Why Your Attention Span Is Now Shorter Than A Goldfish's, According To A Study
AntonioGuillem | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro Be honest: Your attention span is shot nowadays, right? A steady diet of Netflix bingeing and social media doomscrolling has made most of us unable to lock in for as long as we used to. In fact, some scientists say your attention span is now shorter than a goldfish's.
Yep, people love to roll their eyes at all the doom and gloom and panic about what screens and social media are doing to our brains, but research shows there is plenty of reason to actually worry. And if you think it's just "kids today," think again.
Your attention span is now shorter than a goldfish's, according to some scientists.
For scientific purposes, "attention span" is defined as the amount of time a person can maintain focus on a single task, activity, or stimulus. And as you can probably guess, that metric affects pretty much everything we do, from learning and working to carrying on a conversation and doing our daily chores.
And, well, it's not going so great in these modern times! Scientific data shows that every single one of us is impacted by shrinking attention spans, either directly or indirectly.
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For instance, most television shows now hover on a single shot no longer than three seconds. If you feel a bit like your head is spinning every time you watch something nowadays, there you have it: Your own attention span may be fine, but you're being impacted by everyone else's going to speed!
In 2015, a Microsoft study found that our attention spans had fallen to a shocking low of just 8.25 seconds, nearly a whole second shorter than a dang goldfish. That statistic is often considered a bit overwrought, but even the sound science on attention span shows a shocking decline, one that has come at head-spinning speed.
Our attention span was at least three times longer just two decades ago.
Dr. Gloria Mark has led research on the human attention span for more than 20 years at the University of California, Irvine, and her findings mark an astonishing shift in the way we're using our brains over the course of the 21st century.
Her data is far less sensationalistic than Microsoft's, but not less bracing. In 2004, Mark's research found that the average human attention span was about 150 seconds. By 2012, shortly after smartphones and app-based social media became ubiquitous, it had been cut in half to 75 seconds. Twelve years later, in 2024, it was down to just 47 seconds.
So what's going on here? Dr. Mark says that "focused attention occurs in rhythms and it seems to correspond to the ebb and flow of our mental resources that we have available." And those resources are being constantly (and purposefully) depleted by the way our screens and feeds work.
The decline is tied to the ways social media and screens trigger two brain systems.
Yes, it's the dang phones. The brain has two main attention systems, the involuntary system and the goal-oriented system. The former reacts to stimuli in our environment, while the latter is a more intrinsic system that enables sustained focus.
Online platforms, especially social media, are specifically designed to constantly trigger the involuntary system with a steady stream of notifications, visual cues, and unpredictability. That's the "what's next?" part of the endless scroll.
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That constant trigger quickly fatigues the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain where we do our thinking and executive functions. And every time we are asked to switch between these two systems, which we are constantly being asked to do by all things digital, our stress markers increase.
Dr. Mark's research showed that this attention-switching elevated heart rate and blood pressure in research subjects, for example. It's also been shown to increase errors in our work, including in studies of professions where errors can be deadly, like nursing and piloting.
Dr. Mark says that for this reason, it is absolutely essential that we take breaks from our phones, digital platforms, and screens of all kinds to give our brains an opportunity to rest and reset. This might even save us time, too. Every time we get distracted, it takes our brains longer to get back to the task at hand. Which surely makes us all want to go back and check our phones again, just like the system was designed to do.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
