All over the world, our ability to pay attention is collapsing. In the US, college students now focus on one task for only 65 seconds, and office workers on average manage only three minutes.
People tapped, swiped and clicked a whopping 2,617 times each day, on average.
These were some of the staggering numbers that grasped my attention reading Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Think and How You Can Pay Attention Again (2022). As an English teacher and literacy professor I have seen a drop in the number of students who are readers and an increase in students classified as ADHD. This impacts what I do in my classroom and my intentions to help families be more critical of the information they are consuming. Hari describes social media as an IV drip that so many of us are connected to and when I see graduate students glance at their phones in the middle of class as we are engaging in an active learning protocol, I know lost their attention and need to get them back into the events happening in class but according to Hari’s research, it will take 19 minutes for people to regain focus and by that time, class might already over.
The author writes, Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained one to me. He said “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost. When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”
Technology is rewiring our brains. The book argues, “we now live in a perfect storm of cognitive degradation.” Tech designers learn how to exploit psychological weaknesses to ensure compulsive user engagement.
Chapter 4 contends that people’s diminishing attention spans are making them less able and motivated to read long, complex novels for pleasure. Several studies show that Americans are spending less time reading fiction as a hobby. Anne Mangen, a Norwegian professor of literacy, has proven that frequently reading on screens causes people to skim over information, taking a toll on people’s “cognitive patience” (82) and the ability to become absorbed in a novel. Hari laments the decline of fiction reading for two reasons: It is one of the most common flow states in which people can enjoy deep concentration, and it is a proven tool for increasing imagination and empathy.
In 2017, the average American spent 17 minutes a day reading, and 5.4 hours on their phone.
This all impacts how we teach English and literacy. If students are reading less and easily distracted with longer texts, how do we engage and inspire them as readers and critical consumers of information. Here are some strategies we can employ in our classrooms tomorrow to engage students as readers.
1. Reading Aloud in class can stimulate students’ thinking, model reading and thinking, and promote a love of reading.
2. Allow ample time for Independent Reading in your classroom. We cannot just assign students reading for homework, if we expect students to read, we have to carve out time in our class for sustained silent reading.
3. Help students choose books. Student Choice is key. Book talk new and noteworthy books to share with your class, consider book tastings, and book speed dating to help find books that pique students’ interests.
4. Offer Book Clubs for students to read a book and then talk and collaborate on their thinking about the reading. This helps to promote a culture where reading is valued.
Hari writes, we internalize the texture of the voices we are exposed to. “When you expose yourself to complex stories about the inner lives of people over long periods of time, that sinks into your consciousness. You become more perceptive, open and empathic. If you expose yourself for hours a day to disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury from social media, your thoughts will start to be shapes like that. Your internal voices become cruder, louder, less able to hear gentle thoughts. Take care of what technologies you use, because your consciousness will come to be shaped by them.”
There were many interviews and remarks from technology creators and innovators about their inventions. Tony Fadell who co-invented the iPhone said ‘I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring into the world?’ He worried that he helped create ‘a nuclear bomb’ that can ‘blow up people’s brains and reprogram them.’
These sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards. They make us hungry for hearts and likes. Once you have been conditioned to need those reinforcements, it’s hard to be with reality in the physical world, because it doesn’t offer as frequent and immediate rewards as our phones.
Achieving sustained attention is a physical process that requires your body to be able to do certain things. So if you disrupt your body by depriving it of the nutrients it needs, by pumping it full of pollutants – your ability to pay attention will be disrupted.
Hari’s connection between attention, technology, and diet is also worth noting. Most of us eat in a way that deprives us of the nutrients we need for our brains to develop and function fully. The brain gets built from foods. Our current diets aren’t just lacking what we need – they also actively contain chemicals that seem to act on our brains like drugs.
If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked, who switches tasks every three minutes, who are tracked and monitored by social media sites designed to figure out your weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll, who are so stressed we become hyper-vigilant, who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash, who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day – then yes we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems.
The Teaching Factor 