We’ve been hearing stories like this for years, ‘don’t sit to close to the screen, you’ll get square eyes’, ‘if the wind changes, you’ll be stuck with that face’; now it seems Microsoft has actually conducted a study to find out how well we fare with intensive technology use.
The overall story isn’t good; back in 2000, studies shown we could focus on a single task for 12 seconds, but now the number has dropped to just 8 seconds; around 1 second less than a goldfish. The source of this comes from our smartphones and social media. The amount of information readily available makes it easy for us to just jump from one thing to the next; basically we get bored easily now.
Now every cloud has a silver lining; while using technology is hurting our attention span, it seems that it improves our abilities to multitask and concentrate for short periods of time. This means that our minds are evolving with the times, we can filter through what truly deserves our attention and what we should store to memory.
From that I’ve understood that since mobile phones (mainly smartphones) have become mainstream, our overall attention span has decreased. However, in that same time, we have increased our mind power to store to filter and store information quicker; does that mean that our attention span has decreased because we can process information quicker? Why not take a look at the full research report.
