Brains, Goldfish, and Productivity: What’s the (Real) Connection?
Human concentration is an endangered faculty, regardless of the goldfish myth
To give people a real jolt, a few bizarre things had to come together. Things like goldfish and neuropsychology. Or goldfish and social media. Or goldfish and Microsoft. Honestly, goldfish sound bizarre enough in any combination.
However much we humorize the “goldfish myth” though (in case you haven’t heard, read on), sustained attention spans are a matter of real problem in the age of social media and flashing information.
It’s not that human capacity to concentrate in a prolonged way has gone down and affected our productivity— it’s our will to fully concentrate that’s endangered, amidst growing distractions.
This fact is no bundle of laughs and deserves to be acknowledged and even scientifically scrutinized … while it’s (still) fixable.
Attention, concentration, focus…however we chose to name the invaluable human capacity to concentrate, it’s one of our most powerful strengths as human beings.
Andrew Carnegie used to say,
“Concentration is my motto. First honesty, then industry, then concentration.”
According to the Sohlberg and Mateer Hierarchial Model, people have several distinct ways of concentrating including sustained, selective, and alternating attention.
At the outset, I must note: all the thoughts in this article relate specifically to sustained attention or the amount of time a person can have prolonged focus on a single task. While many people argue that the internet has given us an ability to multi-task more successfully, it is precisely the sustained concentration effort that’s evidently decreasing.
It’s also sustained attention/concentration that’s responsible for productivity in nearly every field of work imaginable, and that’s so invaluable for creatives.
In 2015, Microsoft published a famous report on attention spans. Amidst many interesting findings, the takeaway fact has become that human attention spans are down to 8 seconds — or less than those of goldfish, estimated at 9 seconds.
Just fifteen years earlier, in 2000 (or the pre-smartphone era), those same human attention spans were estimated at 12 seconds — so apparently, things are going better for goldfish than humans.
Since then, the so-called “goldfish myth” has been busted, at least on paper: no one has been able to prove the research attributed to Statistic Brain or scientifically compare the human attention span (involving multiple models) to that of goldfish — which, by the way, scientists consider a fish species with considerable memory capacity. Goldfish-based research is used to model and study memory formation.
What Microsoft’s report does note (and what is backed scientifically) is this: the human brain may be influenced throughout our entire life span — not just in childhood or youth, as thought previously (although those years are the most flexible).
This ‘brain flexibility’ is called neuroplasticity and means that a daily activity, emotion, learning process etc. can “shape” our brain whatever stage of life we are in. Naturally, sturdy habits affect our brains more than things we do for a few moments once in a lifetime.
That’s why, in order to understand the way the modern brain processes information, it makes sense to see what influences it most on a daily basis.
What is changing is the amount of things the world can bring to us, in our perpetual now.
It’s estimated that an average American adult checks their smartphone about 52 times a day and spends about 2 hours on social media. While that may not seem like the skyrocketing teen statistics of 9 hours per day, even 2 hours amounts to over 7 years of your whole life devoted to social media.
Which brings us back to neuroplasticity. It’s not just that we’re spending an average marriage span on these platforms, it’s that the habit of receiving “flashing” information actually affects our capability to make slower, rational deductions and assess the true value of things.
We subconsciously think that if we can “evaluate” a photo on Instagram in a second, the same goes for a real-life product or situation. Naturally, that’s used against us every day.
The same Microsoft report specifically instructs how to use its studies on various types of attention spans inherent to various people for … strategic advertising and marketing.
Tom Vanderbilt of the Nautilus magazine, in his article The Pleasure and Pain of Speed, explores the topic of modern speed and its connection to our inherent psychology.
“The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa,” Vanderbilt writes, “catalogues the increases in speed in his recent book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. In absolute terms, the speed of human movement from the pre-modern period to now has increased by a factor of 100. […But] As life has sped up, we humans have not, at least in our core functioning: Your reaction to stimuli is no faster than your great-grandfather’s. What is changing is the number of things the world can bring to us, in our perpetual now.”
Thanks to the flexible nature of our brains, we may register and evaluate visual stimuli extremely fast (and are used to doing that on social media), but we’re still not able to make more complex, rational decisions about content and trustworthiness based on instant impressions. Even neuroplasticity has genetic limits.
And that’s because, for the human brain, visual perception is only the first (and necessary) step towards sustained concentration which should last up to 2 hours uninterrupted. We’re incredibly fast at processing visual information — 50 milliseconds is all it takes to assess visual appeal. That’s 30 times faster than you can blink an eye. The problem is that in the age of flashing information and distractions, that first step frequently becomes the final, and we’re forever stuck in a chain of ‘first steps’.
Marketing and sales companies love this fact.
Research says that just 6% of people who were asked to evaluate the trustworthiness of health sites based their assessment on content. 96% admitted they trusted the site (or not) based on visual impressions.
With the aid of attractive visual stimuli and haste, sales teams push consumers into instant decisions at every step. “Hot” deals, one-day sales, and promo codes for instant buyers all tempt people to buy faster and more. Behind that lies a simple trick: the less time you take to think (concentrate), the easier it is to influence your decisions.
