Can we reclaim our shrinking attention spans from 'TikTok brain'?

In today’s world, it can feel difficult to concentrate when your smartphone pings or buzzes every minute or two with alerts about TikTok videos, Facebook updates, text messages and much more.

How can anyone get through a 500-page book – or even a newspaper feature – when our rewired “TikTok Brain” is hooked to bite-sized content.

The endless scrolling and digital multitasking will pull us away from tasks at hand and fragment our attention span. But, is all hope lost?

Gloria Mark, professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine, has spent much of her career analysing how this affects us. Beginning more than 20 years ago, she has used sensors to track attention spans on screens, analysing habits in the real world rather than in a laboratory setting. When the studies started, in 2004, screen attention spans were about two-and-a-half minutes, but by 2012 they had fallen to 75 seconds and, more recently, they were found to be 47 seconds.

Prof Mark, the author of a 2023 book, Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life, said that there were “a lot of things” that had caused people to become more distracted, with the introduction of smartphones and the rise of social media chief among them.

While being online can be enormously useful for everything from shopping to finding out background information for work, when we move quickly between tasks – such as simultaneously reading messages and writing a report – we rarely perform at our best. Only a small percentage of the population – well below 10 per cent – are thought to be able to multitask effectively, highlighting the importance of concentrating on one activity at a time.

Multitasking affects performance

“Multitasking, we know it leads to worse performance,” Prof Mark said. “It’s not a behaviour that people should aspire to. They should rather think about extending their attention spans. When you switch your attention span so rapidly, there are more errors. It takes longer to do any individual task and people get more stressed.”

Aside from making us perform tasks less effectively, the ease with which we get distracted by one thing or another on the internet also means that we can waste time – sometimes hours – that could be spent on activities that many would consider more worthwhile, such as watching a film, reading a novel, socialising or exercising.

There are individual differences, highlighted Nilli Lavie, professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London, so that some people are better able to keep their attention focused and to ignore distractions. The brain’s parietal cortex, which processes information from different senses, is central to this, with people who have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder tending to have less grey matter in this region.

“We see greater grey matter density for people that have a better attentional capacity compared to people that are less good at paying attention,” Prof Lavie said.

How is our brain wired?

The good news is that while research has indicated that in today’s world we switch our attention more often than in the past, this change is not thought to have become hard-wired in our brains. So if the distractions are taken away, people living now are no less able to concentrate than were previous generations.

“Our work on the brain mechanisms of attentions suggests it’s extremely unlikely that the brain machinery that we have in order to pay attention has actually changed fundamentally in such a short space of time,” said Prof Lavie. “If you’re reading a long article and you want to focus, you may be able to do that just as well as before the technological advance, before the explosion of opportunities to have short snippets of every bit of interest.

“So, there is no fundamental, overall change in our brain mechanisms, but there is the opportunity to be constantly distractible and to shift attention.”

When to switch off?

This suggests that if individuals remove the factors that distract them, their attention should improve. “It’s just a matter of deciding and coming with tactics, to switch off additional sources of information if you’re at a time when you feel like you really want to focus,” Prof Lavie said.

If someone has a work task that they do not wish to be distracted from, the way to ensure that they remain focused is to turn off the device that steals their attention and “avoid being tempted”.

“Put your phone on silent when you’re focusing on a work task on your screen or on a document,” said Prof Lavie. “We don’t have full control on interesting things taking our attention. Our attention system is designed to be captured by important information.”

Can short breaks help?

Taking time away from a task can also be helpful in ensuring that concentration does not dip. So, if you feel that you cannot concentrate at a particular moment, Prof Lavie’s advice is to “give yourself a break and start again”.

“Even very brief breaks can refresh your ability to pay attention for a longer time,” she said. “Everyone faces the difficulty to sustain attention focus for a long period of time.”

Even a break as short as one minute can help, according to Prof Lavie, although it is important not to become distracted by social media and find that this very short period away becomes much longer.

Related to this, one strategy is to set an alarm that will go off after, for example, 20 or 25 minutes, to indicate that a short break can be taken. Although some people find that this helps, Prof Mark is “not a fan” of such an approach.

“Every person has their own individual rhythm of when their attention peaks and when it’s in a valley,” she said. “You don’t want a buzzer to go off when you’re right in the middle and really involved. “When you start feeling fatigued, that’s the time to pull away and take a break, not when a buzzer goes off.”

Prof Mark advises people to look ahead to the end of the day and to consider how they might want to spend time then, such as relaxing on the sofa after completing their work. The thought of this can help some people to focus on the task in hand.

“I want to feel fulfilled because I’ve done my work,” she said. “That … can help people stay on track.”