Speaking of Psychology - Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

These days, most of us live our lives tethered to our computers and smartphones, which are unending sources of distraction. Research has shown that over the past couple of decades people’s attention spans have shrunk in measurable ways. Gloria Mark, PhD, of the University of California Irvine, talks about how the internet and digital devices have affected our ability to focus, why multitasking is so stressful, and how understanding the science of attention can help us to regain our focus when we need it. Learn more: Gloria Mark, PhD, Speaking of Psychology Home Page Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When was the last time that you had an entire day completely free from digital distractions? No text messages, no email notifications, no social media, and no aimless internet browsing. It might be hard to think of the last time you even had a tech-free hour. These days, most of us live our lives tethered to our computers and our smartphones, which are unending sources of distraction. Sometimes it can feel impossible to concentrate deeply on anything for any time. anything for any significant length of time. And indeed, researchers have found evidence

that over the past couple of decades, people's attention spans have shrunk considerably. So how has the rise of the internet and digital devices affected our ability to focus and pay attention? What does it mean to pay attention to something anyway? When you're being bombarded by different tasks, notifications, and emails, is it possible to multitask and deal with them all effectively?

Or is productive multitasking a myth? How can understanding the science of attention help us to regain our focus when we need it, to improve both our productivity and our happiness? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist and the Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Mark studies how people interact with technology in their everyday lives and how technology affects our attention, multitasking, mood, and stress level. She studies people's behavior in real-world settings, and she's found that our attention spans have been shrinking over the past two decades. Her new book published in January is called Attention Span, a groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness, and productivity. Dr. Mark, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. Most of us probably think that we know what it means when we say we pay attention to something. But you wrote in your book that there are different kinds of attention.

Can you talk about that? What are the different kinds of attentions that we experience in our everyday life? Let me actually start out by talking about what William James, the father of psychology, says about attention. So back in the 19th century, he said, everyone knows what attention is. It's the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Of course everyone knows what attention is. We all believe we know what attention is, but it's a lot more complicated than that.

So when I was studying attention, it occurred to me that you can be very engaged in something. and you can put in a lot of mental effort. You know, if I'm reading an article, you know, I really have to, it can be challenging for me. On the other hand, there's a lot of things we do that are not at all challenging, but we're very engaged in. So when we're playing solitaire or, you know, playing simple games online, or, you know, if a person is gardening, you know, they might be very engaged and not at all challenged. So we set out to study different kinds of attention when people use their devices. And what we did was we probed people throughout the day. And we asked them, you know, at this point in time, want you to respond very quickly and tell us how engaged were you in what you just did and how challenged were you in what you just did.

We find that when people are engaged and challenged, there seems to be rhythms in the day when this happens. And people seem to have peaks of times when they do this. we call this focused attention. Tends to be late morning, and again, mid to late afternoon, about two to three. And when people are very engaged in something and not at all challenged, we call that road activity. Lots of things that people do are road activity when they're online. It could be simple games. It could be even reading the news or doing social media.

They tend to do that relatively. uniformly throughout the day. But we do find that focused attention occurs in rhythms, and it seems to correspond to the ebb and flow of our mental resources that we have available. Well, I mentioned in the introduction that you have found evidence that our attention spans have shrunk in recent years, at least as measured by how long people spend on tasks and screens at work. Can you talk about that, how much have our attention spans shrunk? So, you know, we started measuring this back in 2004. And at the time, the measures that we used were stopwatches, because that was the most precise thing we had at the time. We would shadow people with stopwatches. For every single activity they

did, we would record the start time and the stop time. So you're on a screen where you're working at a Word doc, as soon as you get to that screen, we clicked start time. As soon as they turned away and checked email, we clicked stop time for the word document, start time for the email. But fortunately, sophisticated computer logging methods were developed. And so, of course, we switched to those. So back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. throughout the years, it became shorter. So around 2012, we found it to be 75 seconds. This is with logging techniques. This is an average. And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds. And others have replicated this result within a few seconds. So it seems to be quite robust. Now, another way to think about this result is the median. The median means the midpoint of observations. The median is 40 seconds. And what this means is that half of all the measurements that we found were 40 seconds or less of people's attention spans. Now, you know,

