A manifesto on what you should pay attention to – from a book on The Art of Living profusely illustrated by comic strips

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via interlibrary loan, from the Meridian Public Library, I obtained and am extremely enjoying reading a thoughtful 2022 book with comics by Grant Snider titled The Art of Living: Reflections on Mindfulness and the Overexamined Life. Grant is an orthodontist and an artist. He has a web site called Incidental Comics. The book begins with:  

 

THE ATTENTION MANIFESTO [Page 5]

 

I will pay attention to what’s in front of me. [Page 6]

I will make a blank space in each day. [Page 20]

I will do one thing at a time. [Page 36]

I will put my thoughts on paper. [Page 52]

I will go outside no matter the weather. [Page 72]

I won’t be afraid to be bored. [Page 86]

I will experience the world with my body and mind. [Page 96]

I will find beauty in the everyday. [Page 112]

I will stay open to wonder. [Page 126]

 

At Incidental Comics on July 1, 2020 there is an Attention Manifesto comic strip which is not in the book. Here are links to a dozen comics appearing in the book, as presented on web pages at his Incidental Comics site:

 

Stillness [Page 15]

Openness [Page 16]

Contemplation [Page 24]

How to be happy [Page 38]

Beginning [page 53]

What to do on a rainy day [Page 75] 

Ripples [Page 88]

Uphill [Page 98]

The path to empathy [Page 101]

Getting over [Page 103]

Morning light [Page 113]

Multitudes [Page 132

 

The reading man was adapted from a line drawing on page 20 in the Walt Stanchfield book Gesture Drawing for Animation, which you can find at the Internet Archive.

 

Can you even read a chart in a report? Another level of lies about attention spans

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an article by Thais Roberto at the KEYSTONE EDUCATION GROUP on February 8, 2023 titled The first 8 seconds – capturing the attention of Gen Z students. Her third paragraph begins:

 

“Research conducted by Microsoft in 2015 found that the average attention span of Gen Z individuals was only about eight seconds, four seconds less than that of millennials.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But that is complete nonsense. Page 6 of that Microsoft report is shown above, with the numbers of seconds highlighted in red. It mentions neither millennials, nor Gen Z.

 

Also, the source was Statistic Brain, and not Microsoft. I blogged about that on December 30, 2022 in a post titled Shallow research and less curious than hoped.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where else has this new level of nonsense - with Gen Z and millennials been mentioned? One place is by Vineet Arya at Entrepreneur India in an article on June 5, 2019 titled How to not lose attention of Gen Z in the 8 seconds that you have? A second is another article at tradable bits on December 18, 2019 titled How to capture Gen Z’s 8-second attention span through ads. And a third is yet another article by Yehuda Roberts at BrighterDayMh blog on January 9, 2024 titled Average Human Attention Span Statistics.

 

The image of a woman and laptop was modified from one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Living with a popcorn brain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an article by Tracy Swartz at the New York Post on February 18, 2024 titled What is ‘popcorn brain’? How social media may be killing your attention span. She quoted clinical psychologist Dr. Daniel Glazer as saying that:

 

“Popcorn brain refers to the tendency for our attention and focus to jump quickly from one thing to another, like popping corn kernels.”

 

It’s a very vivid term for describing behavior that does not rise to the level of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. On page 96 in her 2024 book The 5 Resets: Rewire your brain and body for less stress and more resilience Aditi Nerurkar describes A Classic Case of Popcorn Brain as follows:

 

“Julian was suffering from an increasingly common condition known as popcorn brain. While not a true medical diagnosis, popcorn brain is a growing cultural phenomenon. It’s a term coined by researcher David Levy to describe what happens to our brains when we spend too much time online. Our brain circuitry starts to ‘pop’ from being overstimulated by the fast-paced information stream Over time, our brains get habituated to this constant streaming of information, making it harder for us to look away and disconnect from our devices, slow down our thoughts, and live fully offline, where things move at a much different and slower pace.”

