The Real Reason You Can't Focus (It's Not Just Your Phone)

47 seconds on average. That's how long people held their attention on a single screen in recent studies. By the 48-second mark, they were somewhere else— multitasking, taking a quick peek at Slack, checking email, scrolling through social media. Maybe you're feeling tempted to peel off right now to click on another video or respond to a text. Well, Hold on a minute, because in this video, I'm going to take you inside the war for your attention and how it's rewiring your brain. Let's start with those 47 seconds of focused attention. Do you feel like you used to be able to concentrate for longer periods of time? If you said yes, your answer is backed up by research. In 2004, people remained focused on one thing for about 2.5 minutes. What changed? You know the answer. Smartphones, social media. But what you may not know is that the battle to capture your attention has been going on far longer. It's been raging for nearly 200 years. Before we get to that backstory, I need to introduce you to a researcher who's been measuring our collapse in our attention spans. Gloria Mark is a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. She's one of the researchers who found that we can stay focused for only 47 seconds. She didn't measure this in a lab. She and her team went into offices and shadowed people with stopwatches. Every time someone switched screens, click. New screen, click. They first did this back in 2004. That was the year that Facebook was launched. Twitter was still 2 years in the future. The iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs's eye.

When we first started studying this back in 2004, we found that people's average attention on any screen was about 2.5 minutes. And then in 2012, this went down to about 75 seconds on average. And then from about 2016 through 2020, right before the pandemic started, we found the average attention to be 47 seconds.

2.5 minutes to 75 seconds to 47. Now, you might tell yourself those 47 seconds don't account for how productive you are. You have 17 tabs open because you're moving fast, working efficiently. Gloria's data tells a different story. On any given day, the average information worker checks email 77 times. One person in her sample Checked it more than 400 times. And once you get pulled away from a project, you don't come right back to it. The pattern that Gloria found goes like this. You get interrupted from one screen, then you're interrupted from the second by a third interruption. Then that third interruption is interrupted by a fourth, and it's only after the fourth interruption that you find your way back to the task that you were working on. Guess how long these detours take? You're not going to like the answer. 25 and a half minutes. Nearly half an hour gone from a single, let me just check this one thing. The story gets even stranger. Most of us have gotten so used to a world of distractions that even when the world isn't bothering us, we choose to interrupt ourselves.

I was reading an article about AI, and for some reason, the thought popped into my head, how safe is it to eat non-organic strawberries? It was just a completely random thought, and I simply had to look it up.

Strawberries. She just had to look it up. Gloria found that when external interruptions go down, self-interruptions go up, almost as if the brain has a quota of interruptions to meet. The problem is not just that we go from task to task to task. Each of them leaves a little trace on our minds.

Every time we switch our attention going from one task to another, you can think of it as having a whiteboard in your mind. When you write information on that whiteboard and then you erase it, sometimes you can't erase it completely. Sometimes there's a residue.

We think we've moved on to a new task, but some of our attention is still absorbed by the previous one. making it harder to achieve total concentration. By the end of each day, we carry the residues of all the tasks we were supposed to do and all the interruptions we indulged in. Then we go home to our families, and we wonder why we only seem half-present. Why has all this happened? Why has our attention span collapsed? Part of the answer lies in understanding who's trying to distract us. Because it's not just our colleagues or our kids, who are vying for our attention. We are being lured into distractions by lots of people who want things from us. They want our money. They want our vote. They want us to think like they do. One story of how these attention merchants learned to capture our focus goes back almost 200 years, to a man, a newspaper, and a story about bats on the moon. In the early 1830s, New York City's newspapers reached only a narrow slice of the population. Most papers cost 6 cents a copy. That was a lot of money back then, so they were mostly read by people who were well-off. A printer named Benjamin Day decided to do something different. He started a paper called The Sun, and he sold it for 1 cent. Many people thought he was crazy, but The Sun caught on quickly. It wasn't just that it was cheaper. It was also full of fantastical, outlandish stories. On August 25th, 1835, The Sun ran a sensational front-page story. It claimed that an astronomer in South Africa had built a very powerful telescope— so powerful that it could see the surface of the moon in detail. According to the paper, the moon was full of life— forests, oceans, and a strange human-like creature. It was 4 feet tall, covered in copper-colored hair and had bat-like wings. Moon bats. The story was completely made up. It also drove the paper to circulation levels no one had ever seen before. Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University. He's the author of a book called The Attention Merchants.

