the hidden truth behind our declining attention spans

I asked you guys on Instagram you felt like your attention span was getting worse and if so why the overwhelming response was yes and one thing Tick Tock reels shorter and shorter content ruining our ability to focus it's a sentiment that pops up everywhere did you know our attention span is nowadays shorter than that of a goldfish the average film shot length has declined rapidly over the past 100 years people lament I used to be able to read for hours and hours as a child and now I just can't seem to focus on a book but at the same time you as Book Sales have really seen a Renaissance since the pandemic you think short film content would kill reading as a hobby once and for all but the opposite seems to be true reading has become cool again the internet is full of people recommending four or 500 page books to other young people in fact a lot of these books are being recommended through short form content so what's up with that hello my name is nominee if you're new here I make content about books and reading and I thought let me finally put my neurobiology degree to use and read some scientific articles about our attention spans and short form content and then talk to you about it maybe we'll find out why it's sometimes so hard to replace Tick Tock with a book so the general idea that I seem to have is that we think that our attention spans are declining rapidly and I totally get that I also feel like a part of my brain dies every time I watch one of those tick tocks with like a Subway Surfer thing behind it and plenty has already been written about our declining attention spans the independent release an article that our attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to only 8 seconds in 2015. Time Magazine boldly states that our attention spans were now less than that of a goldfish a study among the UK public has also shown that half of the public feels like their attention span is shorter than it used to be and it's especially young people that feel like this is the case but I wanted to read some actual scientific articles about this so I sent out to my favorite big science article database and look for stuff about attention spans hopefully even about short form content it now before I want to tell you the results of my research I want to share with you what I have really been enjoying putting all of my attention to the past few months and that is language learning and I'm very happy to announce that this video is sponsored by lingoda which I use to learn Spanish they are an online language learning school where you can learn German French Spanish English and business English it's been a wonderful part of my day every time that I get to sit down for another online lingoda class you can learn anytime anywhere which I really appreciate because my schedule changes all the time but because lingoda offers classes 24 7 there's always a class that I can find that will fit my day um [Music] and if you really want to motivate yourself and completely immerse yourself in your target language I would highly recommend checking out lingoda's language Sprints which are very cool Sprints are two month learning challenges where you can make progress super quickly and the idea is that if you do 15 classes a month you can get 50 percent of your money back and even better if you can do 30 class a month so almost a class every day you will get all of your money back all of it over 4 000 students have won their challenge already click the link in the description for more information or you can use my code leone20 to get 20 euros or 25 off of your first Sprint registration thank you lingoda for sponsoring this video and now let's continue to the research articles that I found about attention now the weird thing was I really couldn't find any research on attention spans among the healthy regular population most of the research I found actually quite expectantly had to do with questions regarding health and education for example how watching too much short form content can be associated with stress how depression and anxiety influences the effects of tick tock overuse whether it can impact our memory in an educational setting but I couldn't find anything about like the general attention span of the public so I thought okay am I just really bad at finding articles maybe I'm using the wrong terms but when you think about it it kind of makes sense that if you're like a medical researcher you're not necessarily very interested in the attention span of like the general public I remember from my studies that most medical research isn't interested in researching just healthy regular individuals psychology lecture Gemma breaks in an interview with BBC simply because I don't think that that's something that psychologists or people interested in attention would try and measure and quantify in a way she also says that the idea of an average attention span is kind of meaningless actually it's very much task dependent how much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is I did find one academic article about attention spans in the digital age but this one was specifically criticizing this idea that our general attention span is going down basically saying well we just don't know enough about it to make any conclusions there are some indicators of the possible negative implications of technology used for learning but many unanswered questions remain about the implications in the real world so this confused me a little I couldn't find any academic articles about the general attention span and it even seemed like academic research institutes just wouldn't even be interested in this question in the first place so aware that all these newspaper articles get their data so I read through a lot of these articles again and I realized that most of these articles were all using the exact same little anecdote the exact same little statistic to talk about attention it's the one about how our attention span went from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015. so all of these articles were just quoting the exact same singular study to fuel the claim that our attention span is dwindling now what was this one study why would anyone want information on the attention span of regular healthy adults who could possibly be researching this Microsoft it's Microsoft they performed a study to help their marketing team Market better it's a research on how the digital lifestyle of Canadian influences their attention spans so that advertisers can use that to their advantage I'm laughing but I'm also crying a little bit I read through the whole thing let me try to explain it to you very quickly so Microsoft researched 2 000 Canadians on their attention capacities and also their digital technology use reading this article was a very interesting experience I'm used to reading academic articles that will refer to the people being investigated as participants or patients in this study they're just called consumers the entire study is focused on finding results that are useful for advertisers marketers they actually see the decline in our ability to filter out distractions as a good thing in their own literal words more opportunities to hijack attention their main conclusion