 

And on pages 103 and 104 she describes how to cure your popcorn brain:

 

“Aim to spend no more than twenty minutes a day scrolling on your phone. At all other times, use your phone only for essential calls, texts, and email. Set a timer and stay accountable. It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re in the digital space.

 

Opt out of push notifications and automatic pop-up features. Trust that if there’s something you need to know about, you’ll hear about it on your time.

 

While working, aim to keep your smartphone at least ten feet away from your workstation, At home, consider doing the same, especially when you’re with your family members.

 

At bedtime, keep your phone off your nightstand. This will help prevent nightime phone checks and also prevent you from reaching for your phone the first thing in the morning. Tell family members or colleagues to call you if there’s an emergency.”

 

 

My image was constructed by filling a silhouette of brain activity from Openclipart with an image of popcorn from Wikimedia Commons.

 

An excellent recent book about attention by Gloria Mark

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have repeatedly blogged about bogus statistics from the Statistic Brain web site claiming we only have an eight-second attention span, less than the nine-seconds for a goldfish (actually instead a gold fish). My latest post on December 30, 2022 is titled Shallow research and less curious than hoped.

 

In 2023 there is an excellent book by psychologist Gloria Mark titled Attention and subtitled A groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness, and productivity. It showed up at Amazon in both the US and UK on January 10, 2023. On page 95 she discusses attention spans for switching screens:

 

“Forty-seven seconds of attention

 

To understand how people’s attention spans have changed with the rise in computing, I have been tracking people’s attention over the years, using increasingly sophisticated and unobtrusive computer logging techniques. I studied a range of participants, all of whom were knowledge workers, but in different jobs, and in different workplaces. Most were in the age range of twenty-five to fifty years old, but I have also studied younger college-age students. Our observations ranged from multiple days to multiple weeks. Each study yielded thousands of hours of observations.

 

The results of all this attention tracking shows that the average attention on a screen before switching to another screen is declining over the years (Figure 1). In 2004, in our earliest study, we found that people averaged about one hundred fifty seconds (two and a half minutes) on a computer screen before switching their attention to another screen; in 2012 the average went down to seventy-five seconds before switching. In later years, from 2016 to 2021, the average amount of time on any screen before switching was found to be relatively consistent between forty-four and fifty seconds. Others replicated our research, also with computer logging. Andre Meyer and colleagues at Microsoft Research found the average attention span of twenty software developers over eleven workdays to be fifty seconds (Ref. 9). For her dissertation, my student Fatema Akbar found the average attention span of fifty office workers in various jobs over a period of three to four weeks to be a mere forty-four seconds (Ref. 10). In other words, in the last several years, every day and all day in the workplace, people switch their attention on computer screens about every forty-seven seconds on average. In fact, in 2016 we found that the median (i.e. midpoint) for length of attention duration to be forty seconds (Ref. 11). This means that half the observations of attention length were shorter than forty seconds.”

 

Some folks have tried to advise those writing web content based on that bogus eight-second span. Let’s assume we read at four words per second (which is a reasonable average that I mentioned in a post on September 23, 2019 titled How many words should be on a PowerPoint slide: 6, 12, 20, 25, 36, or 49? Then we should just write a paragraph with 32 words – only a sentence or two. Gloria’s 47-second average instead implies we can write 188 words - or almost six times more.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gloria also discusses different attentional states during a workday. As shown above, these can be divided into four quadrants (as shown above) based on high or low levels of engagement and challenge. Details are in a 2014 CHI paper titled Bored Mondays and Focused Afternoons: The Rhythm of Attention and Online Activity in the Workplace. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A chart which is Figure 2 in that paper is shown above. People completely avoid the Frustrated quadrant with low engagement and high challenge. They are most focused in late morning and early afternoon. They spend less time Bored or Rote.