The New York Sun, which published these stories, was the first paper to run entirely on the harvesting of human attention. what we also call an advertising business model. That was a crucial historic moment that began the commodification of attention as something very valuable that you could resell and make a lot of money out of it.

The Benjamin Day model of media dominance was ahead of its time. Think about it. Make up attention-grabbing, outlandish stories. Publish those stories in a newspaper that costs far less than your competitors. Take your huge circulation numbers to other businesses and show them how many people they can reach by advertising in your paper. Now, this is not a good way to run a reputable news organization, but at the time, it was a highly effective way to make money. Over the next 100 years, the ad-driven model that Benjamin Day revolutionized would come to have an ever more visible presence in American life. Advertisements turned out to be an effective way to hack the human brain. They could make you anxious about personal defects you had never noticed before. And they could make you covet solutions to these made-up problems. In the 1920s, a company called Listerine had a business problem. Listerine had been used as an antiseptic since the 1870s. People used it to clean wounds, to mop floors. And then Listerine ran an advertising campaign that popularized a little-known medical term: Halitosis. Bad breath. It sounded scary. Listerine ads claimed that bad breath made you unpopular. Luckily, though, Listerine had a solution: mouthwash. Before 1920, few people thought much about bad breath. Within a decade, lots of people discovered they had halitosis. Listerine sales went from $115,000 a year to more than $8 million.

And that was the magic of advertising in the 1920s, to make people want things they didn't otherwise want.

Lucky Strike, the cigarette company, used the same playbook. In the 1920s, it was considered improper for women to smoke in public. Lucky Strike's solution was to brand cigarettes as a symbol of modern women's independence. They called cigarettes torches of freedom. Over time, sales of cigarettes to women rose dramatically. The pattern is the same. Attention is harvested, a need is invented, a market is created. Then radio arrived, followed by TV. The war for attention moved into the home. On Sunday, September 9th, 1956, the attention industry hit a peak. Elvis Presley performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. He and his swiveling hips registered a gigantic audience share. The whole country watching the same thing at the same time.

The whole nation watching one thing at once is really a product of the mid-century and something that was never equaled before and maybe in some ways never equaled since.

All this created opportunities for more ads. Lots and lots of them. By the late 1950s, Americans started to notice that they were drowning in commercials. A company called Zenith invented a device that would let the viewer fight back. The first remote control was marketed as an ad killer. Some early models were even shaped like guns. The pitch was simple: you point it at the TV and you shoot the ad away. You could probably guess what actually happened. The remote control did not free us from advertising. It taught us to channel surf, to be impatient, to be easily distracted. Fast forward to 1992. MTV needed needed cheap programming to compete with the major networks. MTV's idea was to put 7 strangers into a loft in SoHo, point cameras at them, and let them argue. They paid each cast member $2,600 for the entire season. The rest of the compensation, they explained, was in fame. That show was The Real World. It invented reality television. And it discovered something that has only become more true in the years since. You can hold people's attention by paying other people in attention. By the early 2000s, a graduate student at MIT named Jonah Peretti stumbled on another way to grab people's attention: virality. He tried to order custom Nike sneakers with the word sweatshop stitched into them. Nike refused to make the sneakers. Jonah emailed back and forth with the company, and shared the exchange with his friends. The thread went around the country, then around the world. Jonah Peretti went on to co-found the Huffington Post and then a second site called BuzzFeed. The original company name was BuzzFeed Labs because that's what it was, an experiment in what kept human beings staring at a screen. Maybe you've seen one of BuzzFeed's livestreams or early videos. One of the most viral ones showed 2 people putting rubber bands around a watermelon. They added one band and then another and then another. The livestream ran for about 45 minutes before the watermelon finally exploded.

Oh my God!

You ready?

Are you ready?

1, 2, 3!

Today, the attention merchants live in your pocket. If you're watching this on your phone, you are holding one of the most successful attention-grabbing machines of all time. The companies that harvest our attention today have more expansive goals than those of early newspapers or television. They don't just want your attention. They want to know everything about you.

