Transcript

In 2016, a group of researchers—oh, a new photo! These researchers set out to measure. Did I get that email? They measured. What was that? Sorry. The researchers set out to measure the length of, well, our attention spans. Participants downloaded a program that tracked how long they stayed focused on a single computer application before switching to another. On average, users stuck with a single task for 40 seconds, down from 75 seconds measured just five years earlier. This doesn't necessarily mean our attention spans are fundamentally getting shorter. Rather, in today's world, our attention is being pulled in more directions than ever before. This

can make finding focus for work, school, and even the things we love feel almost impossible.

Thankfully, there are ways we can improve and better protect our attention spans, both online and off.

Our brains are constantly receiving a flood of information, from sensory input to environmental cues to internal thoughts. Filtering through it all relies on several brain regions.