2021 FOCUS Flipbook

In the digital age, where the news is limited to 280 characters and conversations take place in the form of emojis, our attention span has shortened. The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is 9 seconds , but according to a study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after 8 seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain. Heavy multi-screeners find it difficult to filter out irrelevant stimuli — they’re more easily distracted by multiple streams of media, according to the same study. We’re unable to filter out the irrelevant information, so the junk, and the information we should probably be paying attention to, flows unfiltered through our brains, resulting in a sort of informational soup. Not surprisingly, 25% of people forget major details of close friends and family; like phone numbers, addresses and birth dates. Source: An Empirical Study of Web Use IT SEEMS THE ABILITY TO STAY FOCUSED IS NOW A SUPERPOWER. 3