Attention Span

Post Date

Sat, 04/08/2017 - 08:06

Categories

Lifestyle

After reading and commenting on Fred's blog, a thought occurred to me. Did you know that the average human's attention span has decreased over the past few years?

According to a study by Microsoft Corporation, human attention span has supposedly dropped from 12 seconds in 2002 to only eight seconds in 2013.

Do you know what animal has a longer one? Goldfish. Their attention span is 9 seconds. But how do would we know that if we stop paying attention at 8?

Researchers suggested that changes in attention span could be due to the brain adapting to evolving technology. I wonder how else we are evolving. Maybe bigger thumbs from texting or flatter heads from bumping into things while we are on the phone.

In fact, you may not have made it this far...or did you :-)

Comments

Fred Klein

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Reading things all the way through has become rare.

Norman Spizz

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Did you purposely misspell maybe to see if everyone read the whole blog?

Mitch Tobol

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I was waiting for the first person to notice it before fixing....you win!!

Gideon Schein

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I am not so sure the loss is something we should take lightly.

Cayce Crown

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I'm not sure I trust a Microsoft study, but I just strive to be present in the moment always.

Corey Bearak

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I often share how my writing style evolved to more and more shorter sentences. In part, this result -- pre-Internet -- to what I called the video age. On on line site I contribute to prefer pieces run about 300 words. That's tough for me to do; I was brought up on 750-800 word op-eds and my early columns averaged that length. I argue good writing keeps most focused. But much of my promotional efforts reflects the need to capture and keep folk's attention. It reflects the design of my political mailing and many other advocacy pieces. Thus when I write tomorrow, I sometimes break every rule (emphasis on "sometimes").