is that heavy digital technology users have a diminished ability to sustain attention long term but it also makes them more efficient at processing information in a shorter amount of time so they only need like shorter bursts of attention you can do the same but in a shorter amount of time and I found their phrasing and the way that they explain this result very interesting because they're saying consumers are better at identifying what they want and don't want to engaging I can only speak of personal experience here but I definitely feel like using technology a lot has just made me really good at very quickly realizing when something is an ad and then clicking the hell away from it because I don't want to engage with that but here's the kicker the info that the average human attention span is dwindled from 12 seconds to 8 Seconds isn't even from this Microsoft study like they just mention it in their introduction as a cute little factoid but it's not a result of their study even though all these newspaper articles have presented it as if it's a result from the Microsoft study but it's not the source mentioned in the Microsoft report is something called statistic brain now earlier this year BBC and Forbes have already reported on how the shorter than a goldfish claim is incorrect they research statistic brain and found out that it's a completely unreputable data Institute so the idea that our attention spans are now shorter than a goldfish are simply it's simply not true now you may have already known that this claim is incorrect which that's awesome but I see that this idea that our attention span is diminishing is still very persistent online in fact half of the UK public still wrongly believes that the average attention span among adults is eight seconds long [Music] now the point of this video was not to debunk an already debunked fact the reality is I still feel like my attention span is getting worse and I know a lot of you guys also do the question remains how do I go from being distracted by my phone to getting sucked into a book for hours on end why do I still feel like my attention span is getting worse over time even though there's no real scientific evidence for it here's the important part I think the debunking of the Goldfish fact can really help us shift our perspective remember the statistic about the shortening film shots that I mentioned at the beginning of this video the fact that the average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to two and a half seconds today is often used as another example of how our attention is dwindling but I really liked how they worded it in the BBC article that I mentioned they pose that it's not at all time that we are losing our attention span all it shows is that filmmakers have gotten better at trying to grab our attention the scientists that critique this idea that our attention is dwindling have also mentioned this in their academic article saying if a learner is using the internet to search for information about a given topic they will be exposed to elements that will capture that attention involuntarily pop-up elements of web pages are an obvious example of this Advertiser the entertainment industry and content Farms on tick tocks are doing everything they can to keep your attention and they have to compete with each other for your attention so the world is getting better and better at it that's why nowadays YouTubers will use flashing subtitles to keep you watching or why those Reddit Story Time tick tockers will use like Minecraft speedrunning footage behind it a lot of elements on the internet have been specifically designed to keep you looking at it even involuntarily it's why Microsoft speaks in their own words of hijacking your attention this is called persuasive technology examples of persuasive technology are the little red dots that appear on an app when you have notifications it's push notifications that will tell you when you're tagged in something or someone likes your photo on Instagram algorithms that learn everything that you pay attention to are also an example of persuasive technology in fact this little effect kind of blew my mind bite dance the company that owns tick tock is not a social media company it is a persuasive technology company that's like the whole point of their company so there's this constant battle between you and what you want to focus on and what's apps and advertisers want you to focus on no wonder that it's getting harder and harder to concentrate on what you want with countless pieces of content battling for our attention using increasingly clever ways to grab it we simply cannot help our eyes being pulled to whoever pulls the hardest it doesn't have to mean that we've become easier to drag around it just means that those who are pulling the strings of our attention are getting stronger and stronger is our attention getting worse are we easier to distract or is the world around us just getting more distracting and I personally really like this perspective change because it doesn't put the blame on ourselves and in doing so I I find that it's a little bit more hopeful that we can actually design our lives around all of these distractions and we're not like permanently damaged or anything but let's be honest for a second why do I then still feel the constant need to pick up my phone why do so many of us still struggle to focus on a book or go on a walk without listening to a podcast or something honestly I kind of feel like it was easier when I was able to just say oh it's just Tick Tock ruining my attention span if it's not that then what is it so I actually deleted Tick Tock a while back because I just oh God I really really really needed to I initially deleted Tick Tock because I felt like I needed to you know like heal my attention span because I still believe that I just noticed that I was super easily distracted by the app and I constantly found myself just wanting to grab my phone to watch a few little short videos that would make me laugh a little bit and when I deleted it I really noticed that I still had this constant urge to pick up my phone only to look at it and see that I have deleted the tick tock app unfortunately and I really really missed Tick Tock the first few weeks of deleting it when I examined that feeling further I realized that it wasn't because my brain was just incapable of keeping its attention to whatever I had to work on at that moment no every time time that I felt this need pop up to look on Tick Tock was every single time that I had a negative thought every time I had to send kind of a scary email or I was getting a little bit stuck in my writing or I had to read an article that I was kind of dreading those were the moments that my brain was instantly like let's grab that phone and give us a little bit of dopamine and it was at that moment that I realized that I wasn't addicted to my phone because I had ruined my attention span somehow it was because I was using Tick Tock as a coping mechanism for my daily life stress and I had just deleted my coping mechanism so I actually lied to you earlier in this video when I said that I asked you guys on Instagram why you felt like your attention span was dwindling I said that the only thing people mentioned was like