The Current - Why your attention span is trash and what you can do about it

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Can't concentrate? What about thinking deeply? Attention spans are shrinking rapidly. Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of the bestselling book 'Deep Work' says we're facing a crisis -- an attack on our ability to think. He's calling for what he calls a revolution in defence of thinking. He outlines the steps for reclaiming your attention.

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podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. How long can you focus for? Maybe like five minutes, but I'm really locked in, maybe like 20 minutes. On a day to day, it might be kind of low, like five minutes. I don't think I can really focus. My attention span right now actually is quite low. I actually am worried about my concentration level because it's zero. The world is a busy place. Phones are ever present and our uniquely human capacity for thinking deeply is waning. The currents and Penman spoke with people outside the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library in downtown Vancouver about their ability to concentrate. I'm being conditioned by these stupid phones and these devices, okay? That's a fact. So I know my

attention spans very f***-ho, and it's not good. It's not good for people and it's not good for relationships. I think deeply about saying concentrated honestly almost every day. Like it's something I'm really trying to focus on. There's like a lot of jokes about it. online about having like fried attention spans and it's like something that people like think super normal and I think that kind of makes people like think that oh if everyone's struggling with it it's fine yeah I'll be thinking about something then all of a sudden I'll be looking at my phone 30 seconds later I'm like oh this is cool and then I'll go over the TV and see what's on there it's never one thing focus is just all over the map I guess I will say that it's important for everyone

to really try it's kind of like active rebellion in these days with AI kind of being so pervasive to really take ownership of your ability to critically think think and challenge things. Like people don't have an opportunity, especially kids, to just kind of be bored and kind of do nothing, which makes it really hard to have focus because if you're doing nothing, you could think about one thing to do as opposed to like 500 things to look at. What does that mean when we can't concentrate anymore? And what can we do about that?

Well, my next guest says we are facing a crisis, an attack on our ability to think. He's calling for what he says should be a revolution in defense of thinking. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of a bestselling book called Deep Work Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Cal Newport, good morning. Thanks for having me. How is your attention span? Well, hopefully it's doing okay, but I work really hard at it, sort of like asking someone who has a regular jogging habit, how are your lungs doing? And they say, oh, they're pretty good.

You wrote, and I want to get to the habit in a moment and the exercise that you put into this. You wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times recently, and it said, I'm done. seeding my brain, the core of all that makes me who I am to the financial interests of a small number of technology billionaires or the short-sighted conveniences of hyperactive communication styles. What were you seeing happen to yourself that led you to write that? Well, I noticed there's a passivity we seem to have in the face of this onslaught to our ability to actually sustain our attention. I certainly noticed it in my own life. You have the digital equivalent of junk food coming through on your phones trying to divert you away from things

that are going to push your brain more. And then you have tools like AI that are trying to offload more mental exercise from you. Oh, we'll do this writing for you. We'll do this thinking for you. And we were sort of sitting back saying, well, what can you do? It's technology. And I was sort of getting tired of that. I said, this actually makes me a little bit upset that these companies are coming at a core aspect of my humanity, my ability to direct my brain at things I find important and I don't want to just sit back and take it. What specifically is happening? I ask in part because you wrote that great book, Deep Work, a decade ago.

And you wrote about the strategies that people could employ to find time to think deeply. But in that Times piece, you said we're losing the ability to think deeply at all, regardless of how much space we can find in our schedules for that. So what is going on right now? It's a troubling development. Ten years ago when I wrote that book, I thought the issue was just make more time for deep work during your job and things will be better. Now, 10 years later, you could make all the time in the world,

and I think most of us would actually struggle to make good use of it. And I think what really happened here was the rise of the attention economy. So you had these tech companies who were making massive fortunes off of trying to monetize our attention, and then this was followed by the AI revolution, which piggybacked on top of that, and said, okay, now your brains are weak from spending a decade staring at these phones. Now we can offload any type of thinking you have left to do. And so I think that one-two punch of phone delivered attention economy distraction followed more recently by generative AI has really put our brains into a much worse situation than even we were 10 years ago. I mean, full confession, I'm somebody who if I'm reading a book and I read all the time, I have to put my phone in another room.

I need to physically be separated from the phone. And I like to think that I'm able to concentrate. But I have to put it away because I know that it will attract me. What's going on there? There's a part of our brain that you can call the short-term motivation system. And what it does is it evaluates things that are proximate, things you could be doing right now, and basically evaluates how much of a reward would we get from that activity. And if the reward is high, it's going to generate a cascade of neurotransmitters that feels like motivation to do that thing.

