Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Attention span

"The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish,” said the BBC in 2002. “Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things,” Ted Selker, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the British news agency. “If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating.”
-As quoted by Sitepoint

Though focused on the web design aspects of attention (and not making our pages too long), it raises some interesting points regarding the way we receive information and the impact it has on us when we're required to attend to something for longer periods. I have felt for a long time that the way we receive information is contributing to this short attention span, even when we're watching a movie or a show that lasts and hour or more, scenes or camera shots rarely last more than a few seconds.

Thinking of our minds as a muscle, we need to train it to either sprint or do distance.

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