‘Goldfish myth’ busters write off the whole ‘attention span’ deficit as a figment of the imagination (supposedly of the same fish). As an argument, they say that were attention spans really that bad, we wouldn’t be able to pay attention to things like movies and other long-winded entertainment.
And yet, Hollywood blockbusters have no lack of fans these days. Sounds like there’s no argument left…or is there?
In fact, Hollywood has been one of the first to adapt to weakened sustained concentration spans. Average shot lengths of Hollywood films have come down from an average of 12 seconds during the “classic Hollywood age” to 1.7 seconds in action films such as Quantum of Solace (2008). Some film critics even wonder how less-than-second cuts don’t make us physically sick.
Anyone may conduct a personal experiment — take an old, classic film and put it on for a Generation Z-er. The younger the viewer, the more “bored” they shall feel with the “slow-motion” action of the older films, as well as unable to concentrate on 20th-century classics by directors such as Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, not to mention Ingmar Bergman and Andrey Tarkovsky.
The conscious verdict, though, won’t be a personal ‘lack of attention’— it will be ‘boredom’.
As Vanderbilt continues, “Princeton University psychologist Emily Pronin has suggested that film (among other things) does reveal a love of faster cognitive processing — in other words, that thinking faster is correlated with ‘positive effect.’ […]
‘Intensified continuity’ is film theorist David Bordwell’s phrase for this heightened experience, which includes not only shorter cuts but, among other things, more frequent close-ups. ‘Techniques that 1940s directors reserved for moments of shock and suspense,’ Bordwell observes, ‘are the stuff of normal scenes today.’ ”
Hollywood only does its best to sell. Thus the “attention span’’ issue evident in our perception of classic vs. modern films is only a result and not the cause of the modern issue. Hollywood adapts to, not influences, the length of our sustained attention span.
And while it may not be like that of goldfish (no offense to the latter), our attention is definitely slipping into oblivion as life becomes faster.
Anyone who’s seen the number of “time-management” tools, apps, etc. on the internet has to admit that the world is much more conscious of its sustained attention span problem than it would like us to think. As they say, “there’s no smoke without fire”. If people all over the world are googling “best apps for time/attention management”, it must be a problem.
Whilst some of those time-management apps are fun and some can be helpful, the most important thing all of us need to understand is: Concentration management and time management apps are just another game marketers are playing with us.
Unless we focus on developing the faculty of concentration, no app will do the job.
Effective time management is only a result of good sustained attention, never vice-versa.
Scientifically speaking, people can concentrate well for up to 2 hours, after which the brain needs a break to recharge. However, even when we’re fully focused and immersed in a task, whenever a distraction occurs, it can take up to 25 min following an interruption to get back the full concentration.
While we cannot avoid external stimuli (for example, in an office environment), research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, shows that in circa 44% of cases, we interrupt ourselves. The culprits include multi-tasking, social media notifications, and plain loss of attention.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” — Steve Jobs
Unlike time-management apps that have you ticking off things (and again, distracting your attention), classic concentration techniques are based on the idea of conserving focus and don’t rely on the internet.
Among them, the most famous is the Pomodoro technique. As many people find it difficult to focus undivided attention for 2 hours, the Pomodoro technique separates those 2 hours into 20 minute intervals with 5 min breaks.
While it is not a panacea or a magic app (these don’t exist when it comes to productivity), the Pomodoro technique can help us focus on focusing. It is a strategy that demands real input from the individual to work but makes the effort psychologically easier.
It is just one out of many little helpers out there. The most important (and big) one, though, is the personal will to change something in our lives. To make those lives fuller with meaning and less prone to distractions and the resulting conditioning.
Any path to recovery starts with an acknowledgment of the problem. That is why I find it so important to stop avoiding the issue of attention spans and start addressing the modern attention deficit before it turns into a genetic disorder.
The ability to concentrate well is too priceless a faculty to just joke over and rejoice if we’re (still) better off than goldfish. This faculty facilitates not just our jobs and creative success but also has a tremendous impact on personal, daily lives, the things we are barely conscious of but should be.
- The ability to pay attention = listening to the world around us and not rushing important decisions
- The ability to pay attention = listening to our partners, family members, giving ourselves time to understand them when an impulsive reaction would have it otherwise
- The ability to pay attention = understanding yourself, analyzing your actions, motives, and goals on a deep (even philosophical) level
No wonder that meditation and mindfulness are popular concepts in the age of rush. Meditation is simply sustained concentration applied to life. It shows that prolonged attention doesn’t have to be nerve-racking but instead can be collected and peaceful. It’s attention that’s available to us each moment of our lives, as long as we just give ourselves the time to listen.
Goldfish may have nothing to do with it, but we, as humans, would do better to stop flashing empty information before our eyes and start consciously focusing on the things and people that will bring us not only sustained attention and sustained success but some real sustained joy.
There’s no special trick to paying lasting attention — each of us has the inherent willpower to do so right now.
Otherwise, we may find ourselves going in the merry go round of sales and entertainment tricks, brainwashing, and much worse, lost time to never be regained.
