Stolen Focus

Collective attention is shrinking, along with the desire to grapple with complexity.

Humanity is grappling with an attention crisis. People are, increasingly, inundated with information, and, as a result, their ability to sustain their focus long enough to understand the material bombarding them is diminishing. Sune Lehmann, a professor of applied mathematics and computer science, conducted a study to determine whether human attention spans were shortening. Using an algorithm to analyze the content of Google Books, which houses millions of scanned books, Lehmann’s team examined books written over a 130-year span, beginning in the 1880s. They observed that the topics people wrote about shifted with increasing rapidity as history progressed. The team confirmed that society’s collective focus had begun to wane long before the dawn of the internet age, but that the internet has sharply accelerated its decline. They attributed this decline to a surfeit of information. When people are overwhelmed with information, their ability to understand complex topics diminishes: Most skim through texts rapidly on their mobile devices, which renders them less...