 

On Pages 282 and 283 Gloria discusses how we should act:

 

“In this book, I’ve aimed to use research findings to shift the public conversation in how we use our devices so that the main goal is to strive to achieve a healthy psychological balance, and to follow our natural attentional rhythm. But you might be thinking, wait a minute, what? Shouldn’t striving for productivity be the number one concern? Just as we can’t run a marathon all day, we cannot experience the high mental load of focused attention for long uninterrupted stretches without our performance degrading and stress increasing. So instead of forcing yourself into long periods of sustained focus with pressure to optimize productivity, instead find your rhythm of using different kinds of attention: there are times when you can be challenged, and other times when you need something easy and engaging. Design your day around using your cognitive resources wisely and aim to optimize your well-being.

 

The public narrative that we shouldn’t allow for mindless rote activity is not based in science. Rote activity has a function in our lives: it makes people happy when they are engaged in activity that is not challenging and often relaxing and helps people step back and replenish their cognitive resources. Gardening and knitting are rote activities, for example. Similarly, in the digital world, there are things we can do to relax and reset and that can bring rewards such as connecting with other people. We need to consider rote activity as part of our work that supports our larger task and emotional goals. Of course, the best breaks are those where you can get up and move around (but not while checking your smartphone). Taking short breaks with easy tasks (and applying meta-awareness so you don’t get too lost) helps replenish scarce cognitive resources, and the upshot is that with more resources, we can focus our attention better, self-regulate more effectively, be more productive, and importantly, feel more positive.

 

Give yourself permission to back off – you need not feel guilty. We can’t all be like William James or the writer Stephen King, who are both known for writing two thousand words a day. We have created a culture intent on optimizing productivity, which also means more production of information, more communication, and more information to keep up with. In our current digital climate, we are fighting gale-force winds to keep the ship on course to maintain our well-being.

 

What you can do is develop agency to achieve better control of your attention, to get in sync  with your attentional rhythm, and with it, strive for positive well-being. The great artists and writers knew the importance of finding their rhythms. They knew when they worked best and when to take breaks and when to fill their day with negative space. The writer Anne Beattie prefers to start writing at 9 p.m. and is at her best between midnight and 3 a.m. She follows her own rhythm for her peak focus.

 

We need to change our conversation in our still relatively young digital age to prioritize our health and well-being. Computers were designed for us to extend our capabilities, but by doing so, we are losing control of our attention and stressing ourselves out. The idea that we get distracted, get interrupted and multitask because of our personal lack of willpower is incomplete. Nor is it useful to blame everything on powerful algorithms. The realm of influence is much bigger. Our attention behavior is influenced by a much larger sociotechnical world that we’re part of, encompassing environmental, social, individual and other technological forces. It's not just about our own lack of discipline. However, we can use agency to plan and take action, like intentionally choosing how to use our attention, to harness our tendency for dynamic attention. Using our attention effectively in the digital world is really about understanding ourselves and the larger environment we live in.”   

 

Curiously there is an article by David Butcher at LinkedIn Pulse on April 14, 2023 titled Modern attention spans: myth and reality. He claims instead that attention spans are not getting shorter. He must not have seen Gloria’s book.

 

Shallow research and less curious than hoped

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For inspiration, I have been borrowing books from my friendly local public library on broad topics like curiosity and creativity. One is Seth Goldenberg’s 2022 book titled Radical Curiosity: Questioning commonly held beliefs to imagine flourishing futures. There is an excerpt titled The Wonder of New Ideas at the Stanford SOCIAL INNOVATION Review on September 20, 2022. On Page 10 of the book, under the heading of CHALLENGING COMMONLY HELD BELIEFS, he boldly claims:

 

“…. Often commonly held beliefs are so common they are camouflaged. Identifying a commonly held belief, peeling back the assumptions it is built upon, and restlessly seeking interventions and leverage points for greater impact is the life cycle of a challenger. People who are Radically Curious are ferociously hungry in their pursuit of knowledge, not as a fixed resource but as an ongoing process. Radical Curiosity is the greatest expression of what it means to be a philosopher: an engaged thinker dedicated to the reconstruction of new knowledge.”

