Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 1: Tim Stenovic on Bloomberg Radio. Just looking at chapter six
Speaker 1: of this book that we're going to talk about in
Speaker 1: just a moment. It begins with before smartphones were introduced.
Speaker 1: To do a digital detox, all I needed to do
Speaker 1: was stay at my mother in law's house as she
Speaker 1: did not have WiFi. Like we are such a connected world?
Speaker 1: Column what a few years ago, gosh in the last
Speaker 1: decade about how I loved flying because there was no
Speaker 1: WiFi and I could just completely disconnect from everything. So
Speaker 1: now you just like it when WiFi doesn't Then this
Speaker 1: week you're last week we hear from you know, Delta,
Speaker 1: that free WiFi for everyone, Right, I agree. I used
Speaker 1: to feel like the plane was the place where nobody
Speaker 1: could touch me. Well, how many times, everybody do you
Speaker 1: sit down to do something only to be distracted by
Speaker 1: the ping of your phone. You pick it up, you
Speaker 1: look at the text. The next thing, Tim, you know,
Speaker 1: you're on Instagram watching videos of airplanes taking off and
Speaker 1: landing and forty minutes has passed. That's you. That's exactly
Speaker 1: what I do. And guess what that thing that I
Speaker 1: sat down to do. I never did it all right, Well,
Speaker 1: this is the subject of a new book, attention Span.
Speaker 1: Finding a Focus and Fighting Distraction, is by Dr Gloria Mark.
Speaker 1: She's Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, California.
Speaker 1: Excuse me at Irvine. She joins us now via zoom
Speaker 1: zoom from Irvine, California. I'm not distracted. I just can't
Speaker 1: speak on this Tuesday. Uh, Dr Mark, good to have
Speaker 1: you here. Congratulation, congratulations on the book. I do feel
Speaker 1: like we are living in a world of distractions, which
Speaker 1: is why I try to start my day with no sounds,
Speaker 1: no nothing, and just kind of some peace because the
Speaker 1: rest of the day there's so much coming at us. UM, welcome, welcome.
Speaker 1: Tell us about your book, Attention Span. So thank you
Speaker 1: so much for having me. Uh So, you know, basically,
Speaker 1: this this work. The book is a culmination of about
Speaker 1: twenty years of research that I've been doing looking at
Speaker 1: how people interact with their devices. And one of the
Speaker 1: things I note is, and even started with myself, uh
Speaker 1: that my own attention was started to be dwindling when
Speaker 1: I was using my devices. I started, uh measuring people's
Speaker 1: attention span using their computers and then later when smartphones
Speaker 1: came out UM since UM around two thousand four, and
Speaker 1: I find that the attention spans have diminished. Back in
Speaker 1: two thousand four, we measured them about two and a
Speaker 1: half minutes on average. The last five or six years
Speaker 1: it's been about forty seven seconds on average, and others
Speaker 1: have what does that mean? Forty seven seconds? What is
Speaker 1: the average attention span? Yes, this means that on any screen, computer, tablet, phone,
Speaker 1: an average of forty seven seconds is what we see. Now.
Speaker 1: Remember it's an average. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's more.
Speaker 1: The median, which is the midpoint, is forty seconds. That
Speaker 1: means half of all of our observations showed attention to
Speaker 1: be less than forty seconds. Well, I have to say,
Speaker 1: when we're working on putting something out on social if
Speaker 1: we do anything that's like they're like no, no, no no,
Speaker 1: twenty seconds or like thirty seconds, Like you've got to
Speaker 1: be really short, uh and fast. At the same time,
Speaker 1: you know, I think about the streaming services. We have
Speaker 1: more and more content and more and more series, and
Speaker 1: we have more and more documentaries that are longer. So
Speaker 1: help me get my head around it. Where people are
Speaker 1: watching for long periods of time they are and and again, um,
Speaker 1: I want to emphasize that this is an average. So yes,
Speaker 1: people can spend you know, long periods of time. You
Speaker 1: can just be you know, engulfed in in some video
Speaker 1: for a longer period of time. But what we also
Speaker 1: see is that people are shifting their attention rapidly. You know,
Speaker 1: this is when they're not watching videos and uh, you
Speaker 1: know they're not watching TV and film and uh, this
Speaker 1: is you know, I I describe this as a kinetic
Speaker 1: attention kinetic dynamic kind of behavior that we see. So
Speaker 1: have have our brains or do our brains change as
Speaker 1: a result of all the stimuli that we have in
Speaker 1: our environment? Well, there there's some research that suggests that
Speaker 1: there there could be some changes to our brain. What
Speaker 1: what I can say is that there are changes to
Speaker 1: our behavior, to our attention behaviors. And and that's uh
Speaker 1: something that we can you know, empirically measure and show.
