I'm 83. A lot of what I do these days is made up of small, short, essentially meaningless tasks that constitute normal daily life. I lose patience with the day to day tasks of elderly life. Even getting dressed in the morning takes longer because my knees no longer bend as easily as they did 20 years ago. Taking a bunch of medications delays the process by maybe 5-10 minutes. Can't not do that and can't forget to do that. I need to wear compression socks because of vein problems. Ever tried to put those suckers on? Another 10+ minutes sucked up out of the start to my day. The list is endless. What used to take 15 minutes now takes 2 hours start of finish. And then I bitch at myself about not getting enough done during the day. Is my attention span shorter? Yeah, it is. All because it needs to be when every act seems to no longer be automatic. I don't even own a smart phone so I'm not distracted by scrolling. I am distracted by trying to get this aging body through the day.
Is it fair to say that our cognitive attention is stable, but that our focus is challenged by the environment? If that's the case, then it seems to me that attention spans have functionally dwindled.
I'm a college prof. When I allow laptops and phones, attention suffers. Case closed, for me at least. So for most people in most contexts, attention now suffers more than before. Doesn't seem like a long shot argument to me.
I think it's fair to say that MY focus is challenged by my environment. I didn't mention in my first post that I use a walker to get around. While the walker itself collapses to various widths, I'm the one who has to see the need to collapse it so it will fit through various living spaces. A single thought disrupted a dozen times getting from point A to point B suffers from fragmentation. So, yeah, my attentions span has dwindled significantly even though my cognitive functioning works pretty much as it always has.
Of course, none of that has anything to do with laptops or phones. Project into the far future as all these college kids move into their 80s. Attention span will become an archaic concept.
Thank you, Nathan. Sometimes I do wonder about that when I get a known sequence wrong and have to start again. Nice to have an outside evaluation. :-))
Slightly different complaint but here's a complaint from 1832 in a similar vein to the shrinking attention span/brainrot:
"This is a reading age; and precisely because it is so reading an age, any book which is the result of profound meditation is, perhaps, less likely to be duly and profitably read than at a former period. The world reads too much and too quickly to read well. When books, were few, to get through one was a work of time and labour: what was written with thought was read with thought, and with a desire to extract from it as much of the materials of knowledge as possible. But when almost every person who can spell, can and will write, what is to be done? It is difficult to know what to read, except by reading everything; and so much of the world's business is now transacted through the press, that it is necessary to know what is printed, if we desire to know what is going on. Opinion weighs with so vast a weight in the balance of events, that ideas of no value in themselves are of importance from the mere circumstance that they are ideas, and have a bonâ fide existence as such anywhere out of Bedlam. The world, in consequence, gorges itself with intellectual food, and in order to swallow the more, bolts it. Nothing is now read slowly, or twice over. Books are run through with no less rapidity, and scarcely leave a more durable impression, than a newspaper article. It is for this, among other causes, that so few books are produced of any, value."
John Stuart Mill originally in a review of Austin's Letters on Jurisprudence, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, II (Dec., 1832), 343-8. Republished in various other places over the years by Mill, I got this text from the complete works.
I'm sure if we looked we could find some classical authors complaining about shrinking attention spans.
I cannot tell you how profoundly this little trivia has affected me. I can easily find myself in this complaint except perhaps I’ll be saying the same about AI. But I’m an avid reader - if someone said this to me about books now I would have laughed. So I wonder if in the future AI and social media will be as common place and infact be “good” recreation. Just fascinating to see how humans have always been resistant to new things and it forced me to confront my own biases.
But I also can’t help but observe the eloquence and vocabulary of the quote, and it reminds me of the similar nature of so many Civil war letters.
The literate were far more literate back than on average than we are today. Half of American adults now read below the 6th grade level
It may be that modern technology has been capturing our attention, taking it away from language/communication and human interaction for a couple hundred years now.
I recently posted a video essay about "book slop"/commodification of books and I talked about how book sales in the last 5-10 years are actually really solid (usually increasing year to year) and how my generation (gen Z) are active library users. I see plenty of discussion about whether we are entering a second era of illiteracy/oral culture and I don't find those arguments convincing. It seems much more likely that we just have more options for education/entertainment/media in general and that some apps and websites are really good at keeping us on those platforms.
I remember being a teenager with no access to mobile internet - I didn't have social media to scroll, so I would just daydream and zone out when I was bored. I was still reading a lot books, just not in those short moments of boredom in between doing other things. Now I fill those moments with tiktok, at least some of the time. And I still read a lot of books. But there was never a version of me that filled every little break with "productive activities". You can certainly make an argument that being bored and daydreaming/zoning out can be better for you than scrolling, but I don't think it has anything to do with our attention spans.
Before social media, I spent countless hours on Napster/ Limewire trying to memorize Biggy songs. My cognitive flexibility/task-switching skills were absolutely taxed in terms of me switching between homework and rapping lol.