 

What did Seth do in a specific case? Did he peel back all the assumptions? No, his research was just shallow. His second paragraph on page 124 says:

 

“According to a 2015 study conducted by Microsoft researchers in Canada, the average person generally loses their concentration after eight seconds, a drop from 12 seconds in the year 2000. Considering that the length of a goldfish’s memory is documented to be about nine seconds, it may be safe to say that we have become less focused than goldfish. …”

 

That is complete nonsense, which I blogged about in a post on August 5, 2020 titled When doing research, your attention span should be more than 10 seconds. A note in the back of Seth’s book refers to an article by Kevin McSpadden in Time on May 14, 2015 titled You now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. But it doesn’t mention memory – just attention. And McSpadden missed that the Microsoft report doesn’t say those attention spans came from their research.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above (on page 6 of the Microsoft report), they got them from a commercial web site called Statistic Brain. Both the BBC and Wall Street Journal determined that Statistic Brain just had made them up.

 

Getting my attention with a giant envelope

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the mail this morning, as shown above, there was a huge envelope from Fisher Investments. Inside there just was a two-page marketing letter on oversize (9-1/4” by 12-1/4”) paper rather than the standard 8-1/2” by 11.” It offered me a free guide with 99 Retirement Tips.

 

Their marketing ploy using unusual stationery succeeded in briefly getting my attention. Similarly, opening a speech by stating a Startling Statistic can wake up your audience.

 

I just shred most envelopes with personalized offers for life insurance without opening them. The only exception is AAA Life Insurance, which includes a useful page of self-adhesive return address labels.  

 

 

When doing research, your attention span should be more than 10 seconds

Back on January 21, 2017 I blogged about Is the attention span of a marketer shorter than that of a fruit fly? Recently I decided to take another look to see if people were still spouting some nonsense statistics about human attention spans. Unfortunately they were.

Not reading a report carefully

At Jim Donovan Health Solutions on July 29, 2020 there was an article titled What goldfish do better than humans. He linked to a 2015 Microsoft report which you also can find here, and then discusses the research in it. As shown above, on page 6 it has a graphic with three statistics on attention span which DID NOT actually come from there.

Instead they came from a web page cooked up by some jerks at the so-called Statistic Brain Research Institute. There are three versions of that Statistic Brain web page, as shown above (currently hidden behind a paywall) which I instead retrieved from the Wayback Machine. The earliest lists The Associated Press as a source, implying it was in a newspaper article sometime somewhere. The next version adds the authoritative-sounding National Center for Biotechnology Information, U. S. National Library of Medicine. A third updates from 8 to 8.25 seconds.

Did those statistics come from any of their indicated sources? No! Two skeptical researchers checked and both came up empty.  Jo Craven McGinty had an article at the Wall Street Journal on February 17, 2017 titled Is your attention span shorter than a goldfish’s? Simon Maybin at BBC News on March 10, 2017 had another article titled Busting the attention span myth. You can find them both here.

By the way, if you look carefully at the Statistic Brain web pages they just refer to a gold fish. That Microsoft report changed it to one word. As two words it could just refer to the color for a fish (not the species) as shown above based on the 1960 Dr. Seuss children’s book title One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.

I read it in a TIME magazine article, so it should be true

Some recent articles are lazy and don’t even go back to that Microsoft report. Instead they just link to a TIME magazine article on May 14, 2015 by Kevin McSpadden titled You now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. One example is an article by John Stevens at Bitcha on July 29, 2020 titled 7 Research-proven tips for boosting credibility on your website. Another example is an article by Melody Wilding at Forbes on July 27, 2020 titled How to be a confident concise communicator (even when you have to speak off the cuff).