obviously because we're talking about averages and medians, sometimes people do spend longer, but quite a good bit of the time, their attention spans are much shorter and within average coming to 47 seconds. So why is this a problem? I mean, you know, since it seems to be happening almost universally at this point, is this just the new normal? It seems to be the new normal because we seem to have reached a steady state over the last five or six years where these are the measures that we're seeing. Is this a good thing? I would argue it's not a good thing for the following reasons. First of all, we find in our research a correlation between frequency of attention switching and stress. So the faster the attention switching occurs, stress as measured by,

people wearing heart rate monitors. We show that stress goes up. We know from decades of research in the laboratory that when people multitask, they experience stress. Blood pressure rises. There's a physiological marker in the body that indicates people are stressed. And, you know, in our studies, we've also simply asked people with well-valent instruments to report their stress, their perceived stress.

And it's reported to be higher the faster that we measure attention shifting. So all of these measures seem to be consistent. I will also measure that when people shift their attention so fast, and this is multitasking when you keep switching your attention among different activities, people make more errors, and that's been shown in studies in the real world with physicians, nurses, pilots. We also know that performance slows. Why?

Because there's something called a switch cost. So every time you switch your attention, you have to reorient to that new activity, that new thing you're paying attention to, and it takes a little bit of time. So imagine if you're writing, let's say you're writing a chapter and you suddenly stop what you're doing and you switch and do something else and then you come back to it. It's going to take you some time to reconstruct. You know, what was I writing? What was the topic I was thinking about? What were the words I was using? That takes a bit of time. And so we incur these switch costs throughout the day as we're switching our attention. And, you know, this creates more effort. It uses more of our

very precious mental resources on top of the work that we actually need to do. You've also found that some switching is good. It's normal during the course of a day so that you might really concentrate on something for a length of time. And then you take a break and maybe you go online or maybe if you're working from home, you put in a load of laundry. or you take a walk. I mean, isn't that something that we actually need to do? Absolutely. It's so important that we take breaks because if you work until you get exhausted, then, of course, you can get burn up. It's so important to take breaks and replenish. And by taking breaks, we have more energy, we have more attentional capacity,

and we can actually do more. We can be more productive. The problem is that in our current world, many work environments, people neglect to take meaningful breaks. And, you know, we get ourselves into a position where we end up having our performance suffers as a result. Now, if you're going to take a break, it's really important to take a break at a point in the task that's called a break point. And a break point is a natural stopping point in a task. So going back to the writing example, if I'm writing something, a break point would be at the end of a section or even at the end of a paragraph, right? But at a point where when I come back to it, then there's not going to be

a lot of effort for me to have to reconstruct what I was doing. I've already finished that part. If you interrupt yourself in the middle of doing something as opposed to a natural stopping point, you use up a lot more mental resources and it's also more stressful. Well, for people who want to schedule breaks, who really want to intentionally make the changes that you're talking about, what do you think about programs? such as internet blockers that prevent people from going online during certain hours of the day so that you can force yourself to be more focused. Do you think that those are effective? We've done a study with internet blockers, and it turns out it very much depends on an individual's

personality. So people who have poor self-regulation skills can benefit from these kinds of blockers. You know, essentially what you're doing is you're offloading the work of self-regulation onto the software. And the software becomes a proxy agent for you, right? It's doing the work. It turns out people who have good self-regulation skills, so people who score low in impulsivity as a trade, people who score high in conscientiousness. These These are people who are actually harmed by these blockers. Why? Because these are people who are very good at taking breaks and coming right back to work.

They can take a break. They can go to social media. They can go to a new site. And they can take a break, relax themselves. Then they can come back to work. In this study, we took away their opportunity to take a quick on- break and they got burned out. They worked straight through. They didn't take breaks. On the whole, I prefer that people develop their own agency, their own self-efficacy in controlling their

attention. These software blockers can be good at times, but I think it's far more important and that people learn to develop their own skills to control their attention. You know, a lot has been written about the Pomodoro technique, which is basically, you said a timer for every 25 minutes to do, and then you agree, you're going to work straight through for 25 minutes, the timer goes off and you get a five-minute break. What about that as sort of a low-tech blocker? Well, that's fine, but there are individual differences. and, you know, some people would be able to work longer than what the Pomodora technique dictates.

