In his book The Principles of Psychology, William James defined attention as “taking possession by the mind of one out of several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought”. Here William James specifically described attention as the process by which the mind selects and focuses on one particular object or train of thought, out of several ones that may be competing for our attention at any given moment.
Gloria Mark, from the University of California, Irvine, says it is only a matter of challenging your mind. When you are mindlessly scrolling on social media or playing a game online, you are far from challenging it. But the same cannot be said for activities such as reading a book (two pages feels like a lot these days) or studying for an exam.
When was the last time you had a tech-free hour? One that is free from phones, TV or your emails. Takes me back to those days when there was a time limit set by my parents to switch off my gaming console or my television.
Relatable with the quote by Andy Bernard from The Office: “Is there a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them”?
Call it pointless reminiscence, but it is undeniably appropriate when put next to the bite-sized content that we are consuming today. Along with this content comes various “techniques”, which, when pondered upon, are standard “do this and then rest” tips. Though these fancy-named methods provide results, they are steps hiding behind a facade of merely normal instructions. They include the Pomodoro technique, which advises people to work for 25 minutes straight and then take a five-minute break. Do this for four cycles and finally take a 15- to 30-minute break. Another one is “eat the frog”, which tells us to identify tough tasks and finish them first.
After all, the ultimate goal is to reach the “flow state”, which is basically a point in time when you immerse yourself so much into the task that time does not matter and you reach the optimal state of creativity and productivity.
What we tend to forget, as per Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the one who coined the term “flow”), is that “the purpose of the ‘flow’ is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself.” Which when put into simple words, goes to say that we are massively focused on how the end product is going to turn out, rather than the process itself.
Seth Godin, an American author, claimed that writer’s block does not exist. It is only the necessity of wanting to “write well” that is keeping us at bay. It is safe to say that the perfectionist in all of us is the guilty party here.
Are we as consumers the only ones to blame for this decline in attention span? Have you actually “fried your dopamine receptors” as the Internet tells you? A fair-minded statement could be that, although our attention span has declined, it has steadily walked down this path with the obvious evolution in technology.
These queries do not converge at the age-old “Is technology a boon or a bane?” question. Rather it is a confrontation for all of us, to be able to tackle this advent of the new age. Despite the fact that an average individual’s attention span (while working with screens) before switching between two screens is a meagre 47 seconds as per analysis in 2021, none of us can actually confess that the emergence of this “new-tech” has not helped us in one way or another.
The famous 2015 survey by a then SEO website called “Statistics Brain” saying a human being and a goldfish share the same attention span of eight seconds was fake and was debunked by Microsoft.
The abundance of technology today is being marvelled at by the masses — most important, without a constraint that we have failed to apply for ourselves.
Living in an age where we pick up our phones over a hundred times a day, the first thing to do when we find ourselves in a cul de sac is to acknowledge that uniformity is indeed a necessity.
The trail leading to this finds itself lined on the sides with good sleep, regular hydration, practising meditation, being mindful of our daily activities and finally reading articles until the end, because who knows? You are most likely already on your way.
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