Get a Handle on Your Shrinking Attention Span
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
161.95978
Summary
Dr. Gloria Mark is the world s preeminent researcher on attention and the author of Attention Span, a groundbreaking new book about how we can restore balance, happiness, and productivity in our lives. In this episode, Dr. Mark explains how our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:11.200
20 years ago, it didn't seem like a burdensome task to write a handwritten letter to a loved
00:00:15.180
one. 15 years ago, it wasn't a big deal to write a long email to a friend. Today, it
00:00:20.460
can feel hard to motivate yourself to tap out a two-line response to a text. The feeling
00:00:24.560
that your attention span has been shrieking over time isn't just in your head. Research
00:00:28.420
by today's guests shows that it is empirically getting shorter and shorter. Dr. Gloria Mark
00:00:33.040
is the world's preeminent researcher on attention and the author of Attention Span. If you'd
00:00:37.300
like to get a handle on your diminishing powers of concentration, you have to understand how
00:00:40.920
attention works. And that's what Gloria explains in the first part of our conversation. We
00:00:45.220
then get into how multitasking is like drawing on and wiping off a whiteboard and why it
00:00:49.720
makes us feel so frazzled. Gloria then shares the way that personality influences your attention
00:00:53.800
span, including why people who are more neurotic have the shortest attention spans and why
00:00:58.260
conscientious people may not want to use distraction blocking apps. We then get into how the internet
00:01:03.320
and the shot lengths of modern movies reinforce our short attention spans. In the last part
00:01:07.720
of our conversation, Gloria makes the case that fighting the hindrances to our attention
00:01:11.620
by trying to be focused all the time isn't possible or desirable, and that our goal should
00:01:16.040
be balanced focus rather than hyper focus. She explains how to achieve that balanced focus
00:01:20.740
by leaning into your unique productivity rhythm, taking breaks without guilt, and developing
00:01:25.280
a sense of agency over your attention. Add if the show is over, check out our show notes
00:01:50.900
So you are a psychologist and you've spent your career researching and writing about the
00:01:56.740
impact of our digital devices on our lives, particularly our attention. And you got a new
00:02:01.500
book out called Attention Span, a groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness, and productivity.
00:02:06.640
And what you've done is you've taken the research you've done for your entire career and synthesized
00:02:10.900
it and presented it in a very readable fashion for a lay audience on how we can help improve
00:02:15.940
our attention. Because I know a lot of people are concerned about it. So let's start off with
00:02:20.180
some statistics you've uncovered in your research. What's the state of our attention spans these
00:02:25.980
So let me start off by saying I began studying this back in 2004 and I used empirical methods.
00:02:34.260
At the time, we would use stopwatches and we would shadow people. We would time every time they
00:02:41.860
switch screens so we could try to get as precise as possible the amount of time they were on a screen.
00:02:47.880
Back in 2004, we found an average of two and a half minutes. Over the years, we continued
00:02:55.000
measuring this. Computer logging techniques were developed, very sophisticated, and we switched
00:03:02.220
to using those. And in the last five or six years, we find attention spans on any screen to reach a steady
00:03:11.740
state averaging about 47 seconds. And others have also replicated these results within a few seconds.
00:03:19.820
So yes, our attention on a screen is short. If you look at the midpoint, the midpoint is called the
00:03:26.780
median. That's 40 seconds. That means half of all the observations we found were 40 seconds or less on any screen.
00:03:35.740
So we went from being able to focus for two minutes on something on a screen before switching to
00:03:40.460
something else to only being able to stay with the same thing for 47 seconds.
00:03:54.220
And besides our attention spans shortening, so the amount of times we focus on a screen or
00:03:59.260
something on a screen, we're also spending more time with our digital devices. How much time are we
00:04:04.380
spending with our smartphones, computers, TVs now?
00:04:08.220
Yeah, so Americans spend about 10 hours a day on some screen. And this is whether it's their phones
00:04:16.140
or computers, TV screens. So, you know, we spend a good chunk of our waking hours on some kind of screen.
00:04:24.660
Okay. So, and I think a lot of people, they wish they could have more attention and they probably
00:04:28.580
recognize this. And what I hope we can do in this conversation is highlight how our attention works.
00:04:33.940
And by understanding how our attention works, how this constant switching from different things on
00:04:39.620
our screens can affect us cognitively, emotionally, et cetera. And then some things you've discovered
00:04:46.580
in your lab and your research that we can do to kind of harness our attention better.
00:04:51.060
So let's start off with some definitions. Like how, how do researchers define attention?
00:04:56.900
So actually, let me go back to where it started. So William James is known as the father of psychology,
00:05:04.340
and this was back in the 19th century. And he defined attention as the taking possession by the mind
00:05:13.300
in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains
00:05:21.700
of thought. So he says, everyone knows what attention is. Of course we do. But, you know, as we go around
00:05:30.900
the world and we observe different things, there are certain things we decide what to focus on. We select
00:05:38.660
certain things to focus on. And according to William James, we do this out of our own volition. In other
00:05:47.060
words, we're in fully control of our attention. Well, you know, unfortunately, James didn't get it completely
00:05:54.100
right. So attention can be under your control. And when it is, it's called controlled processing. But attention can
00:06:04.660
also be automatic. So there can be things that just grab our attention, even unconsciously for us.
00:06:12.740
You know, from an evolutionary perspective, we responded to danger signals in the environment. So
00:06:18.900
people used to scan the environment and anything that might be perceived as dangerous would grab their
00:06:26.340
attention. But we've evolved to respond automatically to signals in our current environment.
00:06:33.300
So things like blinking lights, or certain words that just target very basic emotions,
00:06:41.380
like fear. And of course, a lot of these kinds of stimuli are what we see on our devices,
00:06:48.020
like notifications, targeted ads. So we quickly respond to them, and we can't help but respond to them.
00:06:55.940
It's the same way if you were driving a traffic light suddenly turns red, you can't help but respond
00:07:02.420
to that you automatically stop. So yeah, there's like a top down attention where we're deciding where
00:07:09.620
we're focusing our attention. And then there's like a bottom up attention where the environment
00:07:13.540
kind of dictates what we're going to pay attention to. That's right. And when it's top down,
00:07:18.820
you're very goal oriented, right? So attention is directed to what our goal is. And when you have
00:07:26.340
a particular internal goal, that's, that's where you're paying attention to. We tend to think of
00:07:33.060
attention as being in one place in the mind, but it's actually a system of different networks.
00:07:38.980
So you have one network is concerned with vigilance, another one with orienting, which is choosing where
00:07:47.540
to focus. And then another part is called executive control, and this manages interference. So things
00:07:56.660
like distractions, it tries to guard against distractions. So there's, there's top down attention,
00:08:02.420
which is we're controlling the sort of bottom up attention where the environment is causing us to
00:08:07.620
focus on things. If you hear a loud noise, a bright light, a notification, your phone, that's bottom
00:08:11.860
up. Then you also talk about, there's other types of attention. You talk about the difference between
00:08:15.780
sustained in this idea that you've come up with. I like it's kinetic attention. What are the differences
00:08:21.300
between the two? Right. Sustained attention is a period of uninterrupted focus. Usually it's a
00:08:29.220
relatively long period. Kinetic is a term that, that I came up with to describe the kind of
00:08:36.900
dynamic attention that we're seeing when people are, for example, switching screens or switching
00:08:43.780
devices or when they're scrolling. It reflects the idea that their attention is jumping around. It's not
00:08:52.900
sustained on any particular screen or piece of text. And I think another point you make too,
00:09:00.660
is that our attention, there's like domains of our attention. So I thought this was really insightful.
00:09:05.620
So let's say someone has a goal of planning a trip, right? They're there for the next hour.
00:09:11.460
They're just going to focus on planning a trip, but you highlight when you're planning a trip,
00:09:15.780
you're probably shifting your attention to multiple different things within that goal of planning a
00:09:21.700
trip. So you're checking kayak.com, looking at the prices, and then you're texting your wife. Well,
00:09:26.740
here's, here's this date we could go. And then you're checking your bank account. So like,
00:09:30.740
while you're focused on that top goal of planning a trip, you're actually shifting your attention to
00:09:36.740
different things to accomplish that goal. That's right. So you can think of, you know,
00:09:42.740
when we do say any kind of work on our devices, you can look at it through zooming in or zooming out.
00:09:51.060
When you zoom in, you might look at it as people switching different screens. Like you talked
00:09:57.140
about going from kayak.com to say, going to your bank account, to looking at different places on
00:10:04.260
the web that you might want to travel to. And when you zoom out, you're looking at it as an entire
00:10:10.500
project. This is my project of planning my trip. And then you're switching from that project to some
00:10:17.380
other projects, such as, you know, working on that committee report to some other projects,
00:10:23.780
such as, you know, writing a chapter. So we can look at our attention at different levels,
00:10:30.500
different levels of granularity. And the other thing you point out too,
00:10:34.500
that was interesting is that the distractions or things that could also bubble up to cause us to lose
00:10:40.260
focus that sort of top down can come from inside of ourselves, right? You're working on a project and
00:10:45.220
you're thinking, oh, I want to look up the price of whatever right now for no reason whatsoever.
00:10:51.540
And then you, you go do that. Yeah. So it, it, it seems so obvious now, but when we first started
00:10:57.380
studying this, we assumed that all distractions and interruptions originated from outside of ourselves
00:11:05.060
and we would be observing people and you might see someone say, working on a word document.
00:11:11.060
And for no explainable reason, they suddenly stopped and would pick up their phone or would turn to
00:11:18.820
their email. And then we realized that this is a quite common thing. And it turns out that people are
00:11:26.100
just about as likely to interrupt themselves as to be interrupted by something in the environment.
00:11:33.460
It was surprising at the time. And now it just seems like quite an intuitive thing.
00:11:39.140
So I think a lot of people have experienced the frustration of, you know, I want to focus on this
00:11:43.780
one thing, but then I get distracted and then you feel bad. So what happens whenever we switch our
00:11:49.940
attention from one task to the next and lose that sustained focus, you know, what's going on in our brain
00:11:56.260
and why do we feel bad? You know, like, why does it give us that, you know, that frazzled feeling?