So if your phone is nearby, your brain has been trained through the use of these algorithmically optimized apps like TikTok or Instagram, that it will give you a good reward. So if the phone is nearby, your short-term reward system, it's firing inside your head saying, pick up the phone, pick up the phone. We are evolved to listen to those systems. And this is why actually literally having the phone in a different place where the friction to go get it would be high gives you a completely different cognitive experience because your short-term motivation system doesn't have that option to vote for. And it makes a big difference. What role does AI play in helping to reduce that friction that you just talked about? What I've been seeing when I've been studying how early adopters of AI, so this first couple of years, how are people adopting generative AI tools? One of the big signals I'm seeing is that they're using it to reduce cognitive strain.

We talk a lot about productivity. We talk a lot about automating work we don't want to be doing. That's not what I'm actually seeing onto ground. People are turning to these Gen AI tools in cases where even if it makes their life harder in the sense of the tasks take longer to complete, if they can avoid the strain, for example, of staring at a blank page and having to fill that in with one, words, they will do almost anything to do it. So it's come along and given us an easy way to avoid some of the last remaining acts of cognitive strain that still remained in our lives. You say that we are losing our ability to think deeply at all. And that to some people might sound dramatic. What does that mean at the most elemental level? It means we cannot sustain

our mind's eye for an extended period of time on a target of our choice. That's what I'm really talking about. So to be able to think deeply is to say, okay, there's something going on in my life I want to figure out. I can actually turn my mind's eye internal and try to figure out why do I feel this way or what should I do. Or I have an external problem I'm trying to solve. It's like a business strategy that we need to update. I can turn my mind's eye onto that and sustain my focus and try to actually understand what we should do here that's better. So that contemplative ability of aiming our mind's eye at our own will is critical to the human experience. And that is what I think we're losing. Talk a bit more about that and what the broader consequences of losing that ability to think deeply are on our economy, on our society, and beyond.

There are economic impacts for sure. In the U.S., for example, somewhere around 40 to 50 percent of the economy now is dedicated to what's known as intensive knowledge industry. So these are things, whether it's like R&D or computer programming or aerospace design that require concentrated thought to actually do well at. So if we lose our ability to focus, there's an economic hit. But there's also a political hit as well, right? I mean, the ability to bring in complicated information and sustain your thinking on issues that are affecting you is critical to be a participant in a political democracy. And we have the personal hit. The ability to control our mind's eye is how we expand our moral imagination. It's how we better understand ourselves and our lives and our place in the world.

In that New York Times piece, I talk about Martin Luther King at this pivotal moment early in his career during the Montgomery. bus boycotts, sitting there at his kitchen table just reflecting. And that's when he really solidified this idea, hey, you need to stand up for justice. It was reflection. It was deep thinking that helped form the cause that he then pursued so vigorously. So we lose a lot when we seed our ability to focus on what we want to over to these companies. We also lose a bit of who we are, right? One of the questions that we keep asking on this program is what does it mean to be human now?

How is thinking and thinking deeply at the core of what it means to be human? Well, I think we underestimate the degree to which our sense of self is constructed. It's constructed over time, in part by taking in experiences, ways we feel, things that happen, and then taking the time to actually try to fit this into some sort of cognitive scaffolding that defines our sense of our self and our place in the world. It's an act of self-reflection. It's an act of contemplation. And when you lose that ability, those moments where you're just you alone with your thoughts,

why am I sad about this? How am I going to react to this disappointment? What do I feel like is not going well in my life? All of that is the result of being able to sit there, aim your mind's eye at something important and keep it quietly sustained there. So I think our sense of cells become much more fractured. We become much more reactive, just sort of bouncing from one stimuli to another delivered through glowing screens.