I read it in a TOASTMASTER magazine article, so it must be true

Even sillier is an article by Peggy Beach on pages 22 to 25 in the July 2020 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled Are You Listening? She says vaguely that:

“….Our society is so fast-paced that according to a Microsoft study, the average attention span of people has declined from 12 seconds to 8 seconds since the year 2000.”

Why is that silly? A typical speech at a Toastmasters club is 5 to 7 minutes long. The five minute minimum is twenty-five times the quoted 12 second attention span. If people really just had a 12 second span, then they would fall asleep long before a speech was done. There could not be any Toastmasters clubs, but there are more than 16,800 of them!

Our attention span really is about twenty minutes. Many people enjoy watching 18-minute long TED Talks as YouTube videos.

I read it in a book title, so it really must be true

There is a 2017 book by Paul Hellman titled You’ve Got 8 Seconds: communication secrets for a distracted world. Presumably Paul was distracted when he came up with a title based on a bogus statistic. The Notes for his Introduction just refer to the Microsoft report and the TIME article.

Based on this, you now should do that

Heck no! We are free to ignore advice based on those bogus statistics. An article by Dr. Heather McKee at ThriveGlobal on July 9, 2020 is titled The impact our phones have on our attention and health and what to do about it. Another article there by Joyce Shulman on July 20, 2020 is titled How to be better than a goldfish tells us seven things to do to retrain our brains.

Images of a stopwatch, a toaster and a trout came from Wikimedia Commons. The phony TIME cover came from NBC News.

British attention spans reportedly range from 6 to 29 minutes

Last Thursday, June 14th, I humorously blogged about What if our attention span really is six hours (21,600 seconds) rather than the mythical 8 seconds? After that I searched at Google for some real statistics. I found a press release at SWNSdigital on December 28, 2017 titled Britain’s average attention span revealed. It came from the Skipton Building Society, but curiously wasn’t also posted at the press releases page on their web site. (It was tweeted about though). Two newspapers used it on that day: The Sun in an article titled Average Brit has an attention span of just 14 minutes, study finds and The Independent in another article similarly titled Average British attention span is 14 minutes, research finds. The press release achieved the objective of getting that organization’s name into newspapers at the end of the year.

The Skipton press release began by claiming:

“The average Brit has an average attention span of just 14 minutes, according to research.”

It listed attention spans for 20 different activities, which are shown above in a horizontal bar chart.(Click on it for a larger, clearer view). They range from a high of 29 minutes for a social situation with a friend, down to just 6 minutes for talking to someone either moaning or with a boring voice, or a story about someone you don’t know. But when I created that chart in Excel I found the SUM was 217, so the average (mean) really was 10.85 minutes rather than 14. Both the median and mode are 10, but none of these three averages hint at how wide the range is. However, the average of 10.85 minutes, or 651 seconds is  over 81 times larger than the mythical 8 second attention span.   

That press release is quite opaque - it omits details: what ages and locations were surveyed, when the survey was done, how many people were asked what questions, whether it was a random sample, and whether it was done over the phone or on the web.  

What if our attention span really is six hours (21,600 seconds) rather than the mythical 8 seconds?

There is an often-repeated (but completely baseless) claim that our attention span is only 8 seconds. I blogged about it on January 17, 2017 in a post titled Is the attention span of a marketer shorter than that of a fruit fly? But we know that people do pay attention for 18-minute TED talks (1080 seconds, or 135 times longer). What if they paid attention for another 20 times longer than that, a full six hours?

That topic humorously came up in the recent XKCD comic strip shown above. I thought cartoonist Randall Munroe was kidding – until I followed his hyperlink to an article at the New Yorker on September 26, 2017 by Jia Tolentino titled The repressive, authoritarian soul of ‘Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends.’ I’m not sure you really could find six-hours of discussion about the theory claiming that children’s television show is authoritarian propaganda depicting a post-apocalytptic fascist dystopia.

But, what the heck is a tank engine? That’s explained in an article at HowStuffWorks titled What is a tank engine, as in Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s a switch (or in British a shunt) short-range steam locomotive that carries a water supply in tanks and thus doesn’t need to be followed by a tender (a coal and water car).     

