It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to concentrate, and our attention spans seem to be dwindling at an alarming rate, as we become more and more distracted with every passing year. How did we get here, and how can we reverse this trend?
In 2016, Sune Lehmann, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark and Center for Social Data Science, noticed that his attention span was waning and that he was more easily distracted than ever before. During his analysis of online platforms, he discovered something very interesting: in 2013, conversation topics were trending on Twitter for an average of 17.5 hours before people lost interest. By 2016, that number had dropped to 11.6 hours, a decrease of six hours in just three years. The study also recorded similar results on other platforms, including Google, which shows that the more time we spend online, the shorter our attention span becomes. Lehmann then went on to analyse people’s reading habits of actual books, and found that this trend actually predates the Internet, and that topics of interest have always followed a cycle, appearing and fading away at increasing speed with each passing decade.
The way we receive information is accelerating, in what is called ‘The Great Acceleration’. In the 19th century, for example, news could take days to get from one place to another. Technologies such as the telegraph, radio, and television then accelerated the dissemination of information, while information inputs, meaning the different ways in which we receive news, multiplied rapidly. In 1986, the average person living in the Western world received the equivalent of 40 newspapers worth of news every day through all available information inputs. By 2004, that figure had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers, and today it is undoubtedly much higher. The Internet is the main driving force behind this acceleration, but our brains are simply unable to keep up, and research suggests that they never will. Studies on speed reading, for instance, show that there is a limit to how fast we can process information.
Neuroscientists have also pointed out that the cognitive capacity of the human brain has not changed significantly over the last 40,000 years, but the amount of information we receive has increased stratospherically. Just one of the many consequences of this process is that we find it difficult to concentrate.