I do enjoy it when proper analysis cuts through the pop narrative. Although my temptation to use this as an excuse for a massive scrolling binge will have to be carefully managed…
This kinda reminds me of a video essay I watched a few months ago arguing that our relationship with phones isn’t “addiction”, but habit. Which actually made so much sense to me. Addiction implies something out of your control. A habit is just a pattern you can identify and change. Feels like the same kind of thinking as the goldfish attention span headlines — a framing that’s more alarming than it is useful.
Nice piece, thanks. My subjective experience is that sustained attention requires more effort after social media'ing. So maybe attention spans haven't actually shortened but people's willingness to sustain attention has -- unless they are being tested in a lab. Speculation, but it could reconcile the difference between attention research and cultural perception.
That makes sense. As Tommy pointed out, it's harder to sustain attention after using social media because of the constant context switching that happens from one video to the next is tiring for our brains. So of course it's harder to sustain attention when you're brain is tired.
Excellent work here. I wonder if the reason for all the hand-wringing has to do with what people *want* to concentrate on, and what people want them to want to concentrate on. I'd guess that there's been a substantial change in that desire, particularly among Gen Z, for example, who aren't exactly being groomed for industrial production. Their interests and skills are elsewhere, as is their attention.
I was also struck by the comparison between brain rot concern and a similar concern about pornography. There's so much concern about the way pornography supposedly changes the way people view sex, and there are some indications that it does, but not in the way the headlines like to decry. There seems to be no real evidence that porn is doing what people say it does, namely causing people to view each other as sex objects or mere providers of instant gratification without a right to refuse.
Great piece! There seems to be such a desire to read/write articles with doomsday headlines about declining IQ, attention span, etc. It almost feels the same as every time I hear someone say "Nobody wants to work anymore", something that's been repeated for decades, if not longer.
I think the rise in popularity for podcasts and TVs with hour-plus-long episodes has been interesting. Millions of people are happy to listen to a 3-hour podcast episode of Joe Rogan saying "Jamie, pull that shit up", or to watch a Game of Thrones episode.
I'm 83. A lot of what I do these days is made up of small, short, essentially meaningless tasks that constitute normal daily life. I lose patience with the day to day tasks of elderly life. Even getting dressed in the morning takes longer because my knees no longer bend as easily as they did 20 years ago. Taking a bunch of medications delays the process by maybe 5-10 minutes. Can't not do that and can't forget to do that. I need to wear compression socks because of vein problems. Ever tried to put those suckers on? Another 10+ minutes sucked up out of the start to my day. The list is endless. What used to take 15 minutes now takes 2 hours start of finish. And then I bitch at myself about not getting enough done during the day. Is my attention span shorter? Yeah, it is. All because it needs to be when every act seems to no longer be automatic. I don't even own a smart phone so I'm not distracted by scrolling. I am distracted by trying to get this aging body through the day.
Is it fair to say that our cognitive attention is stable, but that our focus is challenged by the environment? If that's the case, then it seems to me that attention spans have functionally dwindled.
I'm a college prof. When I allow laptops and phones, attention suffers. Case closed, for me at least. So for most people in most contexts, attention now suffers more than before. Doesn't seem like a long shot argument to me.
I think it's fair to say that MY focus is challenged by my environment. I didn't mention in my first post that I use a walker to get around. While the walker itself collapses to various widths, I'm the one who has to see the need to collapse it so it will fit through various living spaces. A single thought disrupted a dozen times getting from point A to point B suffers from fragmentation. So, yeah, my attentions span has dwindled significantly even though my cognitive functioning works pretty much as it always has.
Of course, none of that has anything to do with laptops or phones. Project into the far future as all these college kids move into their 80s. Attention span will become an archaic concept.
You might not have the same body as 20 years ago, but your mind is clearly sharp as ever!
Thank you, Nathan. Sometimes I do wonder about that when I get a known sequence wrong and have to start again. Nice to have an outside evaluation. :-))
I second Nathan's evaluation!
Slightly different complaint but here's a complaint from 1832 in a similar vein to the shrinking attention span/brainrot:
"This is a reading age; and precisely because it is so reading an age, any book which is the result of profound meditation is, perhaps, less likely to be duly and profitably read than at a former period. The world reads too much and too quickly to read well. When books, were few, to get through one was a work of time and labour: what was written with thought was read with thought, and with a desire to extract from it as much of the materials of knowledge as possible. But when almost every person who can spell, can and will write, what is to be done? It is difficult to know what to read, except by reading everything; and so much of the world's business is now transacted through the press, that it is necessary to know what is printed, if we desire to know what is going on. Opinion weighs with so vast a weight in the balance of events, that ideas of no value in themselves are of importance from the mere circumstance that they are ideas, and have a bonâ fide existence as such anywhere out of Bedlam. The world, in consequence, gorges itself with intellectual food, and in order to swallow the more, bolts it. Nothing is now read slowly, or twice over. Books are run through with no less rapidity, and scarcely leave a more durable impression, than a newspaper article. It is for this, among other causes, that so few books are produced of any, value."