It turns out there have been both newspaper and magazine articles written about Thomas. At The Register on December 10, 2009 Lester Haines discussed how Thomas the Tank Engine drives ‘conservative’ political ideology. At The Spectator on December 30, 2009 there was yet another article by Rod Liddle titled Thomas the Tank Engine is merciless and bigoted – that’s why kids love it. He said:

“Children feel most comfortable in an ordered and clearly demarcated world, a world divided into hierarchies. They have a Manichean view of good and evil and they like to see the baddies get punished, preferably in a thoroughly unpleasant manner. They may also identify with gender stereotypes which conform to the roles they have already been assigned or, more controversially, have worked out for themselves from a very early age. Children, and especially little boys, are conservative, when they are not actually fascists.”

At Slate on July 26, 2011 Jessica Roake at length alarmingly described Thomas the imperialist tank engine. And at The Guardian on July 4, 2012 Sarah Ditum bemoaned The tyrannical world of Thomas the Tank Engine. In reply, at the conservative magazine the National Review, on July 24, 2014 Charles C. W. Cooke wrote In defense of Thomas the Tank Engine. And at The Telegraph on March 28, 2016 Paul Kendall asked Why do so many liberal parents hate Thomas the Tank Engine?

Cognitive biases and the frequency illusion

We may think of ourselves as basically rational, but really have a long list of cognitive biases. The list at Wikipedia divides them into three categories (1) decision-making, belief and behavioral biases, (2) social biases, and (3) memory errors and biases. A selected few of them would make a good topic for a speech at a Toastmasters club, or a public speaking class. 

One is confirmation bias:

“the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.”

Watch a recent YouTube video shown above, with a tall geyser that confirms (based on our seeing Hollywood movies) - what should happen when a vehicle hits and breaks a fire hydrant just above sidewalk level. The video was made in Manhattan Beach, California.

But that’s just what happens with a wet barrel hydrant – a type used in Hollywood and other very warm places. It isn’t what happens in colder parts of the U.S. though where dry barrel hydrants are used. There usually will not be any geyer. Another YouTube video shows how dry barrel hydrants are made. The valve mechanism actually is located underground below the frost line. When the hydrant is hit above ground, the long rod which operates that mechanism just detaches.    

Now that I’ve mentioned fire hydrants, you will start seeing them, and have another bias – the frequency illusion:

“The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.”

If you live in a city or town, then fire hydrants really are all around you. But you probably were not paying any attention to them. There are Clow brand hydrants at both ends of the block my house is on. Within walking distance in other housing developments there also are Mueller and Waterous brands.

Over two decades ago I looked at a “traffic hydrant” which was designed so the ground level flange connection would break away rather than the hydrant body. That design used four necked down bolts which unfortunately corroded severely from road salt. When the hydrant valve was opened one day, the bolts failed and the body flew upward like a rocket. On January 25, 2015 I blogged about A simple prop made from PVC water pipe fittings.

This post was inspired by the May 23, 2018 Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic strip about the frequency illusion.  

Two recent cartoons about presentations

On April 11, 2017 Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens cartoon (shown above) was about concentration or attention. On May 6, 2017 Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon was about why imagining a naked audience might not work as a remedy for stage fright.

Is the attention span of a marketer shorter than that of a fruit fly?

Last year on January 21st I blogged about Is the average attention span of a presentation coach almost as short as that of a house fly? In celebration of that anniversary I’ll look at how some marketers have been using the same bogus 8 and 12 second numbers that once came from Statistic Brain. More recently they have hilariously claimed the average attention span in 2015 is precisely 8.25 seconds, versus 12 seconds in 2000. They continue to claim a gold fish has an attention span of 9 seconds.

