Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

If you've ever been fascinated or frustrated by your attention span, this episode is for you.

We'll be learning more about gaining control of our focus and understanding why we get so easily distracted.

Joining us is renowned psychologist Dr. Gloria Mark, who's been called the definitive expert

on distraction and multitasking.

She's the author of a new book called Attention Span, a groundbreaking way to restore balance,

happiness, and productivity.

Dr. Mark, we thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

You write that our use of personal technologies affects our ability to pay attention.

Tell us more about that and how that has really changed things

as far as our attention spans are concerned.

Well, that's a really huge story.

So it turns out that it turns out that it does affect our ability to pay attention a lot. And, you know, I've been

tracking people's attention spans on their screens over the last 15 years. And we use objective

measures. So, you know, we started out actually shadowing people with stopwatches to time

very precisely how long their attention was on any screen before switching. That was very laborious,

so then we switched to using computer logging techniques. So what we found is that over the last 15 years, the attention duration on any screen

has decreased.

And it's down over the last five, six years or so to about 47 seconds on any screen on

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