Kids Head Back to School as Research Shows Attention Spans Are Shrinking

Getting back into a routine is never easy, but experts say today's students and workers are fighting an added obstacle: a world built to pull their focus away every few seconds.

Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has spent more than 20 years studying how people's attention holds up around their phones and computers, and she says what she's found is alarming. In 2003, Mark's research showed people could focus on one task, on a screen, for an average of two and a half minutes before switching to something else. By 2012, that number had dropped to 75 seconds. By 2016, it had fallen again, to just 47 seconds.

Mark points to smartphones, and how much they put within reach at any given moment, as the main reason focus keeps slipping. "It's like being in the world's largest candy store," she said.

That shrinking attention span isn't just a personal habit, though. Mark says it's showing up in real ways at school and at work. People increasingly offload their memory to their devices instead of holding onto information themselves, and spending less time focused on any one thing is making it harder for people to actually learn.

Mark believes protecting attention matters more than ever in a digital world, because what people pay attention to shapes who they become. "If kids pay attention to screens, that's forming the kind of person they will become," she said.