00:12:00.820
So, you know, every time we switch our attention to something else, we have to recreate a new internal
00:12:09.540
representation of that thing that we're looking at. So if you're working on a report, you have an
00:12:17.700
internal representation of that report. You have a sense of what's going into that report, you know,
00:12:25.460
what are the sections of the report, how it's organized. And then suddenly you switch your
00:12:30.340
attention to do email. And you're being asked to provide some information. So now you have to create
00:12:38.260
a new internal representation of whatever that information is that you have to send, say, to your
00:12:46.820
manager or your colleague. And then you might switch to something else and have to create a new internal
00:12:53.380
representation. And then at some point, you finally go back to that original task. And you have to
00:13:00.340
think of it as redrawing that internal representation. Now, when we're switching really fast,
00:13:07.780
you know, you can think of it as as an internal whiteboard. And every time we're switching, we're
00:13:14.740
erasing that representation and redrawing it, switching again, erasing it and redrawing it.
00:13:21.060
And when we do that very rapidly, right, this requires a lot of mental effort. Now, when you
00:13:28.740
talk about what happens, what are the consequences of switching so fast, there are consequences,
00:13:35.620
performance suffers. So first of all, and this has been shown from decades of research that people
00:13:42.820
make more errors when they switch their attention back and forth among different things. There's been
00:13:49.380
studies shown with doctors and nurses and pilots. We also know that it takes more time to do tasks
00:13:57.620
when you're switching. Remember, you're recreating that internal representation, there's time that it
00:14:04.260
takes to reorient to that new thing you're looking at. It's like switching gears in our minds. And it
00:14:11.860
takes time, it uses up our precious mental resources. This is above and beyond what we need for actually
00:14:19.540
doing the work. Now, probably, the worst thing of all is that we get stressed. So when we're switching
00:14:27.380
our attention, when we're multitasking, it's also been shown in the laboratory that blood pressure rises,
00:14:34.420
there's a physiological marker that indicates people are stressed. In my own research, we've had people
00:14:41.540
wear heart rate monitors in their real world work environments. And we know that their stress goes up
00:14:49.700
when their attention switching goes up as well. And when people report stress, their perceived level of
00:14:58.020
stress goes up. All these measures are consistent and shows that, you know, people get more stressed.
00:15:04.900
So this is why planning a trip can feel not great, because you're constantly shifting your attention.
00:15:09.940
Yes, yeah, you have to keep all that information in mind. And you have to keep updating that information
00:15:17.540
in your mind. And yes, it can take up a lot of your very precious and limited mental resources.
00:15:24.660
And I think you highlight this research that you've all done about task switching. So I think when
00:15:30.340
people think, well, I'm multitasking, I think everyone's heard that you're not really multitasking,
00:15:34.340
you're just switching from one task to the next quickly, might feel like you're doing two things at
00:15:38.660
the same time, but you're not. But you talk about whenever you switch to a task, and then switch back
00:15:44.420
to that task you interrupted yourself on, it takes a long, it takes a lot longer to get your brain
00:15:49.700
going back in gear to that original task. What's the kind of average time?
00:15:54.580
That's right. So remember, we talked about zooming in and zooming out. So if we look at zooming out
00:16:01.460
again, and we look at switching between different projects. So you have a project of planning your
00:16:07.140
vacation, then you have another project of doing a committee report, and then you have another project
00:16:14.180
of, let's say, planning your podcast. So every time you switch at that level, it takes an average
00:16:21.860
of about 25 and a half minutes to get back to that original interrupted project. Now, what do we do in
00:16:29.860
those 25 and a half minutes? We're not just looking into the air, we're actually working on other things.
00:16:36.900
So we actually work on average, about two and a quarter different projects. So let me explain what
00:16:44.740
that means. So we get interrupted, either by ourselves or by something external to us. We're
00:16:52.180
working on a second thing, we get interrupted again. So then we begin working on a third thing,
00:16:59.300
we get interrupted again, we start working on another project, and we only spend roughly about a
00:17:06.100
quarter of the time compared to the others on that. And then we go back to the original task. Now,
00:17:14.260
if you're in computer science, this would be called nested interruptions. And what that means is you're
00:17:22.420
interrupted from your interruption, if that makes sense. So this is a general pattern. Remember, we're
00:17:29.940
looking at averages and general patterns that we see for many people over the work day. So the main
00:17:36.660
point is that when you're interrupted, you generally don't just work on one thing, and then go back to
00:17:42.340
the original task. But there's intervening things that you take care of before you go back.
00:17:47.780
And this is why with task switching or multitasking, it takes longer to get stuff done.
00:17:52.100
That's right. Yeah. And you know, it turns out that most people prefer to not multitask. That's
00:17:59.620
called monotasking, where you work on one thing through to completion, and then start something
00:18:05.940
else. Most people by and large prefer that. But it turns out, you know, we don't, we work in what's
00:18:12.820
called a polychronic world. This is a world where multitasking is just thrust upon us, we have so many
00:18:21.140
demands that we have to meet, you know, email and slack and phone calls. And so there are so many other
00:18:28.340
demands on our time, that it becomes a polychronic world, which means we're switching among different
00:18:35.300
things. And I like the analogy of when we switch a task, it's like a whiteboard in our brain. So you're
00:18:41.140
working on one task, you switch to another one. So you have to erase the previous sort of schema or
00:18:46.020
mental model of that task and draw a new one. Well, just as on a whiteboard, when you erase
00:18:51.540
something, there's a residue left over. Oh, yes. There's, there's a, there's a residue left over
00:18:57.120
when we task switch as well, like a mental residue. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. Because
00:19:02.980
you know, imagine that you're reading some really gripping story on a blog. And, you know, you're reading
00:19:10.820
about, let's say, a horrific accident. And then you go back to your work, well, that horrific accident,
00:19:18.340
you know, it's going to stay with you, right? There's remnants of it, that will stay with you
00:19:22.840
and interfere with your current task at hand. So you're absolutely right, we can't always erase that
00:19:29.220
internal whiteboard completely. And that can just cause us to not be able to think as clearly or as
00:19:35.840
effectively as we'd like on that, that new task. We're just still thinking about the other thing.
