The myth of shrinking attention spans
Apparently, we now have an attention span of eight seconds. Less than a goldfish, so the story goes. There’s just one problem. It isn’t true.
There’s no real science behind that eight-second claim. Nobody’s come up with a single, magic number that sums up human attention, because attention isn’t a fixed resource. It ebbs and flows depending on what we’re doing, how interested we are, whether it matters to us, and what else is going on in the background. It’s way more fluid – and way more personal – than a one-size-fits-all statistic.
But the story persists because it feels true.
We check our phones. Jump between tabs. Half-listen in meetings. Reach for a device the moment nothing noteworthy is happening. And research by psychologist Gloria Mark suggests there really has been a substantial change in how long we stay with things on our screens before switching.
But that’s not quite the same as saying our underlying capacity for attention has collapsed.
Something has changed, but not necessarily what we think. Our capacity for attention isn’t broken. What’s changed is our environment – and the habits we’ve built inside it.
We’re not designed for indefinite focus
The human mind has always wandered.
A noise attracts our attention. Movement catches our eye. A thought appears. Something unexpected happens and we immediately want to know what it is. That’s not a flaw. For most of human history, noticing change mattered.
What’s moving in those bushes? Where did that sound come from? Why has that person’s expression suddenly changed?
A brain that stubbornly ignored new information in order to maintain perfect concentration would not have been especially useful. Attention needs to move. Both psychology and neurology confirm that our minds are consistently somewhere other than our current activity. And that’s OK. Wandering attention is perfectly normal.
But we hardly needed modern psychology to tell us this.
People have been practicing meditation for thousands of years. And what is one of the first things you discover when you try it?
Your mind won’t stay where you put it.
Focus on the breath. A thought appears. Return to the breath. Another thought. Return again.
The wandering mind isn’t new.
Contemplative traditions have understood this for millennia. And they developed a way of practicing something to embrace that reality: the ability to notice where attention has gone and deliberately bring it back. And that distinction is more important than we realise.
That natural tendency to shift attention is not evidence of decline. But it does make us highly responsive to an environment designed to offer the next signal, reward or surprise.
And modern digital environments are exceptionally good at capturing that moment.
The world around our ancient brain has changed
We now carry devices offering effectively unlimited novelty: messages, email, news, video, social media, notifications, games, shopping, work and entertainment. And increasingly, these systems don’t simply contain interesting things. They are designed to discover precisely what we’ll respond to so they can give us more of it. Again and again.
Attention has economic value.
If a platform can make you look, keep you looking or persuade you to come back, that attention can be converted into advertising, data, engagement, productivity or sales. And they’ve become remarkably good at producing things human attention naturally finds difficult to ignore: novelty, reward, threat, social information and surprise.
And they can deliver them endlessly. So novelty, once relatively scarce, is now mass produced at scale and immediately available everywhere.
Our attention hasn’t slowly become defective. Our environment has become ruthlessly efficient at rewarding it.
But there’s a deeper issue
We tend to talk about distraction as though technology is doing something to us.
Sometimes it is.
A notification arrives and attention flickers. And that little ping alone is enough to disrupt performance on any attention-demanding task – even if we don’t pick up the phone to check what it means.
But increasingly, we don’t need the ping.
We check anyway.
A pause in conversation. Phone. A webpage loads slowly. Another tab. A difficult piece of work starts requiring effort. Email. Standing in a queue. Phone again.
Eventually our environment doesn’t need to interrupt us. We’ve learned to interrupt ourselves.
Gloria Mark’s work on attention in digital environments highlights how self-interruption plays a significant role in the modern pattern of task switching. And this is where the story of our shrinking attention span gets muddled.
What may be shrinking is not our neurological capacity. It’s the time we routinely spend choosing not to stay with one thing. Through repeated switching, checking and responding, we have practiced allowing the next stimulus to decide where our attention goes.
Habit is not the same as incapacity
If technology has damaged our attention span, then we are mostly helpless.
But if repeated switching, checking and responding has reinforced unhealthy habits, then we are complicit in our own distraction. However, this also means we are not entirely powerless.
Change remains possible. It means we have agency.
We can notice the impulse to check without checking. Decide that not every notification deserves an immediate response. Better still, leave the phone in another room, close the email app. Finish the paragraph. Stay with the conversation. Continue working on the difficult problem. Allow the queue to remain boring.
In other words, we can practice the same skill contemplative traditions have been following for centuries. Notice where attention went. Then choose where it goes next.
Attention is multiple systems – not one “on/off” switch
In Peak Mind, neuroscientist Amishi Jha describes attention as three systems that work in tandem:
Orienting: your focus on a target (concentration/flow)
Alerting: broad awareness and monitoring for change
Executive: managing goals and redirecting attention
When you struggle to stay focused, it’s not always “my attention failed.” Often, it’s that the executive system is being overloaded by constant competing goals and frequent rapid switching. And executive control improves with consistent practice – especially when our environment makes staying easier.
As James Clear’s Atomic Habits reminds us, we don’t need to rely solely on willpower or motivation. We can make simple adjustments to our physical and digital surroundings and use behavioral cues to create space for focus and deep work to happen more often.
This is not an attention flaw. It’s a design problem.
Workplace reality: attention can’t be only an individual responsibility
We expect people to focus at work.
Then we give them email, Teams, project notifications, back-to-back meetings, multiple priorities and an organisational culture that sometimes treats rapid responsiveness as evidence of commitment.
And then wonder why people are distracted.
But if we treat attention solely as an individual responsibility, we may fail to recognise that attention is also a design outcome.
Cal Newport’s Deep Work highlights the issue that distraction-free concentration on cognitively demanding work is becoming more valuable at exactly the same time our working environments are making it harder.
If we want people to think deeply, solve difficult problems, make good decisions and have meaningful conversations, we need workflows that make those behaviours easier.
That means thinking differently about interruptions, communication, meetings, notifications, priorities, technology, and especially availability culture. Because every environment trains behaviour. Including our own.
Instead of questioning people’s attention spans. We should be asking: “What are we training our attention to do?”
Our capacity to notice novelty isn’t a defect. It’s a feature. And our attention isn’t broken. We’ve simply become very skilled at giving it away.
But between something capturing our attention and what we do next, there is still one thing worth protecting and practicing: our ability to choose.
We can design workplaces differently. We can curate our own workflows more wisely. And we can practice getting better at noticing when something has hooked our attention.
And then decide whether that’s actually where we want it to be.
Research & further reading
Bradbury, N. A. (2016). Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more? Advances in Physiology Education, 40(4), 509–513. https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00109.2016
Chun, M. M., Golomb, J. D., & Turk-Browne, N. B. (2011). A taxonomy of external and internal attention. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 73–101. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100427
Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Hanover Square Press.
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192439
Stothart, C., Mitchum, A., & Yehnert, C. (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(4), 893–897. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000100
Jha, A. P. (2021). Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day. HarperOne.
Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits. Avery.
Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing.