A century before social media bans and advice to turn off notifications on devices, inventor and science fiction writer Hugo Gernsback proposed a more extreme way to avoid distractions: an insulating wooden headset. External influences, he says, constitute “the greatest difficulty that the human spirit has to face.” Gernsback’s isolation device — part diving suit, part monastic cell — helped him work, he said, but it carried a choking hazard. He then installed an air supply.
Fears that sustained thought is under attack have become even more acute in the digital age. Smartphones are buzzing, Internet tabs are multiplying and television episodes regularly offer reminders to help people follow the plot. Surveys suggest we feel less able to concentrate, teachers report distracted students, and headlines declare our attention spans are diminishing.
Research in psychology and neuroscience, however, has painted a more nuanced picture of what happens to our attention span. The findings suggest that people are switching between tasks more frequently than in previous decades, and that this switching is often detrimental to performance. But there is little evidence that the brain’s basic ability to focus has been impaired. This suggests that if we can stop the distractions from our environment, it is possible to regain our focus.
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Inventor Hugo Gernsback wears his wooden “insulator” helmet.
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“I think there’s a huge disconnect between what we feel and what’s actually happening,” says Monica Rosenberg, a psychologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.
Attention span confusion
“Many people report feeling like they can’t pay attention,” says Nilli Lavie, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. “They say they are constantly distracted, their attention shifts from one thing to another, and they can’t concentrate.”
In a 2021 survey of more than 2,000 British adults, almost half said they felt their attention span was shorter than it used to be. And two-thirds think young people’s attention spans have diminished. Teachers and schools around the world have responded to this perception with modular lessons that break topics down into digestible pieces. Some students now study literary excerpts rather than complete novels. When novelist Elif Shafak wondered why TED talks were getting shorter, she said last year that she was told it was because “the world’s average attention span has decreased.”
The idea of an average attention span has intuitive appeal. But the way we talk about it can confuse distinct concepts. Researchers distinguish between people’s ability to pay attention, that is, their underlying ability to focus on a particular task, and their real-world behavior, or what people are actually focusing on in each moment.
Additionally, attention span is the result of several processes in the brain. These include sustained attention, the ability to stay engaged in a task over time; selective attention, ability to prioritize certain information and ignore the rest; and executive control, the ability to direct attention toward a goal rather than toward what is more tempting.
Caution in the laboratory
Ability is measured under controlled laboratory conditions that test performance on a task – often tedious – over time. To test sustained attention, volunteers can monitor a screen displaying streams of letters and shapes and identify specific changes. The “d2” task, for example, displays rows of letters, such as d and p, sometimes with hyphens drawn above or below, and asks users to mark the letter d only if it has two lines below it.
Numerous laboratory studies have shown how performance on such tasks declines within about ten minutes, although the pattern of decline is not smooth: even seemingly strong attention naturally fluctuates between bursts of good performance, lapses, and recovery.
Other tests demonstrate how providing a distracting environment, such as playing sounds of babies crying and dogs barking, worsens people’s performance on cognitive tasks. This provides a basis for understanding distractions in the real world. Analyzes have shown that, for example, road accidents are more likely to occur if drivers are talking on the phone.
Lab studies didn’t show that people’s underlying ability to pay attention changed – when they were free of distraction. But there are differences in the way people behave. Those who report frequently juggling multiple media streams at once tend to perform worse on tests of selective attention, demonstrating, for example, greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant information. They also show differences in tests related to working memory and executive control.
But these correlations could simply reflect the fact that individuals with different attentional tendencies might be naturally led to change their focus more often; observations cannot prove that their digital environment causally changed their brains. And although diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have increased in recent years, researchers generally attribute the increase to changes in awareness and access to assessment and diagnostic practice, rather than to an underlying change in people’s attention span.
Overall, there is no convincing data from controlled laboratory tests to support the idea that people have become less able to concentrate because attention spans deteriorate over time. A 2024 meta-analysis of d2 test results taken by more than 21,000 people in 32 countries between 1990 and 2021 showed no difference in children’s results and, if there was, a slight improvement in adult performance.
“It’s not so much that human biology has changed, it’s more a change in habits. And the question is how reversible those habits are,” says Nelson Cowan, a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia.
Real-world measurements
The strongest evidence for a change in attention comes not from laboratory tasks but from measures of real-world behavior. For two decades, Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, has monitored how office workers use computers. His studies, based on direct observation and digital monitoring, show that the average attention span devoted to a single task has steadily decreased. “We know that attention spans on screens have decreased significantly,” she says.
Mark’s work does not seek to measure sustained focus on a specific goal. Instead, she counted when and how often workers switched from one task to another. Such changes need not be aimed at trivial distractions that might annoy the boss. They include opening a new browser tab, checking an email and moving between documents, as well as glancing at a phone. In the mid-2000s, she says, she observed that workers spent on average about two and a half minutes on a dedicated screen task before switching. By the 2010s, this had dropped to around 75 seconds, and by the early 2020s, it was around 47 seconds, according to Mark’s 2023 book.
Often included in the discussion of these findings is a 2015 marketing report from Microsoft Canada, which indicated that the average human attention span fell from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. The report stated that this was shorter than the average attention span of a goldfish, which it reported as 9 seconds. But the report’s findings, based on surveys, filmed behaviors and electroencephalogram (EEG) data — which uses spikes in brain activity to measure when people change focus — reflect changing digital habits rather than cognitive limitations and even note that people are becoming more efficient at processing information. (Plus, goldfish are unfairly maligned; there’s no evidence they have particularly short attention spans, and studies show they retain some information for months.)