00:19:43.440
Okay, so I think we've got done a good job of highlighting what attention is, how it works. You
00:19:47.400
know, you can have top down attention, bottom up, you can zoom in, zoom out. When we shift our attention
00:19:52.740
to different tasks or activities, that causes a lot of just it's cognitively expensive, it wears you out,
00:19:59.380
and it can stress you out as well. Let's talk about what influences our ability to direct our
00:20:05.020
attention, or have our attention drawn to things. Let's talk about ourselves. You've done research
00:20:09.920
that our personality can influence our ability to pay attention. What does that research say?
00:20:16.700
So it turns out that you're right. You know, people, we are unique beings, we have different
00:20:23.040
personalities. There is a personality test that's called the big five. And this is the most widely used
00:20:30.880
personality test. And there are five different dimensions in this test. There's extroversion,
00:20:38.440
there's agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It turns out that people
00:20:46.740
who score high on the dimension of neuroticism tend to have the shortest attention span. What is
00:20:55.100
neuroticism? When a person is neurotic, they tend to be more susceptible to stress, they tend to reanalyze
00:21:03.200
past events over and over in their mind. So you had a, let's say you had a conflict with your colleague,
00:21:10.660
and you keep replaying that over and over in your mind. This kind of continuous replay in our minds uses
00:21:18.880
up a lot of our cognitive resources. And when we're using our cognitive resources in that way,
00:21:26.020
there's less resources to actually apply to looking at that information in front of you. So there's
00:21:34.280
fewer attentional resources available to devote to the current activity. So people who are neurotics
00:21:42.360
tend to have shorter attention spans. There's another personality facet that's called urgency.
00:21:51.420
And that's related to being impulsive. So when a person scores high in this, what's called urgency,
00:21:59.740
they're impulsive in the short term, they can't restrain themselves, they just have to react on whims.
00:22:06.280
And it turns out that people who score high in this area also tend to have shorter attention spans.
00:22:14.920
So and, you know, one reason is that if you're impulsive in this sense, in this short term way,
00:22:22.180
you just can't restrain yourself from responding to distractions. Now, you know, we looked at those
00:22:30.460
results in our research. And we also looked at people's susceptibility to stress. And we find
00:22:38.140
that there's a personality trait when we put all this together that I call lack of control. And this
00:22:45.820
does suggest that there is a personality trait that's associated with distractedness that's correlated
00:22:53.000
with having short attention spans on our screens.
00:22:56.360
And I imagine these individuals will have to kind of do some metacognition to try to figure out what
00:23:01.500
can I do to maybe shape my environment so I'm not as distracted because I have that personality to be
00:23:08.540
That's right. You know, just because we're dealt a bad set of cards with our personalities
00:23:13.760
does not mean that we can't change. We absolutely can change. There are things that we can do that
00:23:21.000
everyone can do to increase their attention spans.
00:23:24.820
We also uncovered some counterintuitive findings with personality with people who are conscientious.
00:23:30.040
So people who are conscientious, they're, you know, they're very focused. They're like the person
00:23:33.900
with the binders and like label different colors, et cetera. But I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
00:23:38.660
there was some research where people who are, who score high in conscientiousness, they actually,
00:23:43.080
I think they end up taking more breaks from work because I guess they just wear themselves out
00:23:48.980
Well, there's some really interesting things with people who are conscientious. I am
00:23:54.440
a conscientious person. One of the things we find is that they tend to check their email
00:24:00.180
more frequently. They check it more frequently than other people. The way I would interpret that
00:24:06.860
is that they're like a sentry on duty. They don't want to let anything slip by. So they want to make
00:24:12.800
sure they're just on top of things. And as a result, they keep checking their email. You know, we, we did
00:24:19.680
do a study where we tested software for blocking distractions, and we wanted to see how effective it
00:24:27.600
was. And it turns out when a person scores very low in self-regulation, this is a person who's very
00:24:35.700
impulsive. This kind of blocking distractions can be helpful, at least in the short term. But when a
00:24:42.760
person is conscientious, it's actually very harmful. Why? Because a conscious person can go to some
00:24:51.980
distracting site like social media, but then they can come right back to their work. So they don't get
00:24:58.620
lost in rabbit holes. But when we cut off their, these distractions like social media, they tend to work
00:25:05.640
straight through without breaks. And as a result, we find that they get burned out. So when a person is
00:25:13.080
conscientious, they're very good at being able to take breaks on social media or news sites or
00:25:21.860
wherever. And they're also very good at getting back on track. And they also highlight there's research
00:25:27.940
our emotions can affect our attention. So if we're in a positive state and have positive affect, our
00:25:33.440
attention, I think, broadens and widens. And we see things that we wouldn't typically see. And when
00:25:37.560
we get more negative, we start narrowing in on things. And I think we've all experienced that
00:25:42.380
whenever you're getting a bad mood, just like little things just really bother you a lot. And you just
00:25:47.600
focus all your attention on that. And the research backs that up. Oh, that's absolutely right. So, you
00:25:53.680
know, when you feel positive, and when you're experiencing positive events, this can help us replenish
00:26:01.460
our attentional resources. This is called the broaden and build theory in psychology. And
00:26:07.760
basically, what that says is when we have more attentional resources available, we can focus better,
00:26:14.980
we have more energy to resist distractions. So, you know, these are studies done that people,
00:26:22.160
they have certain stimuli that make them feel positive, like they watch a film that makes them,
00:26:28.480
you know, feel happier. And then they give a test and it shows that they can generate more ideas and
00:26:37.020
better quality ideas compared to others who were given some kind of stimulus, like a film that
00:26:44.120
elicits a negative affect. So, you know, being positive is a really good thing when it comes to
00:26:51.100
attention. It can really work for us. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:26:57.000
And now back to the show. So, we've talked about how our personality and our emotions can affect
00:27:06.960
our ability to pay attention. Let's talk about our external environment. I think particularly the
00:27:11.100
internet. I think that's the thing that people are just most frustrated when they're frustrated
00:27:14.440
about. I can't pay attention. They look like, well, it's the internet. I'm just so distracted.