I think many or most of us are hooked on one or more online products which know more about us than anyone else. They know so much more about you, your vulnerabilities, your desires.

This is why your attention span is now 47 seconds. For almost 200 years, and industry has been building tools to capture it. And the devices you now carry around in your own pocket are the world's most efficient way to connect those tools to your brain. If you're starting to feel despair, there's a bit of good news. Human beings have a remarkable ability to adapt. We can plan, we can resist, we can regain some measure of control over our own minds. Gloria Mark says fighting distraction starts with noticing it, what she calls meta-awareness. We often reach for our phones unconsciously. We tap a notification before we even decide if we want to do so. We open a tab without remembering why. The next time you feel the urge to respond to a distraction, pause. Ask yourself whether you really need to find out whether non-organic strawberries are safe to eat. Maybe you can table that question for 15 minutes until you finish what you're working on.

I learned to ask myself, why do I have this urge go to social media? Why do I have this urge to check my email right now? When we can become more conscious of them, we can be more intentional and we can create plans.

Perhaps you make a plan to reward yourself with a social media break in 20 minutes. Once you've gotten through your work, that break will feel even sweeter. Just make sure that you set a timer so that your break doesn't become an extended doom scroll. Gloria's second tip is to use your forethought to your advantage. Picture yourself at 6:00 PM at the end of your workday. How do you want to feel? What do you want to have accomplished? The clearer that picture is, the easier it becomes to refuse the next distraction.

So I want to see myself relaxing, maybe watching my favorite show, being with family or friends. How do I wanna feel? I wanna feel rewarded. And the more concrete of a visualization you can form, the more powerful it is to keep you in check and keep you on task.

Now, Gloria does not think that we should have to figure out how to reduce distractions on our own. Many workplaces are already doing more to help employees cut through the mental clutter.

Some organizations institute quiet hours. Quiet time during the day where no electronic communications are sent and people are off the hook from having to answer electronic communications. And what this does is it helps reset expectations because email has its own set of norms, as does Slack, as does texting, that when you get these messages, you have to respond fast. And so The burden cannot just be on the individual to pull out, but there really has to be a collective solution that I believe organizations need to be responsible for.

These periods of quiet time, they can be built to overlap with periods when our brains are most likely to be able to focus. Gloria has done research on this too.

Turns out that when we look at the focused state of attention being challenged and We see a peak rhythm, which is around mid-morning for most people, and again about mid-afternoon for most people. There are individual differences, of course, but we do see that there are these peaks and valleys, so to speak, of attention throughout the day.

There is one more technique that Gloria suggests, and it's particularly counterintuitive.

It has to do with a Japanese concept There's a very well-known Japanese garden in Kyoto which has the most beautiful rocks that are very carefully positioned. And what is as important as the rocks themselves is the space around the rocks, because that space creates a kind of dynamism that makes these rocks more beautiful.

Gloria used to be a painter before she became an academic. In painting, the empty parts of the canvas are called negative space. The figure on the canvas only stands out because of the empty space. Gloria thinks about a workday the same way. The hours you spend not staring at a screen can help you do better when you have to look at a screen.

So of course, We wanna perform the best that we possibly can, but we also have to design empty space into our day to enable our work to shine, because otherwise we just get exhausted. And what can you do during this empty space? Take a walk, go out in nature. That's the best break of all. You can meditate. There's many different ways to help your mind refresh.

In other words, lean into mindfulness. Into deliberate practices that can give your mind the rest it needs. And if all else fails, consider zooming out, way out. Tim Wu said that his work is motivated by an idea from the philosopher William James. Your life will have been what you paid attention to. William James set down that sentiment more than 100 years ago, before anyone had heard of a smartphone or a feed or a notification. The war for your attention Began a long time ago, and it's still being fought. Attention merchants spend a lot of time and effort harvesting one of your most precious possessions. The resource they're after, the one that decides what your life adds up to, that resource still belongs to you. The question is, how will you use it? If you want to keep thinking about the hidden currents in your mind, please check out the Hidden Brain audio podcast. Each week we have a new episode that you can find on Apple, Spotify, or hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.