I wouldn’t be the first to admit that my attention span has dwindled to an average of just roughly three to five minutes at a time, because anything requiring my full concentration for longer than that will just receive the same fate: my interest in the thing drains out and my mind wanders to something else. Once in a while I get into a rare trench of attention and actually stick with something for a substantial amount of time (some hours) but ONLY if the activity gives me a constant influx of variety in doing it. Usually I need to force this variety by myself. For example, I manage to keep at reading several pages or chapters of a book at once because my mind simultaneously juggles ideas and synthesizes everything I have known, to generate new patterns and connections. Occasionally I take notes while reading, record myself reciting quotes out loud, or allow myself to jump back and forth between sections in a book, which can introduce variety to the activity of reading.
In most things I do on a daily basis, however, it’s quite unlikely I can genuinely invest all of my attention to one task for long. I was at some point convinced that this phenomenon of human’s shrinking attention span is one of the worst things that are happening to our cognitive abilities and will inevitably set our society on a backwards trajectory of evolution or something dramatic like that. With all the productivity gurus preaching “deep work” and hours-long meditation, or all the articles that sensationalize the attention crisis by comparing humans to goldfish, I would be made to feel quite terrible about my apparent inadequacy for not staying focused on one thing long enough. To be fair, the conversations about attention span today often emphasize the role of the bigger culprits like the Internet, social media design, or mobile devices like the smartphone, rather than the individuals themselves. Users of these technologies are not exactly blamed for the changes happening to them, but the connotation of these changes being undesirable and regrettable somehow is still quite obvious.
Now, I also understand that the discourse is a lot more nuanced than “long attention span = good; short = bad”. When we critique the influence of modern media and technology on our ability to focus, it has to do with only certain aspects of how we interact with technology. For example, jumping around from one thing to another at a rapid-fire pace but simultaneously processing all these elements to identify connections and generate new perspectives could be a good thing. This can be beneficial for creativity as well as synthetic/systems thinking. On the other hand, without that layer of consciousness, our mind may end up drifting through various elements and not actively process or interpret them, causing a certain mental inertia. Another scenario is that we also feel overwhelmed by the constant and transient stimuli and disengage entirely. Perhaps when critics of modern technology highlight its threats to attention span, it is preferable to break these risks down to distinct components that may have different implications for our cognitive needs rather than just label the symptom as “bad”. How long one can pay attention and stick to an activity isn’t what we should focus on. How the brain adopts different modes to engage with stimuli and how this engagement can mean different things for different activities, for example, are some other, more nuanced aspects we can consider. Pinpointing only the attention span and trying to “fix” it falls short of fully comprehending the “good” and the “bad” of how our brains are being transformed (contexts matter a lot and can change “good” to “bad” and vice versa too!). Furthermore, and this is for another post perhaps, it reinforces a burdensome standard for how to spend time doing activities – a standard that is not only misleading but also rooted in the dogma of hyper-productivity and making work a centerpiece of one’s identity.
The title of this post is misleading, because I end up not really defending a short attention span so much as proposing the notion that perhaps attention span isn’t the point of the discussion at all. This is the crazy thing about the thinking capacity of brains: as I was writing this, I let myself be informed and shifted by random distractions that eventually took me off the path of arguing only for the case I had set out to argue. This post itself was originally a draft about micro-blogging and my love for writing very short reflections anyway, before I connected it to an entirely different subject to discuss. I could have tried to power through an hour of planning and writing this without giving in to distractions, but in that case I would have also never gotten to the realizations outlined here. The several breaks I took every few minutes of working on the draft can do wonders.