00:27:18.540
That's where you go. So, you started this research, you know, more than 20 years ago,
00:27:22.980
sort of the birth of the internet as we know it today. How has the internet changed over that time
00:27:29.540
and how has that affected our attention spans? Well, I think we can all blame our distractions
00:27:36.220
to a single individual by the name of Vannevar Bush. I'm being a little, I'm exaggerating a little bit
00:27:45.080
here. But Vannevar Bush was an engineer who back in 1945, he led the U.S. Office of Scientific Research
00:27:55.240
and he was very frustrated with the way information was organized. And at the time, it was organized
00:28:02.220
according to the Dewey Decimal System. And he said, this is too artificial. People can't find information
00:28:08.860
like this. So, he said, information should be organized the way people think and people think
00:28:15.500
by associations. And so, he came up with this idea, was just an ingenious idea called the Memex.
00:28:24.240
And the Memex was, it was an idea, it was never built. It was the idea that we should organize
00:28:29.880
information, all our documents, our media, our photos, our letters of correspondence, all of that
00:28:38.140
should be organized so that they're associated together in some way. And that's how the idea of
00:28:44.160
nodes and links came up. It's a great idea. And it's even worked a little bit too well because
00:28:50.840
the theory of how our minds and memory is organized is according to a semantic network of associations.
00:29:01.700
So, the design of the internet mimics the way that human memory is theorized
00:29:07.820
to be organized as this semantic network of associated ideas. So, when we go on, say,
00:29:16.040
a Wikipedia page, there are so many points of entry into our minds network, right? And we see an idea
00:29:24.160
and this, it sets off just a firestorm of other associations in our minds. And so, we start surfing
00:29:32.100
through the internet. We see a link, we click on that. It sets off a whole series of other kinds
00:29:38.480
of associations in our minds. We might see another link, sets off other associations. And before we
00:29:45.360
know it, we're just traveling through the internet and get ourselves into a rabbit hole. So, the internet,
00:29:53.320
of course, it's grown. It's, with its open architecture, anybody can contribute. And anybody and
00:30:00.120
everybody has, the internet has grown. We have, every year, there's more and new ways
00:30:06.700
to distract us. So, it's a combination of the internet design and also how our memories are
00:30:16.380
Right. Those connections. I think we've all experienced. I know, there's a couple of months
00:30:19.660
ago, I remember this one. I was reading an article. I don't even remember what it was about, but somehow
00:30:23.240
I ended up watching videos of the Osmonds from the 70s. And I was like, how did I get here? I don't
00:30:29.680
remember. This had nothing. And then also added to that. So, the internet is distracting and causes
00:30:34.680
it to get distracted because it overlays how our mind theoretically works. But then, in the past 15,
00:30:41.040
20 years, we've added that social element to the internet, which we're social animals. So,
00:30:49.720
That's right. We're just social beings. And our social natures just compel us to go on social
00:30:56.180
media. So, we seek social rewards. We're geared to exchange social capital, which means exchanging
00:31:03.980
resources and favors with other people. We spend a lot of time on the internet because we care about
00:31:11.140
our online identity. We spend a lot of time building up that identity. And we're influenced
00:31:18.380
by others, socially influenced by others. So, all of these social forces, they interact with the
00:31:26.020
design of social media platforms and other things online that enable us to connect with other people.
00:31:35.520
And then, you also have the developers of these platforms and even media companies. They figured out
00:31:40.640
that, well, if you can get that quick hit, you're going to have people spend more time. So,
00:31:45.960
YouTube videos or the TikToks, they've gotten shorter and shorter. And that seems to cause
00:31:52.360
people to spend more time. Yes, that's right. I mean, TikTok has an algorithm that's very agile
00:31:59.620
and it adapts to what it believes the viewer likes. And every so often, when you watch TikTok,
00:32:07.760
you're going to find some video that's just hilarious. It's not going to be every video,
00:32:13.200
but it's going to come along every once in a while. And that's called intermittent reinforcement.