And I think that's a diminished form of our humanity. There's a neat thing that you do in this piece in which you draw a parallel between the moment that we're living through now and the transformation and the shift around how we understood exercise that happened in the 50s and 60s. Tell me about that. To me, this is hopeful, right? If you look back to the mid-20th century, we did not generally think a lot about diet and exercise. We had in some sense bigger fish to fry and it wasn't something we thought much about. And then there was this transition that happened, especially in the 1950s and 60s, where A, our food got to. industrialized and less healthy. And B, we switched to more of a suburban-style car culture, so physical activity went down, and we got really physically unhealthy. And there was a revolution in thinking we had where we said, oh, diet matters, exercise matters. Now, that sounds so obvious to the 21st century listener, but this was actually a revolution in how we thought about ourselves and our health. I think something similar can and should happen for our cognitive fitness, that we're at a point now,

We say, you know what, we never used to think about this before, but our ability to sustain focus on things that are important is really critical. And because our environment has shifted, we're getting really bad at it. Oh, we need to really prioritize this now. We need to care about our cognitive fitness and take proactive focus steps to be stronger mentally. So this is sort of what I'm calling for is a revolution in cognitive fitness similar to the 20th century revolution and physical fitness. Why do you use that word revolution? That's the way I think about it, because it was a somewhat sudden and significant shift in the way that we understood the world enacted. I also like this idea that is pushing back.

Revolutions have a sense of resistance. And I think that's where we are right now as well, is that we need to say, wait a second, we're not just sitting here passively taking an information about, oh, I guess this is what AI is doing now. I guess this is just what happens on our phones. We have agency. One of the things that happened that spurred that revolution when it came to physical fitness was with the practice. President had a heart attack, right? Yeah, Eisenhower had a heart attack. He was out playing golf in Denver.

And they made this decision, the White House made this decision, that they were going to bring out Paul Dudley, who was this sort of pioneering cardiologist who had started the American Heart Association, to brief the press. And they say, let me educate you about heart attacks and cardiovascular health. And it was in that briefing that a lot of Americans for the first time were really given the message, hey, what you eat. can make a difference on your heart health. Actually, like, you have a say in this. This is not just the fickle finger of fate that's going to come down and touch you randomly in your 60s and you may or may not die. And that was actually a revolutionary new idea for a lot of people.

Oh, your diet matters for your longevity. Chambers Plan employee benefits is not for profit. And that's great for your business. Chambers Plan supports businesses with one to 50 plus employees across Canada and reinvest surpluses to help keep. rate stable. Get flexible coverage for you and your employees with outstanding customer service and unmatched value. Benefit together with Chambers plan. Learn more at hellochambers.ca. I'm Lisa Yuso, a digital producer at Ideas, the podcast that likes to feed your curiosity.

I ask my colleagues why they think you should listen. Ideas can make you the smartest, most interesting guest at your next dinner party in less than 60 minutes. It's got the best of a storytelling podcast with the best of a great lecture. You can pretty much never predict where an episode will take you, but you can count on every episode to shift your perspective, even just a little. Find and follow ideas wherever you get your podcasts. Do we need an equivalent of Eisenhower's heart attack to spur this kind of action, to spur this revolution, do you think?

Well, I've been wondering if, for example, some of the things that have been happening, especially here in the states with smartphones and social media and kids, I think this has been very effective that we had this large policy shift that seemingly happened overnight or schools across the country said, you know what, you really shouldn't have phones in schools. And the results have been anecdotally and quantitatively overwhelmingly positive. We've had the successful lawsuits recently against meta that's also been happening in the states about, hey, your product is causing harm. You don't get to just shrug your shoulders and say technology is technology. Like, you built this and it caused harm for these kids. So I think those could be watershed moments. I think AI is playing an interesting role as well. Because unlike a lot of other technologies where we like them at first,

and then over time they became a more negative presence, the average person is just hearing doom and dread deadlines about these technologies and are scratching their heads and saying, well, why are you building these things? All we hear is headline after headline where you're bragging about how all of our jobs are going to go away and all of our systems are going to collapse. I think both these things together is creating a sort of anti-technology sentiment that maybe will have a similar impact

as the Eisenhower heart attack. So let's talk about what that revolution would look like. What is the cognitive equivalent of exercise, of going for a jog? Well, I think we have to look at both parts of physical health, which is nutrition and exercise. So what you consume and what you do. So, I mean, I would imagine at an individual level,

this might mean, oh, I care about what information I consume, just like I care about what food I consume, which means, for example, I'll look at something like TikTok and say that has no nutritional value. You call TikTok a Dorito, a digital Dorito. It's an ultra-processed product, right? A Dorito is not really a food.

We broke down the elements of foods into their stock components, remix them in a lab to be hyper-palatable, and it's, quote, Michael Pollan, an edible food-like substance that is highly addictive and does nothing really good for us. Well, TikTok video is the same thing.

