Hi, we're here from curiosity

to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about why our collective attention span is shrinking,

how you can increase your productivity

by building deep work skills and why

eyeball planets may be our best bet for finding alien life. Let's satisfy some

curiosity. New research suggests our collective attention span is shrinking.

I said collective attention span by the way, so not the individuals, but the

collectives. A collective attention span is all about how long a hot or trending topic stays hot, or the speed at which our public conversation moves.

How long can we collectively obsess over a movie, a book, or a hashtag before it loses its appeal.

To measure our communal attention span over time, a team of European researchers turned to data

naturally. As in the past 40 years of movie ticket

sales, Google Books Data for books written in the past 100 years,

Scientific Citation Data going back 25 years years and 2010's data from

Reddit, Wikipedia, and Google Trends. They crunch the numbers on how popularity

moved on from all these different platforms. They measured popularity by the rate of

commenting on Reddit for instance and by the amount of time something spent on the

trending charts of Twitter. Was our collective attention span shrinking as time

passed?

They found that indeed it was, but not in every arena.

...