, empathy, imagination); mental health (stress, anxiety, depression, sleep); achievement (academically, at work); and for society (cultural understanding, sense of belonging, social identity).
But it could have even more dramatic implications for society. In a viral substack, journalist James Marriott posited that we’re heading toward a “post-literate society”, arguing that the natural end point of all of this will be the death of democracy. “More than 300 years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying,” he writes. “The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the 18th century. Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants – moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking.”
As problematic as all this is for adults, it poses an even bigger danger for children and young people, who have grown up surrounded by devices and constant digital distraction. Adolescents are particularly at risk because their brains aren’t fully developed, particularly the parts responsible for self-control. “You get the gas, the ‘go’ signal, before you get the brakes,” says Berryhill. “When you have an endless supply of alluring sensory stimuli, it is very difficult to self-limit.”
The term “digital dementia” was coined by German neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr Manfred back in 2012 to describe the cognitive decline he had observed among young people due excessive reliance on devices. One 2022 paper took the idea of “digital dementia” literally, predicting that too much screen time during children’s brain development increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias later in life.
And a major new study has found that children who spend a “significant” amount of time using social media see a significant erosion in their ability to concentrate; interestingly, the same pattern did not emerge for those whose screen time was primarily made up of watching television or playing video games.
In response to all this, there have been growing calls to introduce age limits for smartphones. Australia just took the unprecedented step of banning social media for children under the age of 16.
But no matter your age (and despite the possible doom spiral prompted by all of the above), it’s not too late to change. Though our attention spans may have shrunk over time, they can also be built back up – just like any other muscle. “There are ways we know of that can expand your attention span,” encourages Berryhill. “Practising mindfulness; putting your phone in another room; getting to break points and making those be the moments at which point you are allowed to check your devices or your email or whatever it is that causes you problems.”
There are plenty of hacks to help cut down on smartphone use: everything from apps to “boring-ify” your phone’s interface to devices like the Brick, which restricts access to pre-determined apps until you physically tap your phone to unlock it. There’s even been a “screen Sabbath” movement, whereby people regularly take an intentional day away from devices and spend it on more analogue pursuits, such as reading, walking, and spending time with friends and family.
When we don’t have the cognitive resources to focus, we do what’s easy. And what’s easy? Social media
Gloria Mark
“We can take regular, good, solid breaks”, to maximise rather than drain our attentional capacity, advises Mark. “The best break is to go outside in nature; we did some research and even 20 minutes in nature means people have better divergent thinking. It somehow helps us think much more clearly and generate ideas.”
Another important element is getting good quality sleep. One of Mark’s studies found that the more sleep participants got the night before, the longer they were able to focus the next day. On the flipside, the more “sleep debt” people accumulated over several days – getting only six hours a night when they need eight, for example – the more time they spent on social media. “The way I interpret it is that when we don’t have the cognitive resources to focus, we do what’s easy,” says Mark. “And what’s easy? Social media.”
The important thing to remember in all of this is that you are not “weak” for struggling to concentrate. Everything in today’s distractification culture is specifically designed to steal your attention, and the techniques used are tied to our most fundamental human instincts. “Sparkly, shiny, moving and loud things grab our attention – they say there is something new in the environment that you need to evaluate, which has evolutionary importance,” explains Berryhill. “You need to pay attention to that rustling in the grass, because you might be delicious. You have to orient yourself to changes in your environment – but we’re putting those changes into our own environment in the form of these tech portals.”
The most surefire way to grow your attention span? Put down the devices, remove the power of big tech and take back control of your own brain.