Attention, concentration, focus, awareness, interest, absorption – whatever you care to call it, we’ve got less of it than ever before!
Are you still with me?
Developmental authorities state that a child can master 3 - 5 minutes of concentration per year of age, up to a maximum attention span of about 20 - 30 minutes in adulthood. When one compares the brevity of our current endurance to the hours-long Lincoln/Douglas debates described in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, one gets a sense of the magnitude of the change.
Perhaps more germane to this publication is the anecdotal evidence that lesson plans for elementary students in the 70’s ran to 30 minutes. A student teacher I know has been asked to prepare this year for a maximum of 10 minutes.
So what’s the cause of our deteriorating attention span?
Some blame the Net. In 2002, the BBC reported that surfing the Net can result in the attention span of a goldfish – a mere 9 seconds!!
More recently Nicholas Carr in the July/August 2008 Atlantic cover story ‘’Is Google Making Us Stoopid: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains’’, wrote
…what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.
Carr cites the work of developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University:
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.
Others are wary of television. In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended no television or other electronic media for children younger than two and suggested limiting viewing for children older than two years to less than two hours per day. Five years later, a University of Washington study published in Pediatrics underscored that warning by revealing a strong correlation between the number of television hours watched per day at ages 1 and 3 and problems of concentration, confusion, impulsiveness, obsession or restlessness at age 7.
Despite these warnings, a 2005 study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a staggering 61% of children aged two years or younger were exposed to television or a video/DVD for more than one hour per day. Further, nearly one in five children aged one or younger was reported to have a television set in their bedroom! Some parents noted the educational benefits of programming or excused themselves with the need to calm kids or keep them occupied. Yet many households reported that their TV’s were turned on all the time to create a ‘’background’’ distraction.
Convenient though it may be to blame one medium over another, it would seem that the rerouting of neural highways in our relatively plastic brains is a result not of any one particular medium but of all mass media. Guilty parties – ranging from the internet to split-screen TV to newspapers that summarize the notable in sidebars and bold font text boxes – are simply responding to our demand for more information faster.
It is impossible to imagine a world in which that will change, so we, like media, must adapt, balancing our power skimming and image-barraged world with focused efforts to focus.
And all that adds up to games – whether problem solving solitary exercises such as sudoku and word searches or socializing group games - the combination of goals, structure and fun will contribute greatly to increased attention span and an enduring sense of accomplishment.
You knew I’d get there eventually!
Please drop us a note and let us know what tools you employ in the home or classroom to enhance concentration.
