Where did our attention spans go, and can we get them back?

Science Weekly

The Guardian

Science

4.2 • 938 Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Oxford English Dictionary announced its word of the year at the end of 2024: brain rot. The term relates to the supposedly negative effects of consuming social media content, but it struck a chord more widely with many of us who feel we just don’t have the mental capacity we once did. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying our waning attention spans for 20 years. She tells Madeleine Finlay why she believes our powers of concentration are not beyond rescue, and reveals her top tips for finding focus. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Guardian.
0:02.0	Severance Season 2 is coming to Apple TV Plus.
0:12.0	What you all did five months ago was one of the most painful moments in the history of this company.
0:17.0	Our message got out. We're famous.
0:19.0	All of us equally are one of us is like the star.
0:21.7	What did you see? My Audi's wife is Miss Casey. If you want to find out what happened to her,
0:26.8	I'll help. She's still alive. I want to see my wife. He should have left.
0:33.7	Severance, new season streaming 17th of January, only on Apple TV Plus.
0:38.1	Subscription required.
0:46.2	Twenty years ago, Gloria Mark had just taken on a new role, Professor.
0:52.3	I had so many different deadlines and people that I was interacting with, and I found that
0:59.5	it was just really hard to pay attention on any one single thing.
1:04.0	Her struggle to focus made her wonder.
1:07.2	Was she the only one experiencing this?
1:10.9	So she started to study a very particular set of people.
1:15.2	Office workers sat at computers.
1:17.8	We started following people around with stopwatches.
1:21.8	So we were shadowing them in their workplace.
1:26.3	Every time one of the workers switched their attention away from a screen,
1:31.1	Gloria would be standing behind them, logging the time with her stopwatch.
1:35.9	And you can imagine how labor intensive that was.
1:39.3	It was really quite a lot of work.
	...

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