They've broken down human content into its constituent elements, We'll have millions of people just uploading, trying everything they can. And then we'll have algorithms sort through this to try to find like the exact sequence of sort of colors and movements and pictures and themes. That's going to be irresistible for you, the user. It's a digital Dorito. And maybe that's not something we need to consume. And on the exercise front, this is where things like reading real books, writing, not trying to avoid it, but embracing the strain of writing and going for thinking walks.

I'm just going to reflect while I move, just like Aristotle did, you know, way back when in the ancients when he would walk the grounds of the license, I'm thinking. I'm going to be parapetetic, and I'm just going to walk and think. Like, that's going to be my cognitive exercise and avoiding ultra-process content. Maybe that'll be my cognitive nutrition. So my doctor would say, don't eat the Doritos. Are you suggesting that we don't use social media whatsoever? Well, at the very least, I would say short-form video content that's algorithmically curated.

Yeah, let's not do it. I'm talking TikTok. I'm talking about reels on Instagram. I think we need to walk away from that. Like we walk away from, as adults, we just don't need a lot of Twinkies. Other type of social media, hey, if I'm following a particular, particular person on Instagram. It's like an author I like and I go on there every once in a while to like see their latest videos. That's okay. I mean, maybe that's like you have the occasional

slice of pizza. But I do think we need to start thinking in those terms of like there's certain cognitive foods that if we're adults, we shouldn't be eating. And if we have kids, we shouldn't let that be their main part of their diet. That it's not that it's no good for you that it's actually harmful to you, that this is something that we need to think about in terms of causing harm. I think so. I think if you're looking at a service like TikTok for four, four or five hours a day. There's all sorts of primary and secondary harms that's causing in exchange for really no benefit, right? That there's much better ways to get whatever benefit that is, be it diversion or entertainment or being informed. There's much healthier ways to get

those same benefits. Is there room for moderation, he says, is somebody who might eat a Dorito or two? I mean, I don't know if you've tried to do this before. Have you ever tried to open a bag of potato chip and say, look, I'm just going to eat a few while this is here? There was a good ad campaign that was about that how you can't do that, right? You can't just eat one. Yeah, they bragged about it, right? And I think actually TikTok brags about this as well. It's like, hey, we have the highest user engagement of any social app that's out there. I think abstention is hard, right?

The same thing with like cigarettes. As a lot of smokers, like, went through this in the 90s when the smoking rates dropped. They're like, well, what if I just cut back on smoking to certain occasions? It doesn't work that way. You have to probably with the more addictive behaviors is if it's not really giving you a benefit, abstention is going to be the right way. We used to be afraid of talking about that. And I think now it's not taboo anymore.

It used to be considered eccentric to say, no, just don't use that service. It used to say, no, no, you have to use these services. This is like the new town square or whatever. And I think now people are much more open to a much wider variety of engagements with technology. They're much more open with the idea of like, hey, don't use TikTok, don't use Instagram reels. Get all social media off of your phone, you know. That's not a crazy suggestion anymore. What about reading?

Go back to that. And partially because, like writing, it can be difficult. You have to sit and you have to think. throw yourself into something. What do we know about how much reading is enough to exercise our brain, for example? Reading is the cognitive equivalent of something like jogging, right? It's hard, and you are going to feel some like resistance or discomfort, but not in an overwhelming sense.

And it really gives us a lot of health on the other side. When we read, I think Marianne Wolfe, the researcher here at UCLA, has done a really good job of trying to make accessible what happens in your brain. But basically, the short version is, the more you read, the more your brain actually wires together different modules or segments of your brain that had different independent uses in our evolutionary past, it wires them together into this neuronal dance that can accomplish this goal of taking marks on a page and turning them into internal understanding. Now, once you've done that, you now have in your brain what she calls deep reading processes,

it's a smarter brain. And you can now take these wired together different sections of your brain and turn them the other way to produce original thoughts, to produce original insights. So just like jogging means your cardiovascular health is going to go up and now you're going to be able to do more physical activities that are more impressive. Reading makes your ability to actually think smarter, more interesting thoughts. It improves it and that then becomes useful in all aspects of your life. Do you see any value in using artificial intelligence? Are there areas or times? Because it can be a tool, and again, it's much debated, but it can be a tool that when used properly perhaps can save some time, can it cut down on repetitive?

