The massive behavioral conditioning we’ve all been undergoing since the advent of ubiquitous electronic communications technology has changed us radically. But this dramatic, if not epochal, change is underappreciated. It’s underappreciated because we’re living in it as it happens, like frogs in cold water that slowly gets heated up without the fro

If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and

When it comes to focused attention, we focus on one thing only, something we can sustain for only a few seconds. The maximum duration of focused attention seems not to have changed over time (Doyle and Zakrajsek 2013, 91). Focused attention is different from “sustained attention,” which we need to stay focused on one task for a longer period and is

Dr. Mathew Dumont writes, in The American Journal of Psychiatry, that “apart from the rapid and violent content of the programs, there are incessant changes of camera and focus, so that the viewer’s reference point shifts every few seconds. This technique literally programs a short attention span.”