00:32:19.080
And it's enough to keep you there. It's enough to get you stuck there. If you knew that every third
00:32:25.420
video would be hilarious, and then all of a sudden that stopped, you know, the third video came along and
00:32:32.920
it wasn't funny, you would stop watching TikTok, right? From a psychological perspective, it's called
00:32:40.320
the behavior is extinguished. But when you have intermittent or random reinforcement, you don't
00:32:47.340
know when that next funny video is coming. And so, you stick with it, right? Because you know it's going
00:32:53.160
to come at a random interval. And, you know, even if it might be 10 videos before something comes along
00:32:59.540
that's funny, you still know it's coming and you wait for it. So, the hardest behavior to extinguish
00:33:06.960
is this kind of intermittent random reinforcement. Well, with TikTok, their algorithm is kind of is
00:33:13.780
in a black box, but there's people have some ideas of how it works. And there's, I mean, it's amazing
00:33:18.620
the things they're looking at to figure out which video to show to you. Like, they'll show certain
00:33:23.440
videos to you depending on where you're at, whether you're at work or at home, depending on what time
00:33:28.460
of day it is, in the morning or at night. They figure out, well, at night you like to watch these
00:33:32.760
certain types of videos. They're going to show you that. You know, they'll look at how long you're
00:33:36.280
even looking at a video. And that's sort of an indication, well, they like this one. So, they're
00:33:40.100
going to show you more of that. So, it's just more trying to hook our attention. They're using your
00:33:44.640
external environment to hook your attention. That's right. We leave so many digital traces on the
00:33:51.340
internet that can be mined and used to capture our attention. So, another thing you talk about
00:33:57.280
your research has looked at is how the way movies and television shows are edited have probably
00:34:04.440
contributed to our shortening attention span. What's going on there? Well, yeah, it's interesting.
00:34:10.280
It's a chicken and egg question. We don't know what's influencing what. We do know that TV and film
00:34:17.540
shot lengths have decreased over the years. They started out much longer. They now average to be
00:34:23.700
about four seconds. That's pretty short. We also know commercials have shortened. Commercials used
00:34:31.020
to be a lot longer. Now, it's not uncommon to see six-second commercials. So, you know, we can't assess
00:34:39.000
causality. We can't say that short TV shot lengths caused us to have short attention spans on the screen.
00:34:46.940
It could be the other way around. It could be that film directors and editors are influenced by their
00:34:53.560
own short attention spans to make shot lengths short. It could be that they're gearing and editing
00:35:01.200
film and TV to what they think the viewer wants to see. They may believe that the viewer doesn't have
00:35:07.500
the capacity to watch anything longer than a four-second shot length. So, you know, it's a chicken and
00:35:14.600
egg question. We don't know. It's an interesting parallel trend that's going on. And my interpretation
00:35:21.860
is that this only reinforces us to have short attention spans. And then, you know, the other
00:35:29.180
thing to look at is when we use social media, social media platforms constrain the length of our content
00:35:37.880
that we can post, right? Whether it's Twitter, when we text, we tend to text in very short
00:35:43.880
length simply because it's difficult to write long text. And, you know, videos like, for example,
00:35:51.000
on TikTok promote short videos. So from many different directions, we're encouraged for our
00:36:01.160
No, we've experienced the difference between movies made today compared to 20, 30, 40 years ago. So my son,
00:36:10.400
he's 12 and a couple of weeks ago, you get on this Rocky kick. He all of a sudden, I want to watch the
00:36:14.700
Rocky series. And we're like, okay. Uh, my wife and I, I don't know if you're going to like our daughter's
00:36:20.480
nine. I don't know if you guys are going to like this because it's, it's made in the seventies. It's really
00:36:24.380
slow. You guys are used to watching your YouTube videos where there's the jump cuts and people screaming and
00:36:30.160
whatever, but we watched it and yeah, I mean, you forget how slow movies were like Rocky. There's hardly any
00:36:37.020
action in it. The boxing happens at the very end. And then the shots are just these really long
00:36:41.480
shots, maybe 10, 20 seconds on a, on a, on a single frame. And it was, it was, I was surprised
00:36:47.900
my kids, they actually took to it. They've actually enjoyed it. They actually embraced it, but it was
00:36:51.900
jarring to kind of go back in time to see how movies were edited 30, 40 years ago. Yeah. Yeah.
00:36:58.320
So I think a lot of us, we'd like to rein in our scattered attention. We know we might have a
00:37:02.900
problem. We want to get more focused, but your research has led you to the conclusion that trying
00:37:08.380
to be productive and focused all the time just isn't possible or even desirable. Why is that?
00:37:15.020
Well, that's because we just can't have sustained focus for lengthy periods in the same way that we
00:37:22.140
just can't lift weights all day without stopping. So we have a limited amount of attentional resources.