Tick Tock Oreos short content there was actually two things that people mentioned the most the first thing was indeed short form content but the second one overwhelmingly was Mental Health feelings of anxiety being depressed being stressed and I know that I'm not the only one that uses social media to distract me from like my daily life stressors instead of just you know feeling your feelings I think many of us don't necessarily grab our phones because you know we're just incapable of concentrating but because we're feeling a little stressed and we want to alleviate this stress immediately I forgot to mention here that stress does also diminish your ability to concentrate so it's no wonder that a lot of people mention their mental health as a reason why they see their attention span declining for example having trouble focusing is one of the symptoms of burnout and it's also a side effect of depression and anxiety but that lack of concentration is not permanent it also means that it's good to ask yourself do I feel like my attention span is getting shorter because I'm watching too much short form content or am I watching more short form content because my attention span is getting shorter due to being under so much stress and short form content is a really really really easy way to opt out of your stressful situation because it's so good at just keeping you completely engrossed and keeping your attention right it's a lot more instantly accessible than like journaling and like actually working through your negative feelings and there is science to back this up actually remember when I said at the beginning of the video that there is actually a lot of research being done on like Health stuff related to short-term content and internet addiction now keep in mind that addiction to the internet and addiction to short form content is a super new area and that Addiction in this situation is very tricky term because there's no like standard DSM-5 definition for it yet so many studies use a different definition and it's all very new territory so just keep that in mind because of that there's also many different theories on how internet addiction or short form content addiction Works uh and I'm not here to tell you which one is correct because obviously I don't know and there's just one that I found the most interesting that I wanted to highlight today regarding stress so I found that there are more and more studies on short form content addiction that propose that it's actually isn't really an addiction and that we should instead look at it like a coping mechanism for stress already back in 2014 it was remarked in a research article internet use can actually be used by people to alleviate bad moods dysphoric moods and therefore can be used to cope or compensate for their daily stressors I love it when the scientists find out that the girlies are using Tumblr because they're sad a study among Chinese adolescents found that the two most significant drivers for short form content addictions were social phobias and burnout they say that immersing themselves in short form videos can become a coping strategy for adolescents to avoid the embarrassments caused by social phobia and also that it can be used as a coping strategy against stress stress in general has been associated with problematic use of short form content and because of this more and more scientists are proposing that short form content addiction isn't so much an addiction but more A coping mechanism against stress short form content addiction can be a double-edged sword rational use can alleviate stress but overuse can cause addiction-like symptoms now again I'm not saying that this is the Right theory it's very new territory and we really don't know what's going on really but I think it's a useful one to keep in mind when we're trying to manage our attention in a world where everything is trying to capture it from us for example actually recently redownloaded Tick Tock because I I needed for videos and maybe I did feel a little bit of fomo every time my friends were making Tick Tock references but I noticed that I've become much healthier in my Tick Tock use now now that I am aware that I am using Tick Tock as a coping mechanism every time I need to do something that I don't want to do now that I know that it's a coping mechanism I'm much better at recognizing it when it's happening stopping myself and finding another way to de-stress that will actually distress me like reading a book or actually sending that scary email because unfortunately sometimes self-care really is just doing the thing that you're scared of and you know what it's actually really not that weird that reading is super popular again because I know for a lot of people reading is a coping mechanism it can be escapism I am convinced that there is a perfectly positive relationship between your stress levels and your needs to read stories about hot fairies they should research that maybe the problem for some of us has never been our attention spans maybe instead the problem was that we were using short form content as a way to deal with the stress in our lives that's why it's actually no surprise that despite the rise of short form content a lot of people have picked up reading again they've just found a healthy coping mechanism and it doesn't have to be reading just anything that you can do to de-stress in your free time is great doing yoga going for walks doing exercise I don't know and if you let yourself experience your negative feelings for a second I know super gross I also don't like it but we gotta do it then you'll quickly realize that actually you are quite capable of focusing on the things that you want to do for very long times conclusion so I originally made this video I started researching this video because I was just interested in like seeing how our attention span was getting worse and I just wanted to know how that that relate it to our increased interest in Reading turns out that there's currently just no proof that Tick Tock or Instagram are ruining our attention spans all we know is that they're getting better and better at grabbing it even when we do not want to be paying attention to them the most important thing about attention is that it's limited we cannot pay attention to everything we have to filter out the important things but in the end we are in control of where our attention goes and in turn what we remember and what we fill our lives with so if you're looking to make reading your next coping mechanism you can subscribe to my channel I recommend books all the time and talk about them and if you like reading Vlogs and like slower chill not attention grabbing content you should subscribe to my second Channel Leoni Crystal I will link it in the description I know this video wasn't about books the way my other videos are but I still hope you really enjoyed this little video um I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I will see you soon in another video very soon goodbye foreign 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Channel: The Book Leo

Views: 914,752

Keywords: book, books, booktube, reading, booktuber, peruseproject, paperbackdreams, review

Id: aDfeOvUZ7Kk

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 16 2023