BBC: Goldfish, brains and phones

We have a challenge for everyone- can you stay focused for the full six minutes?

Sounds easy? Maybe not, because today we're talking about our attention spans: are they shrinking?

That's right, so we're asking today: is the length of time we can focus on something- that's our attention span- actually getting shorter? Now, one study says that- in fact, it claims the human attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish. 

Can that be true? Smartphones, the internet, social media- these all certainly do take uup a lot of our attetion. But how much? How long do we look at our mobile phones for in a day, on average? Is it...

a) around 30minutes    b) around two and a half hours, or      c) over three hours. 

I tend to be quite busy, but I know some people are really addicted to their mobile phones so I'm going to say around two and a half hours- that's answer 'b'.

OK, so, a report released by Microsoft said the average human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds. Since then it's fallen to just eight seconds. 

Right, and that's a massive change in a very short time. Now, the year 2000 was just before the boom in digital media and smartphones, so many thinks they're blame for all these distractions- now, distractions are things which take away our focus or attention. 

Yes. And we mentioned goldfish earlier- goldfish reportedly have an attention span of nine seconds. That's one more than phone-obsessed humans with a mere eight seconds!

And there's a phrase in English- we say 'to have the attention span of a goldfish'. Or 'the memory of a goldfish'. So these poor...poor goldfish, Neil. 

Yes, they get a bad press, don't they? That's a phrase which means 'criticism'- especially criticism in the media and especially in newspapers- or the 'press', as we call it. 

So- is it really true than humans are now even more especially distracted than fish?

Well, BBC radio programme More or Less recetnly investigated this claim. 

That's right. and they found out a couple of things. Firstly- they couldn't find evidence of the research that Microsoft quoted in their report. In other words, the programme couldn't find scientific evidence that our attention spans are in fact shrinking.

And secondly- the psychologist they spoke to said there are problems with the idea of measuring attention spans in the first place. It's a term that's a widely used, but it's not very scientific. 

Sounds fishy. 

Yes. Fishy means 'suspicious', by the way. Sorry, goldfish. Again. 

So, are we humnas in fact more easily distracted than before? More or Less Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychologist at the Open University, if human beings are less able to focus these days. 

It's all down to the individual, it's all down to how you choose to apply your attentio. So attention- switching ability may well have developed in recent years, in the age of the smartphone and the internet. But because someone's distracted by their smartphone or wanting to quickly Google something, it doesn't mean that they then don't have the ability to control and sustain their attention when they carry out another task. 

So she says we're not necessarily more easily distracted. Instead, we may actually be better at switching our attentio quickly  between different tasks. 

That's right. She's really saying we can multitask better than before. And that means we can focus on many different tasks, each for a shorter period of time. 

She said: "It's all down to how you choose to apply your attention." Let's just highlight that phrase down to. Here, it means 'depends on'. It all depends on how you choose to apply your attention. 

So- maybe our attention spans aren't getting shorter, we just choose to look at our phones a lot more.