00:37:29.160
You can think of it as your attentional capacity. And when you just have sustained focus for a long
00:37:35.840
time, imagine one zoom meeting after another, where you really have to pay attention. We just can't do
00:37:41.800
this without getting exhausted. So what we really need to think about is taking meaningful breaks. And
00:37:50.860
when we talked earlier in this program about the importance of positive affect and wellbeing,
00:37:58.260
that's really important to aim for when we use our devices, because then we preserve and build up our
00:38:06.260
attentional resources. When we have a full tank of attentional resources, we can actually do more.
00:38:12.840
We can be more efficient. We can be more productive. So rather than focus for extended periods and just get
00:38:20.600
yourself exhausted, stop, take a break, replenish, and then you'll actually be more productive.
00:38:27.380
And you also, one thing we should be doing is trying to figure out our attentional rhythm. Just as
00:38:33.300
there's a rhythm to a day, you know, the sun rises and the sun goes down, we have a rhythm for our
00:38:40.720
Yes. So we did a study where we probed people over the course of the day and we would probe them about
00:38:49.260
18 times a day. And the irony does not escape me that we interrupted them 18 times a day, but they
00:38:56.520
were very, very short probes that they could answer in a few seconds. And we asked them how engaged they
00:39:02.880
were in what they were doing and how challenged they were. And what we found based on this aggregating the
00:39:09.960
results is that focused attention does have a rhythm over the day. And there seems to be two peaks.
00:39:17.960
For most people, their peak focus time is late morning around 11am and also mid to late afternoon
00:39:25.420
between 2 and 3pm. And this ebb and flow of our focus seems to coincide with our expending mental
00:39:35.100
resources. Right? So when we're at our peak mental resources, that's when we can apply them and be
00:39:41.640
most focused. So how can you find out your rhythm? Well, one thing you could do is to learn your
00:39:48.500
chronotype. Most people have a good sense of whether they're an early type, you know, you like to wake up
00:39:55.580
really early. And that's when you're at your best or your late type, where you really need to sleep in
00:40:02.960
before you can perform well. But you can actually take a test to find out what your chronotype is.
00:40:11.380
There's something called the morningness, eveningness questionnaire. So that's one thing you can do.
00:40:16.820
But the other thing is to learn to get a sense of how exhausted you are, how energetic you are.
00:40:25.500
You can even keep a diary throughout the day of, you know, what your level of attention is.
00:40:31.620
That can help you understand what your peak is, when your best performance is. And why is that
00:40:38.680
important? It's because then you can begin to plan your day and save that time for your hardest work,
00:40:46.340
the work that requires the most creativity. You don't want to waste that peak focus time doing email
00:40:52.600
or, you know, doing social media. You want to save it for work that really needs attentional resources.
00:41:01.620
So this is all about, you know, I think you make the point. I like this. It's about developing more
00:41:05.480
agency over your, your attention. Yes. Instead of feeling like you have no control of your attention,
00:41:10.840
you have some control and knowing when you have the most focus that can help you kind of arrange your
00:41:15.300
day and your environment to take advantage of that. I mean, any tips on you found for self-regulating?
00:41:20.860
So even if you figure out how to arrange your schedule, so you you're working on the most,
00:41:25.080
you know, attention needed task at the, your peak attention time, you're still going to get that
00:41:30.840
temptation to be distracted and do something else. Are there any tips that people can do to better
00:41:35.680
self-regulate? Yes. Yes, there are. So one of the things you can do is learn to probe yourself
00:41:43.420
and gain what I call meta-awareness. Meta-awareness means being aware of what you're doing as it's
00:41:51.540
unfolding. So we do so many things that are automatic that we talked about earlier here,
00:41:56.860
bring those automatic actions to a conscious awareness. So every time you go to grab your phone,
00:42:03.560
you can probe yourself and ask, what, why do I feel a need to do that? Why do I feel a need to
00:42:10.080
switch screens and go to read news or go to social media? Is it because I'm bored? Is it because what
00:42:18.380
I'm doing is too hard? Is it simply a habit? And once you become aware of it and understand the
00:42:24.840
reasons, this can help curtail it. Another thing we can do is practice forethought. And this means
00:42:31.920
understanding how your current actions are going to impact your life later in the day. So what's
00:42:38.580
your future self going to look like at the end of the day? If I go and spend an hour on social media,
00:42:45.960
what's my life going to be like at 10 p.m.? Am I going to be still up working on that overdue report?
00:42:52.840
Or am I going to be feeling fulfilled that I accomplished a lot today? I can relax, I can have
00:43:00.660
a glass of wine. So practicing forethought. And another thing that's really, really important
00:43:07.380
is keeping goals in mind. So remember, attention is goal directed. We pay attention to what our goal
00:43:15.580
is. As long as we keep our goal in mind, our attention is directed toward that. So I did an
00:43:23.140
experiment with colleagues at Microsoft Research. And we used a conversational bot to remind people
00:43:30.520
of their goals for that day at the beginning of the day. And people actually did perform better,
00:43:36.900
at least for the short term, for a short period of time. And from this, we learned that yes, it's
00:43:43.540
important to be aware of your goals, but it's also important to continually remind ourselves of our
00:43:51.320
goals. So, you know, it's a dynamic process. It's not just once at the beginning of the day,
00:43:59.980
And another thing you point out, I think a lot of people, when they're like, I want to get better,
00:44:02.780
I want to get more focused. They're like, well, I'm going to install an attention
00:44:05.680
distracting or a blocking app. You mentioned earlier for people who are distractible,
00:44:10.820
we've got that personality for distractibility, it could help. Conscientious people could backfire
00:44:15.140
because you end up working more. But you actually say, you know, what you really need to do,
00:44:18.520
you're better off is developing that sense of agency with that sort of that probing you do.