One silly reference last month was in an article by Ryan Shelley on December 16, 2016 at Business2Community ironically titled Stop Posting Crappy Content: The Art to Creating Content with Purpose which wrongly attributed those numbers to Microsoft. A second silly reference was in an article by Sandra Fathi on December 20, 2016 at Ragan’s PR Daily titled 5 PR and social media predictions for B2B communicators which also attributed them to Microsoft. A third is an article on January 8, 2017 by Vikas Agrawal at Customer THINK titled How to Drive Social Traffic With Infographics.

Even sillier, at Amazon is a forthcoming book by Paul Hellman titled You’ve Got 8 Seconds: Communication Secrets for a Distracted World. The back cover blurb wrongly claims:

“The average attention span, experts tell us, is now 8 seconds.”

But the most outrageous claim was blaming the 8-second attention span on the new kids in the work force - Generation Z. Jeremy Finch said that at Fastcoexist in a 2015 article titled What is Generation Z, and what does it want? He said they would dig below the surface but began by misstating the same old nonsense. Kimberly N. Ellison-Taylor also said it in a post on December 21, 2016 at the AICPA Insights blog titled 5 to Watch: Trends and Predictions Shaping 2017.

Fortunately these silly claims have been challenged. On January 29, 2016 at Policyviz Jonathan Schwabish wrote about The Attention Span Statistic Fallacy. He even linked to my November 16, 2014 blog post titled Does it take 9, 90, or 900 seconds to lose your audience’s attention? Jonathan also showed the Microsoft graphic including the reference to Statistic Brain that was cropped out in the version shown by Vikas Agrawal. Mindi Ridgeway referred to Jonathan Schwabish’s article in a November 15, 2016 article at WORDS per se titled The Myth of the Modern Attention Span. There also was a serious article on December 1, 2016 by Neil A. Bradbury at Advances in Physiology Education titled Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more?

If instead of marketers you had asked parents of toddlers about attention spans, they would have talked about minutes rather than seconds. On example is an article at Day2Day Parenting titled Toddler Attention Span: How Long Should They Be Able To Focus? Another is an article by Helen Fowler Neville at Parenting Press titled Be Realistic about a Child’s Attention Span. She said that a 2-1/2 year old may spend about 2 minutes on a single activity, or even play peacefully for 10 minutes. 

The Statistic Brain web page originally claimed the source for their silly numbers was The Associated Press. Later they added the more prestigious National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. I called their bluff by actually looking at the PubMed Central database, and easily found an article from August 2008 in Infant and Child Development titled Focused Attention in Toddlers measurement, stability, and relations to negative emotion and parenting. Table 1 shows their results for toddlers aged 1-1/2 (T1) and 2-1/2 (T2) years. For a 1-1/2 year old the shortest mean attention span was 3.19 (minutes). 
 
But, just how short is the attention span of a fruit fly? According to an article from 2016 at PLOS ONE titled Vision in Flies: Measuring the Attention Span it is 4 to 5 seconds.

Images of a fruit fly and a toddler both came from Wikimedia Commons.


Update on March 13, 2017

The BBC World Service radio program More or Less had a nine minute long story  titled The Attention Span of a Goldfish debunking the Statistic Brain claim. Also see this BBC web page.

Update on October 16, 2017

Jo Craven McGinty, the Numbers columnist at the Wall Street Journal, also debunked the Statistic Brain claim in a February 17, 2017 article titled Is Your Attention Span Shorter Than a Goldfish’s? Experts say pay no mind to claims that goldfish can focus longer than humans; find out for yourself. You can read the abstract online here.

I don’t have access to the Wall Street Journal via the EBSCO databases at my friendly local public library, and must instead actually go over to the library at Boise State University to look via a public terminal. Jo said that:

 “The National Center for Biotechnology and the U.S. National Library of Medicine are also listed as sources, but Ron Gordner, a senior researcher at the library could find no reference to the statistics in either of the organizations’ publications.

 The Associated Press is listed, but it couldn’t locate an article with the numbers.

 Statistic Brain didn’t respond to emails or a phone call asking for its source material…”