Some people would work less. I think it's much more important that people become self-aware of their own level of energy and the amount of attentional resources they have available and take breaks according to what their own levels are. So, you know, I've learned to do this. I've learned to become more aware of what my own capacity is. And when I start feeling tired, that's the point when I take a break. If I know I've got a really hard task to do, I might schedule a break before I start doing that task so I can replenish myself and then right after so that I can, you know, build back up

the resources that I expended. The worst thing you can do, the worst thing is to schedule back-to-back Zoom meetings without breaks, that it just gets us exhausted. There's no transition between these meetings. So we need to schedule in transitions between these kinds of hard tasks. When we're talking about attention and attention spans, there's something a little bit different but related, which is the concept of flow. Can you explain what that is?

because that is a kind of attention. And it's very, very different from what we've just been talking about. That's right. So flow is a type of attention that the psychologist Mihaliyi, Schiiksa Mihaliki, discovered. And it's what he calls the optimal state of attention. It's when people are so immersed in something that time just doesn't seem to matter. And so it's when we. It's when we are at our peak creativity.

We're using the optimal amount of challenge of our skills. So if we're not challenged enough in whatever your skill happens to be, you won't go into flow. If you're challenged too much in your skill, you won't go into flow. It'll be too hard. So there's that sweet spot that you have to hit to go into flow. flow. So before I went into psychology, I actually had studied fine arts and used to be an artist, and I would get into flow regularly. And it's the nature of the work of, you know, being an artist and, you know, being creative, that I could regularly get into flow. Now, as a scientist, I rarely get into

flow because of the nature of my work where I have to be very analytical. And I have, you know, I have to use very careful thought. Is that a bad thing? No, not at all. It's, it's very rewarding. It's just I realize that the nature of my work and the nature of a lot of knowledge work is such that it may not be conducive to flow. But sometimes I get into flow if I'm in, say, a brainstorming session with other people. We might get into a kind of group flow where, you know, we're just everyone is feeding off of each other's ideas. But, you know, in my typical day-to-day life now, I generally don't get into flow. And it's not a bad thing. Let's talk for a minute about the effect of the internet and devices on children's attention span. Most of your research has been

with adults, but kids are spending a lot of time on devices as well. Are they going to have even more trouble with attention than those of us who first experience this level of distraction as adults? This is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society. So it turns out children that are as young as two to four years old, they already average two and a half hours of screen time a day. And when they get to be between five and eight, they average about three hours of screen time a day. Now, most of that screen time, it's TV and YouTube viewing. But children also do a lot of gaming, right? So we know from a lot of laboratory studies that when children are very young, they're a lot more susceptible to distraction than older children.

And when they're distracted, it takes them longer to get back and focus again on that thing that they weren't distracted from. So, you know, I worry that when young children are spending so much time on the screen, it acculturates them to think that this is normal behavior to be on a screen. The problem is that when children are very young, there are certain parts of their brain that are not yet mature. So their ability to self-control

and a part of the brain called executive function. And executive function is, you can think of it as the governor of the mind. So it manages things like decision-making and setting priorities of, of what we should be paying attention to. It helps manage interference of peripheral stimuli in the environment. And executive function is not yet well developed,

and children are sitting in front of screens, and they're exposed to all kinds of potential distractions. So I think this is not a good idea. Children need self-control for learning. And more and more, we're seeing schools having a lot of online learning available for kids. And kids need self-control as a skill to be able to search for information, to do math problems online, to read and write without being distracted. I find it problematic that we're putting children into a digital world. before some very critical mental functions are fully developed.