00:44:22.240
So you can just do it on your own. You'll be better off that way. Yeah. And then you also,
00:44:28.300
I thought this was surprising. You tell people not to feel guilty about doing this sort of
00:44:33.100
rote online activities that they do, like playing games or scrolling social media. Why is that?
00:44:38.780
Yeah. And it's not just online activities, but any kind of rote activity. So first of all,
00:44:45.020
you know, people are happiest, they're calmest when they do these kinds of rote activities.
00:44:50.380
They can help relax us. And if we use them right, you know, they can even help us build up our
00:44:57.920
mental resources because, you know, we're engaged in something, but we're not expending a lot of
00:45:04.500
mental resources. But it's so important to be strategic about using this. You know,
00:45:10.880
we can't play simple games all day, you know, but it is fine for a short break. And if you have,
00:45:17.120
let's say you, you're, you feel pretty exhausted and you've got another meeting coming up in 10
00:45:22.940
minutes, it's okay to just pull back, do something that's going to calm you. And you know, in 10 minutes,
00:45:30.420
you're going to have to stop. And, but I want to emphasize the best break of all is to go outside
00:45:36.800
and take a walk in nature because studies show that that helps us de-stress. It helps us generate
00:45:43.500
more ideas. It's called divergent thinking. That's the most important thing we can do. But if you,
00:45:50.600
if you can't do it and circumstances don't always allow that, then it's okay to take an online break,
00:45:57.720
but be strategic. And you have to find some hook that's going to pull you out. If you can't do it
00:46:06.120
on your own, whether it's setting a timer or whether you do it 10 minutes before a meeting,
00:46:11.420
but you have to make sure that you don't get stuck in it. And it, yeah, we should not feel guilty for
00:46:17.200
doing that. Okay. So if you want to take a little break to do a, you know, a quick game or do a social
00:46:22.940
media scroll or better yet, you know, take a walk outside. Don't feel bad about that because we need
00:46:28.680
breaks to replenish our mental resources. And, uh, you know, it puts us in a positive mood. I mean,
00:46:34.520
well, maybe checking social media won't put you in a good mood, but you know, a simple game or walk
00:46:39.320
can put you in a positive mood. And like we talked about earlier, feeling calm and positive
00:46:45.000
really helps your focus overall, but you just need to be strategic about this all, you know,
00:46:50.380
make sure it's not something you're going to have, make sure you choose an activity that you're not
00:46:54.640
going to have trouble pulling away from. And, you know, I think the big takeaway you want people to
00:46:59.060
understand is that yes, we can figure out ways to be better focused, but it's not possible to be
00:47:04.800
focused all the time. So it's really about learning, uh, how to follow your natural rhythms,
00:47:09.480
focusing when you need to, but also allowing yourself breaks, you know, cutting yourself some
00:47:14.640
slack. You want people to have, you want people to have balance, like a balanced focus.
00:47:19.680
Yes, absolutely. That achieving a psychological balance is really the most important thing we can
00:47:27.120
think about when we use our devices. Tech is not going away. You know, some people do a digital
00:47:33.300
detox. That's fine, but it's not a permanent solution. And for anyone to pull off completely
00:47:39.400
from digital technology, it only penalizes that person. If you're a knowledge worker, you get cut
00:47:46.280
off from important work communications for other, for all of us, even we get cut off from loved ones and
00:47:53.880
friends and family. So a digital detox is, you know, it might work in the very short term, but it's just
00:48:01.600
not a permanent solution. It's better for us to develop agency, to control our own attention.
00:48:09.180
And, you know, the ship has sailed. Tech is here to stay. So let's learn to live with it and feel
00:48:16.160
positive when we use it. Well, Glory, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn
00:48:21.140
more about the book and your work? Yes. So you can go to my website, which is www.gloriamark.com. That's
00:48:30.580
all one word, Gloria Bar. My book is called Attention Span, where I cover what we talked about today,
00:48:39.780
but a whole lot more. And I would be very happy to hear from you if you go to my website and would
00:48:46.640
love to hear what people think. Well, Gloria Mark, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:48:51.400
Oh, it's been a real pleasure too. Thank you. My guest today was Gloria Mark. She's the author
00:48:56.360
of the book, Attention Span. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can
00:49:00.040
find more information about her work at our website, gloriamark.com. Also check out our show notes
00:49:04.400
at aom.is slash attention, where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.
00:49:08.560
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at
00:49:19.500
artofmanless.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that
00:49:23.180
we've written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And while you're there,
00:49:26.100
make sure to sign up for our newsletter. There's a daily or weekly option. It's free.
00:49:29.560
And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium.
00:49:33.140
Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLESS to checkout for a free month trial.
00:49:36.820
Once you're signed up, download the stitcher app on Android iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free
00:49:40.720
episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one
00:49:43.880
minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you've done
00:49:47.080
that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who would
00:49:50.780
think we get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time,
00:49:54.700
it's Brett McKay. Remind you to want to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.