Your Attention Span Is Fine (So Is Your Goldfish’s)

Hopefully last week you didn’t fall for any April Fools pranks and sign up for air guitar lessons or apply for a position as a cat herder. To protect you from any more untruths this month, Maestro will be busting some of the most common psychology myths that get shared in sales and marketing.

This week we’re tackling the amazing shrinking human attention span. Wait, you’re still reading? Congratulations, you’re a genius. You’ve managed to focus on something for far longer than the oft-cited eight seconds to which most of mankind is limited.

PEOPLE’S ATTENTION SPANS ARE NOT SHRINKING

We all know that we can’t believe everything we read on the Internet, but the “fact” on shrinking human attention spans has been shared by reputable sources such as NPR and Time Magazine. Sometimes even the best of the best make mistakes.

The legend goes that in 2000, the human attention span was measured at 12 seconds. By 2015, it had dropped to only eight seconds—that’s one second shorter than the attention span of a goldfish!

It has since been found that this statistic was shared in a report from Microsoft Canada in 2015. While the report covered research that was conducted by Microsoft Canada, the waning attention span numbers in the report were attributed to the Statistic Brain Research Institute. And that’s where the trail goes cold. Nobody knows where they got the information. (And I can’t shake the idea that Statistic Brain is to statistics as George Costanza’s The Human Fund is to humans.)

HAVE WE LOST OUR CRITICAL-THINKING SKILLS?

Let’s forget that the fact has no scientific source for a minute, though. The bigger concern here is why we all failed to question the information in the first place. There is so much wrong with it on its very surface.

What is meant by attention span? How can you definitively measure something that has not been scientifically defined? Is “attention span” supposed to mean how long I can focus on something because I can binge entire seasons of Schitt’s Creek in a day. Netflix loses interest and asks me if I’m still watching before I come close to losing focus.

LEAVE THE GOLDFISH OUT OF IT

And I haven’t even gotten to the goldfish. How is someone measuring the attention span of a goldfish? Are they showing it something and timing how long until it looks away? My goldfish won’t stick with me through more than a few episodes on Netflix, but that’s just because he prefers Breaking Bad to Schitt’s Creek. Give him some Bryan Cranston and some fish flakes and he’s set.

Okay, I don’t really have a goldfish, but I think you get my point. You can’t really measure the “attention span” of a human or a goldfish. You can, however, measure learning and memory. That’s how we know that the whole “goldfish have no memory” idea is also a myth. Studies have shown them to maintain memories for weeks, months, and even years. If you have ever fed a goldfish, you know that it at least remembers being fed the day before because it comes to the top of the tank before the flakes even hit the water. 

I think that’s what bothers me so much about how much the myth of the shrinking attention span has been shared and reshared. It’s the fact that we, as humans, don’t stop and think about much of the information we’re given. All of us have personal experiences that refute the myth of the shrinking attention span, but nobody bothered to seek out the source of the information—not even NPR.

DON’T LET MYTHS IMPACT YOUR WORK

Fine. We don’t have a shrinking attention span. And maybe you have horribly offended some goldfish along the way by assuming they had poor learning skills. What’s the big deal?

One issue is that organizations use this misguided information and false statistics to guide their activities. Many companies have been shortening and dumbing down their content for this new race of unfocused humans. It’s difficult to get your point across in fewer than eight seconds, but science says that’s all we have!

Many persistent myths, including the ones we’re writing about this month, do include some kernel of truth (except that goldfish are dumb—nobody is sure why that one has taken hold). While our attention spans aren’t shrinking, we do have more and more sources of information vying for our attention.

Don’t interpret this to mean, however, that your content must be short. It simply needs to be better. The binge-watching phenomenon shows us that if something is interesting enough, it can hold someone’s attention.

Are you still reading this blog? Contact us at mastery@maestrogroup.co to learn more about our training and sales strategy services.