tasks. Is there an opportunity to use AI? I think so. And I think if we put on this cognitive health frame, there's a useful filter we can apply. So if you're using an AI-based tool to automate or eliminate a task that's tedious, I think that's a big win. But if you're using an AI tool solely because you're trying to avoid cognitive strain, that's when I would be wary. So automation of tedium, yes, avoiding cognitive strain. I think that's a problem, especially if you're in like a knowledge work job where the application of your brain is the primary driver of value generation. The job part is interesting as well because one of the things you recommend is changing our

workplaces and there's a part of that that I think people might run to or run away from. And that's no phones or laptops at meetings. What does that do? Well, it allows us to actually sustain concentration in that context, right? So again, if we have the phone there or we have a laptop that has access to email and Slack and similar distractions, the short term motivation regions of our brain are going to be like, look at this, at this, look at this, and it'll be very difficult to actually engage with sustained attention on whatever's being talked about, be it giving attention to the other person talking or the idea they're presenting.

And I've been making this argument since, you know, I wrote that book before 10 years ago. Knowledge work is about producing original information using the human brain. We should be prioritizing then settings where the brain can do that well. But what we've done instead is set up our office environments to be as hostile as possible to that fundamental ability. continue to find that reality baffling. Can we do this on our own? You have the smartest people in the world who have created this technology that, to your point, is trying to drag me away from whatever I'm doing now to look at it. And in Australia, for example, you have the social media ban

for kids under the age of 16. You have the wild success of a book like The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which is calling for governments in some ways to step in here. Do governments need to do this or can we do this on our own? I think we do need governments to step in. I think we need engagement at all levels. We need individuals really carrying and prioritizing cognitive fitness. We need institutions and organizations at the sub-governmental level carrying about it. Our schools, for example, should really care about this. And then I think the government level has a role to play in this as well, just like we saw with physical health, right? Like the government can't make me jog. That's a commitment I need to have. But the government

did ban trans fats, which actually probably had a significant impact on, you know, heart health. So I think we need engagement on these issues at all levels. And in part, we need people to believe that we can do something about this. One of the things that you say in that New York Times piece that leapt out at me is no more shrugging. What does that mean? I've seen a lot of this passivity and it really sort of distresses me, right? This idea of, I guess kids these days are just on their phones. What can you do?

And then we just accept that. Or I guess like AI, you know, I guess we're all just going to let it right for us today and all the, you know, and it's going to take all of our jobs. like what can we do? There's a lot of shoulder shrugging. And I want to get us out of that stance into a more aggressive stance, which is why I think, for example, the shift to get phones out of schools was very significant, right? Because it's an example of a technology came. It was widely adopted. We noticed there was problems and we rolled it back. And everyone's happier about it. So I think that is such an important step forward because it shows we are not on this deterministic march of technological inevitability that once a tool is out there, what can we do?

we still have agency. I call this philosophy techno-selectionism, this idea that we can be highly selective about technology, including revising past decisions. Nothing is inevitable. We have autonomy here. Jonathan Haidt said on this program that if you said the train is out of the station,

but the train is rolling down the track and your child was there, you would do everything to try and stop that train from hitting the child. That's how we have to think about it in some ways. We don't just say, well, it's over and done with, we need to actually take action.

I 100% agree with this, and I agree with John about that. And I think he is living proof that, like, action is possible. I mean, I remember when I first started covering John maybe four or five years ago, and it seemed like a Sisyphian task came out there trying to convince people that, like, kids shouldn't be using their phones. And there was all these people arguing against them and it was out of fashion. Five years later, it changed. People did make changes.

So this, you know, these type of things do give me hope. And if we don't, what is at stake collectively? You say that these problems are only going to get worse. So if we do not broadly take this on and understand the value of thinking and being able to think deeply, what do you think is at stake? I think there's multiple major ramifications. I think there's the economic ramifications of having an economy that increasingly is skewing towards more advanced and complicated knowledge work. If that's going to happen at the same time that we get literally dumber, we are going to have economic competitiveness problem. I think we have a civic political problem.

the more we lose our ability to sit there and think carefully about issues, the more we're going to fall into algorithmically defined tribalism, which as we've seen here in the States doesn't work out that well for anyone. And I think it's leading to unhappiness and despair. The non-cognitive life, the non-contemplative life, a life where we're not very good at sustaining thoughts is a life that's much more reactive, it's much more simplified, and it's harder to find sustainable meaning and purpose in that world. So we have a lot of negative ramifications that are losing. mean if we don't take seriously our ability to use our brains. Cal Newport, it's great to speak with you about this. Thank you very much. Well, thanks for having me. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of a great book called Deep Work Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. You've been listening to the current podcast.

My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.