SAINT PAUL — Sometimes when you're trying to focus, it can feel like distractions are everywhere. Most notably, the mini-computer in your hand or pocket stands out. To combat that problem, we wanted to know: How can we improve our attention span? Good Question.
Endless options to play, learn, and discover greet kids at the Minnesota Children's Museum. Some activities grab their attention more than others, but they stay in the moment, something their parents can struggle with. "I feel like my cellphone gets in the way of me enjoying the outside world sometimes," said Makaylah Harris of Minneapolis.
From downtime to on-the-clock, the need to do two things at once intensifies for some people. "With my job, I have to multitask because I run two screens," said Gail Allen of Eagan. Dr.
Gloria Mark is a professor of Informatics at the University of California. She researches attention span and wrote a book ( https://gloriamark.com/attention-span/ ) on how to improve it.
"I've been tracking attention spans over two decades and we started 20 years ago," she said. For her study, subjects watched content on a screen. When they diverted their attention, the time was marked.
In the beginning, Dr. Mark said the average time a person kept their attention on the screen was about 2.5 minutes.
Twenty years later, subjects were shifting their attention from the screen within an average of 47 seconds. Why are attention spans dropping? Dr. Mark says smartphones are the culprit.
They help owners.
