The goldfish attention span myth
Quiet Wall ·
You may have read that people now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Where the eight-second figure came from, and why it does not hold up.
The claim
You have probably read it: people now have an attention span of eight seconds, one second shorter than a goldfish. It appeared in 2015, was repeated by Time and many others, and still turns up in talks and articles about phones.
It is a good line. It is also not based on any research anyone has been able to find.
Where the figure came from
The numbers appeared in a 2015 consumer insights report from Microsoft Canada, which credited them to a website called Statistic Brain.
When the BBC's Simon Maybin went looking in 2017, the sources Statistic Brain listed had no record of the research behind the figures. A specialist in fish behaviour told the BBC that goldfish do not have a particularly short memory or attention span either.
So the claim fails twice: there is no study behind the eight seconds, and the goldfish was wrong too.
Why it does not hold up
- no study measuring an eight-second human attention span has been found
- attention is not one number: how long you can stay with something depends on what it is, how tired you are, and what else is competing for you
- a single figure for everyone, falling year by year, is not how attention is studied
What is true instead
What people notice when they repeat the line is real. It is harder to stay with one thing when something else is always one tap away. That is a fact about the surroundings, not about a shrinking brain, and surroundings can be changed.
- put the phone out of reach for the length of the thing you want to do
- turn off notifications for anything that is not a person
- practise staying with an empty minute, which is the hardest test of all
Ten minutes, not eight seconds
Quiet Wall is ten minutes with nothing else competing for you: a reminder arrives, the phone goes across the room, and you look at a blank wall until a sound brings you back.
Do people have a shorter attention span than a goldfish?
No. The eight-second figure came from a 2015 Microsoft Canada report citing a website, Statistic Brain, and no research behind it has been found.
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