I don't think kids are really ready for that. Can focus be taught? I mean, you seem to be implying that we need to be doing something, particularly with children, so that they aren't constantly distracted. But, I mean, how do you teach somebody to focus on something? Well, for children, I think the best thing children can do is to do, activity off screen. And I think they would learn to focus, whether it's, you know, playing outside, reading books is an excellent way to get children to focus. If we're talking about adults,

I think that one of the best things that adults can do is to make sure that your internal tank of mental resources is kept at high capacity. So when you have a full, full tank of resources, you can focus much better than when you're just spent. You know, when your resources have just drained because you're doing hard work all day, you're switching your attention a lot. It's going to be very, very hard to focus. And there are things we can do to build up those resources. So we can, one of the best things you can do is to get a really good night's sleep. I know everyone says, of course, we know you should get a good night's sleep, but let me tell you what happens when you don't. When people accumulate what's called sleep debt,

and sleep debt is the accumulation of loss of sleep. If you need eight hours of sleep a night, and I need eight hours of sleep at night, but if you're only getting six hours a night, that difference is called a sleep debt. And if you're consistently getting six hours of sleep a night, you're accumulating sleep debt. And we know that the greater the sleep debt, the shorter the attention spans. And what do people do when they have a lot of sleep debt? We found that they tend to do more lightweight activities like social media. They just don't have the resources to be able to focus and do hard work. So they do what's easy based on the amount of resources that they have available.

Let's switch topics for a minute to something else that you talk about in your book, which is how TV and movies have changed in the past few decades. You're right that the pace of television and movies has sped up and things like the length of each camera shot. They're getting shorter. Why is that? And are those changes affecting our attention? Or is this happening because the people who are creating these things already know that we have no attention anymore?

So I was very surprised to learn that TV and film shot lengths have decreased over the years. They started out much longer. They now average about four seconds a shot length. That's on average. If you watch MTV music videos, they're much shorter. They're only a couple of seconds. So we've become accustomed to seeing very fast shot lengths when we look at TV and film. Even commercials have shortened in length.

Commercials used to be much longer. Now it's not uncommon to see six-second commercials even shorter than that. Now, it's a chicken and egg question. We don't know if TV and film have affected our attention spans on computers and phones. We don't know if our attention spans have affected the decision-making of film editors and directors. We don't know exactly if there is any causal connection. We see these two parallel trends. It could be the case that directors and editors are influenced by their own short attention spans when they create these film shots. Or it could be.

that they're creating short film shots because they think that's what the viewer wants to see. But this has become quite ubiquitous. In fact, on YouTube, there's a particular YouTube aesthetic which uses jump cuts. So when you're watching a YouTube film, the film becomes very jumpy, right? It's the natural pauses that people make when they speak is removed. So the idea is to pack more content into a shorter amount of time. So, you know, we're seeing short lengths of content from all directions. It's not just what we're attending to on computers and phones. But I think you found that some of this we're doing to ourselves. Like I know some people who feel like there's so time crunched that when they want to listen to a podcast, they turn up the

speed to 1.5 or 2, you know, and then listen to it. I mean, Why are we doing this to ourselves? And is this helping? You know, I myself have sometimes done that. Why do we do this? You know, there's a number of reasons. I can't say exactly why we do. It could be because we want to fit more content into a shorter amount of time

because there's so much content available, right? We're talking about access to the world's largest candy store, and we want to sample all the way. that are available. So, of course, you might want to speed up the podcast so that you can simply take more in and quickly get to your next favorite podcast. So I don't know exactly why we're doing it on ourselves. It could be also out of habit.

We're just used to listening to things faster. But we do have, you know, all of this content available to us at our fingertips. within milliseconds. And so, you know, perhaps we just want to sample as much as we possibly can. Now, during the pandemic, many people have switched to remote work, which I'm guessing has meant more emails, more messages on Slack and teams, and workers have to deal with all of this. How do you think this is affecting people's attention and focus? Do you even know, is it too soon to say? Yeah, so I've worked on a survey with colleagues. So we have people self-reports. They've reported that it's hard to focus. I've done other work where we're looking at team, team interaction in remote work and have picked up some information from that. People do report having a hard time focusing. It's a different kind of distraction than you would have a in a workplace. Of course, you're distracted by the pile of dirty laundry that you're looking at.

