Yes, Your Attention Span Might Have Shortened, But That Might Not Be A Terrible Thing

Goldfish are often – and unfairly – maligned for having super-short attention spans. In reality, goldfish have quite impressive brains. They can also grow to be absolutely massive and are competent motorists, so you should watch what you say about them. Humans, on the other hand? If recent research is to be believed, our attention spans are shrinking fast.

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8-second attention spans

A study from the Microsoft Corporation rang alarm bells back in 2015 by finding that the average human attention span, previously sitting at the lofty heights of 12 seconds, had dropped to just 8 seconds by 2013. We often blame social media, shortform videos, and apps that encourage us to just keep swiping for our lack of ability to focus – but no one was really doing any of that back in 2013, so what gives?

“Attention is crucial,” writes Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, in a recent piece for The Conversation. “However, what is sometimes missed is that there are many forms of attention, and not all of them are necessarily diminishing.”

There’s no one brain region responsible for attention; we can’t just zap the “attention cortex” and magically get school students to focus on their work or keep employees diligently on task for hours at a time.

Scientists have spent years trying to tease out how attention works in the brain, and their mission is far from over. “This work has produced a complex and disjointed body of evidence across different species and forms of attention,” reads a 2024 review. “However, it has also provided opportunities to better understand the breadth of attentional mechanisms.”

One thing that is clear is that this whole “8 seconds” thing might not be referring to attention span as most people understand it.

According to Sahakian, it’s “possible to get better at one form of attention and worse at another.” A short attention span of just 8 seconds, in her view, is likely to refer to visual scanning or searching for something interesting to spend more time on.

That’s different from what people usually mean when they say “attention span”: sustained attention, devoting lots of time and focus to one activity. Mixing up these terms and definitions has the potential to muddy the waters even further.

Attention: a Gen Z problem?

For Gen Zers, who record much higher daily screen times on average than their predecessors, they may only watch each TikTok video or Snapchat Story for a few seconds at a time, but that doesn’t mean they’re incapable of paying sustained attention to a task when they choose to.

Gen Z and millennials, for example, are still prolific library users according to some research, indicating that print books haven’t been totally replaced by digital devices.

Research from Google also found that Gen Z’s interest in longform video is going from strength to strength – that’s things like video essays, in-depth documentaries, and video versions of podcast episodes. Some of these can run into multiple hours in length.

A 2023 study found that sustained attention span varies across someone’s lifetime, peaking in young adulthood – perhaps something to note for any older people determined to heap criticism onto Gen Z.

Nevertheless, the idea that smartphones are stealing young people’s attention is a sticky one, and there’s a slew of research papers in the literature investigating this theme.

Dr Neil Bradbury, a professor at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, opined in a 2016 paper that while it was very easy to find examples of people stating that college student attention spans had dropped to 10-15 minutes – and some institutions had even started cutting short their lectures accordingly – there were “scant few primary investigations” to support the notion.

“Of all the studies that do attempt to measure attention, many suffer from methodological flaws and subjectivity in data collection,” Bradbury wrote. “Interestingly, the most consistent finding from a literature review is that the greatest variability in student attention arises from differences between teachers and not from the teaching format itself.” In other words, if your students are nodding off after 15 minutes in your lecture hall, that might just be a you problem.

The picture all of this seems to build, and which others have argued for, is that young people are not unable to spend more than 8 seconds at time on something. Rather, they quickly decide whether something is worth a longer investment of their time – and when they believe it is, they commit.

“I feel this myself,” wrote Adam Holm, self-confessed young person, for Forbes. “The reason I scroll on is not my low attention span. It’s that the content I’m exposed to isn’t worth my attention. I’m fed up.”

Perhaps we’re jumping to conclusions and judging ourselves too harshly, just as we did with the goldfish. It may well be the case that our scanning attention span is decreasing over time, but that might not necessarily be the disaster that some would have us believe. And by continuing to learn more about how attention works, in all its complexity, we can hopefully learn to turn its different facets to our advantage.