John Stuart Mill originally in a review of Austin's Letters on Jurisprudence, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, II (Dec., 1832), 343-8. Republished in various other places over the years by Mill, I got this text from the complete works.
I'm sure if we looked we could find some classical authors complaining about shrinking attention spans.
I cannot tell you how profoundly this little trivia has affected me. I can easily find myself in this complaint except perhaps I’ll be saying the same about AI. But I’m an avid reader - if someone said this to me about books now I would have laughed. So I wonder if in the future AI and social media will be as common place and infact be “good” recreation. Just fascinating to see how humans have always been resistant to new things and it forced me to confront my own biases.
Thank you for sharing this quote!
Yes, fascinating
But I also can’t help but observe the eloquence and vocabulary of the quote, and it reminds me of the similar nature of so many Civil war letters.
The literate were far more literate back than on average than we are today. Half of American adults now read below the 6th grade level
It may be that modern technology has been capturing our attention, taking it away from language/communication and human interaction for a couple hundred years now.
Yes but he was and is right
I recently posted a video essay about "book slop"/commodification of books and I talked about how book sales in the last 5-10 years are actually really solid (usually increasing year to year) and how my generation (gen Z) are active library users. I see plenty of discussion about whether we are entering a second era of illiteracy/oral culture and I don't find those arguments convincing. It seems much more likely that we just have more options for education/entertainment/media in general and that some apps and websites are really good at keeping us on those platforms.
I remember being a teenager with no access to mobile internet - I didn't have social media to scroll, so I would just daydream and zone out when I was bored. I was still reading a lot books, just not in those short moments of boredom in between doing other things. Now I fill those moments with tiktok, at least some of the time. And I still read a lot of books. But there was never a version of me that filled every little break with "productive activities". You can certainly make an argument that being bored and daydreaming/zoning out can be better for you than scrolling, but I don't think it has anything to do with our attention spans.
Before social media, I spent countless hours on Napster/ Limewire trying to memorize Biggy songs. My cognitive flexibility/task-switching skills were absolutely taxed in terms of me switching between homework and rapping lol.
Can we do another Live that just consists of you rapping?
I'll have my agent write up a contract
I do enjoy it when proper analysis cuts through the pop narrative. Although my temptation to use this as an excuse for a massive scrolling binge will have to be carefully managed…
This kinda reminds me of a video essay I watched a few months ago arguing that our relationship with phones isn’t “addiction”, but habit. Which actually made so much sense to me. Addiction implies something out of your control. A habit is just a pattern you can identify and change. Feels like the same kind of thinking as the goldfish attention span headlines — a framing that’s more alarming than it is useful.
In science journalism today, the word addiction is used the way the word blind is.
If you missed something because you were too distracted, you are blind.
Similarly, if something new becomes a regular part of your life, you are addicted.
That's how it feels to me.
Nice piece, thanks. My subjective experience is that sustained attention requires more effort after social media'ing. So maybe attention spans haven't actually shortened but people's willingness to sustain attention has -- unless they are being tested in a lab. Speculation, but it could reconcile the difference between attention research and cultural perception.
That makes sense. As Tommy pointed out, it's harder to sustain attention after using social media because of the constant context switching that happens from one video to the next is tiring for our brains. So of course it's harder to sustain attention when you're brain is tired.
Look how high I can jump!!
I wonder if it's a sign that there's a lot more content and much of it isn't very good or engaging.
If I'm reading a good story or watching a great movie I stick with it and don't fidget with my phone.
I recently finished my undergraduate thesis studying attention and smartphones and came to some pretty similar conclusions!
Excellent work here. I wonder if the reason for all the hand-wringing has to do with what people *want* to concentrate on, and what people want them to want to concentrate on. I'd guess that there's been a substantial change in that desire, particularly among Gen Z, for example, who aren't exactly being groomed for industrial production. Their interests and skills are elsewhere, as is their attention.
I was also struck by the comparison between brain rot concern and a similar concern about pornography. There's so much concern about the way pornography supposedly changes the way people view sex, and there are some indications that it does, but not in the way the headlines like to decry. There seems to be no real evidence that porn is doing what people say it does, namely causing people to view each other as sex objects or mere providers of instant gratification without a right to refuse.
Great piece! There seems to be such a desire to read/write articles with doomsday headlines about declining IQ, attention span, etc. It almost feels the same as every time I hear someone say "Nobody wants to work anymore", something that's been repeated for decades, if not longer.
I think the rise in popularity for podcasts and TVs with hour-plus-long episodes has been interesting. Millions of people are happy to listen to a 3-hour podcast episode of Joe Rogan saying "Jamie, pull that shit up", or to watch a Game of Thrones episode.
Hot take. I’m troubled by the multiple journalistic sources all citing a statistic that nobody can find.
Thank you 😊
I love that you put Quinton's Victorious video in this article.
Can someone sum this up for me it doesn't fit into my context length