In a workplace, you might be distracted by ambient noise in the workplace. We do know that it makes a difference whether people have a private workspace at home where it can be quiet or whether they have to share a public working space with others, which is more distracting. Some people might go to a cafe to work. And of course, that creates another type of distraction. So a lot of it very much depends on the environment where the person is working. We also know that, you know, if you're remote from your colleagues, you can't really signal to them when is a good time to interrupt. If you're in a workplace, and especially if you can see your colleagues, you can see when they just hung up the phone, then you know it might be a nice time to walk over and talk to them,

or you might stand outside their office and wait, and then you can see when it's good to interrupt. When we're remote, we don't have that visual information, and so we can just be sending electronic communications to our colleagues at all time. there's another study that I did with my postdoc, and she found that a lot of people feel that they want to go above and beyond what they ordinarily do to be able to signal to their colleagues, to their supervisors that they're working hard, and so they jump to answer their email, their Slack messages so that they can demonstrate, hey, I'm very. working. You know, you don't see me, but I want you to know that I'm here and I'm working hard.

And that's why I'm going to jump on these messages. Now, we've been talking a lot about what individuals can do regarding better attention spans. But are there changes that organizations should be making or even changes at a societal level that could help all of us with, you know, sort of boosting our ability to stay focused on important things? There are. And I'm a big advocate for changes on a collective level. And the reason is that if any individual decides to just, you know, pull out and completely cut themselves off from technology, they might penalize themselves. If you're a knowledge worker of any kind, you're cutting yourself off from important work communications. You can be cutting yourself off from communications,

from family, friends, loved ones, from important news in the world. So it's not always beneficial for any individual to cut themselves off. But an organization can do things. They can, for example, control times during the day when electronic communications are sent. they can create a window of time when no communications would be sent.

And this would be a quiet time with, you know, people can work. In our research, we find that people check email on average 77 times a day. And if you have this quiet time, at least you can curtail that checking, right? We might be able to reduce the amount of checking because you know there's no point to check. There won't be email coming. On a societal level, there's starting to be what's called right to disconnect laws. And there's one in France. It's called the El Camry law.

There's also Ireland and Ontario have policies. So other countries are starting to pick up on this. And it's the idea that no worker can be penalized if they do not answer electronic. communications after work hours, before and after work hours. New York City tried to introduce a right to disconnect law in its city council meeting. That got shot down very quickly. And my favorite, I read the transcripts of the meeting and my favorite response, my favorite argument against it was from the Bureau of Tourism, which said, you know, we're the greatest. tourist city in the world were the city that never sleeps. So, you know, if we have right to

disconnect laws, it enables people to detach from work. And that has so much psychological benefit for individuals. You truly do need a break from work. We can't be on work 24-7, and that's that's what's happening. The borders between our personal life and work life have just blurred so that, you know, in personal time, when people are at home after work, they're dealing with work problems and work communications. People do need time to really relax, to break away from work. It's such a great psychological benefit. And if they can do that, it enables them to better retouch, reattached work the next day because they're fresh, they're replenished. So I'm a big advocate of right-to-discconnect policy.

Well, let me ask you a totally different question, which is, what's next for you? What are you working on now? What are the important research questions that you want to see answered? Yeah, so I would like to continue looking at our attention. I'm interested in a lot of things. I'm interested in how we can get more value from the Internet. We have this incredible resource available to us. And so rather than be upset by it because it distracts us,

how can we turn that around and instead find value from it? And how can we utilize our time best and optimize our time best when we use the resources that the Internet offers without, without getting exhausted from it. And I also have been looking at teamwork, remote teamwork, and how that can be optimized, you know, because more and more companies are starting to have hybrid work and remote work.

And what are the repercussions from that? What are the benefits from that? So I'd like to understand that better. Well, that all sounds really interesting. I look forward to seeing your subsequent research. I appreciate your joining me today, Dr. Mark. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me.

You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology. Or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondyenne. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.