Speaker 1: We also show that there's a relationship between this fast
Speaker 1: attention shifting and an increase in stress. So okay, how
Speaker 1: about behavior change? Because I want to know how I
Speaker 1: can and I noticed this. I just sometimes I'll delete
Speaker 1: Twitter from my phone because I know I'm spending too
Speaker 1: much time on it. Even though the app is no
Speaker 1: longer on my phone, sometimes I'll still open up my
Speaker 1: phone instinctively when I'm like on an escalator in an
Speaker 1: elevator or something, and then try to find Twitter, even
Speaker 1: though I know it's not there. It's like a reflex
Speaker 1: format sickness. Please please help me, doctor. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a muscle memory. I mean, you know, when you do
Speaker 1: something for a long time, it becomes a habit. Uh.
Speaker 1: So there, you know. And I want to emphasize that
Speaker 1: we we tend to blame notifications for you know, this
Speaker 1: is the reason why we're distracted, but it's just as
Speaker 1: likely for people to interrupt themselves. So about half the
Speaker 1: time people we are our worst interrupters. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: So it's not we can't just blame it on things
Speaker 1: that are external to us. Children as young as two
Speaker 1: to four years old already average two and a half
Speaker 1: hours of screen time a day, and it soon climbs
Speaker 1: to an average of three hours and five minutes for
Speaker 1: ages five to eight. Uh. Foundation from multitasking laid at
Speaker 1: the very youngest of ages. Remember when multitasking um dr
Speaker 1: mark was considered a good thing, but you know, the
Speaker 1: research shows that it's not. There's actually it's actually research
Speaker 1: that's been going on for decades that shows that when
Speaker 1: people switch their attention two different tasks. We know that
Speaker 1: blood pressure goes up. There are physiological markers that indicate
Speaker 1: stress that show this this goes up as well. We
Speaker 1: know my own research looking at people in the wild
Speaker 1: where they wore heart rate monitors. We find that stress
Speaker 1: goes up when people are switching their attention, and people
Speaker 1: report subjectively that their stress is higher. So all these
Speaker 1: measures are consistent. So I guess I want to go
Speaker 1: back to this idea of retraining ourselves and thinking about
Speaker 1: how we can be more productive. Because there's this idea
Speaker 1: that we're so productive because we're connected and we can
Speaker 1: always access our emails or contacts our tasks. But there's
Speaker 1: also this idea that if you know, hey, you retrain
Speaker 1: yourself to be more focused on these things and you
Speaker 1: actually sit there, you get that task done, you're more productive.
Speaker 1: So how do we find focus and fight distraction? Which
Speaker 1: is the subtitle of your book. Yes, so I think
Speaker 1: that we need to do work on different levels there.
Speaker 1: You know, there are individual solutions, there are also collective
Speaker 1: solutions that could be done at an organizational level or
Speaker 1: even societal level. At an individual level, I think that
Speaker 1: we can draw in the work of Albert band Or.
Speaker 1: He's a very famous social psychologist who had a lot
Speaker 1: of success in getting people to improve their self effocacy.
Speaker 1: They could change, they could stop smoking, stop substance abuse,
Speaker 1: and I think there are certain principles that could be
Speaker 1: applied to help us, you know, control our attention better.
Speaker 1: For example, we have so many automatic actions. We we
Speaker 1: grab our phones, which check em we check social media.
Speaker 1: These are done automatically. If we can become more intentional
Speaker 1: in our behavior so we can make these unconscious behaviors
Speaker 1: more conscious then, you know, and we can understand the
Speaker 1: reasons why we're doing them, then it gives us a
Speaker 1: chance to be able to gain control over them. If
Speaker 1: we don't do that and just got about forty five seconds,
Speaker 1: what's the risk. The risk is we continue switching our attention,
Speaker 1: creating stress, you know, even exhaustion live in it. I
Speaker 1: will say that I will sometimes just not look at
Speaker 1: my messages when I've got to get something done and
Speaker 1: just focus on it, and then people will be like,
Speaker 1: why aren't you answering your messages? And I'm like, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get something done. I think the reflective part
Speaker 1: is something that you know, I really have to be
Speaker 1: intentional about. Yeah. Absolutely, Our thanks to Dr Gloria Mark,
Speaker 1: Chancellor's professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine, her
Speaker 1: new book Attention Span, Finding Focus and Finding Distraction. We
Speaker 1: thank her for her time today