Mark’s research shows that frequent attention shifts come with a cognitive cost. “When people change jobs, and especially when they do it relatively quickly, as the data shows, they tend to make more mistakes,” she says. “It takes them longer to complete a single task than if they had to work sequentially, and stress increases.” Constant change also distracts from the type of mental effort used. “We’re not using those thinking, deliberating, working memory skills,” she says. This can lead to the familiar discomfort of doing superficial activity without appearing to be making progress.
Every generation fears that new technologies will harm the ability to concentrate. “But we’re now in the digital age, and I think it’s different,” says Mark: both the scale of information available and the speed with which we can access it has changed. Importantly, the nature of the competing attractions that attract our attention has also changed. The modern environment doesn’t just impose distractions. This bombards us with alternatives that offer more immediate rewards. People switch tasks very often and reset their attention each time because they choose to do so, even if they don’t realize it.
“If the alternatives are truly rewarding and high value, then it will be very difficult to focus on something else that will require more subjective effort,” says Michael Esterman, a neuroscientist at Boston University in Massachusetts.
This is a “high value” as classified by a psychologist or neuroscientist – which is not necessarily how a parent, teacher or supervisor would perceive it. Notifications, messages, and social media feeds provide the brain with bursts of social validation, novelty, and information.
Mark argues that these enriching digital environments could alter our attentional habits, including our tendency to drift even in the absence of obvious distraction. His research suggests that the sources of interruptions are not just external, like the ping of an incoming message. “People are as likely to self-interrupt as they are to be interrupted,” says Mark. And when external interruptions decrease, internal interruptions often increase — a trend that suggests that distraction and change can become habitual, she argues, and leave attention more fragmented.
Does our brain really change?
Real-world studies such as Mark’s are too complicated to generate reliable data on specific aspects of brain performance. But Lavie also worries that this constant change is linked to weaker executive control. She suggests this could have long-term implications for the brain.
His work shows that the ability to control attention is linked to structural differences in the brain, including the amount of gray matter in regions of the frontal cortex. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and behavioral testing, she showed that individuals with a greater volume of gray matter in these areas perform better in tasks that require staying focused and resisting distraction. Gray matter volume can be used to make precise predictions about individuals’ performance and could reflect a combination of genetic factors and long-term experiences.
In principle, such measures could be used to detect changes in attention span over time or between cohorts of people. Lavie doesn’t have data to demonstrate this, and no such pattern has been shown in controlled laboratory studies, but she maintains that it could happen. “It’s possible that either you exercise it and it has a good volume of gray matter,” she says, “or you don’t, and it shrinks.”
Rosenberg studies a different brain signature of attention. Using functional MRI, which measures brain activity, his team identified patterns linking multiple systems, including the frontoparietal cortex, subcortical structures, and the cerebellum, which together predict a person’s effectiveness in tasks requiring sustained attention. These connectivity signatures are robust across individuals. ls, populations, and clinical groups, such as people with ADHD, and can be used to predict attention performance in people who have never been tested before.
Again, because connectivity patterns can predict how well individuals perform tasks requiring sustained attention, repeated analysis of the same people could reveal whether this ability is stable or changing. But so far, Rosenberg’s studies are only snapshots or short-term studies and focus on brain development rather than long-term changes.
How to improve concentration
What does the research on attention suggest about how we can improve our focus? “If we want to change our focus, then I think changing our environment will be much more effective than changing ourselves,” Rosenberg says.
One solution is to remove known sources of external distraction, especially those that provide short-term value and reward, even if the distraction seems small. In some studies of cognitive tasks, people perform worse if they have their phone in their pocket, even if it is on silent.
Since attention naturally gravitates toward high-reward distractions, another strategy is to artificially inflate the value of the task at hand. Payments for accuracy and consistency in attention tasks reduce errors, produce fewer errors, and may slow the rate of attentional decline over time.
Do you have a job and are already paid? Feedback, internal competition, and clear goals can help create the impression that accuracy and consistency are important. The same goes for feeling like what you do matters.
If attention is shaped by habits, as Mark suggests, then it should also be possible to train and reverse those habits. Techniques such as mindfulness appear to strengthen the ability to notice when attention is drifting and bring it back. Short breaks can restore performance.
And distraction itself isn’t always the enemy. An important finding from controlled laboratory studies of attention is that even when volunteers are not externally distracted, their minds continue to wander, often without realizing that they have distracted from their task.
Esterman, who has spent years studying these fluctuations, argues that attention flickering must originate in the brain as helpful internal processes that can distract us, including thoughts, ruminations, and worries. Periods of mind wandering can support creativity, planning, and problem solving, allowing the brain to explore and integrate ideas.
Not only is sustained attention riddled with inevitable errors, but it is also shaped by mood, stress, sleep, and anxiety, all of which influence both performance and how people interpret their own errors. Negative moments occupy an important place in memory, while successful concentration often goes unnoticed.
More importantly, the consistent results of laboratory studies suggest that, despite the competing attractions of the modern world, it is still possible to concentrate when we really need it. “We pay attention to our goals,” says Mark. The question is what became of these objectives.
And if nothing else works, there’s always a wooden helmet.
This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time May 6, 2026.