Is the deluge of digital media killing our ability to focus? Psychologist Gloria Mark explains how we are shaped by what we pay attention to – and why today’s short snippets of everything are reinforcing short attention spans.
Phil Stieg: Today, we’re honored to welcome Dr. Gloria Mark to the podcast. She is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and a leading expert in the impact of digital media on our lives.
Her recent book, Attention Span, is a comprehensive exploration of how digital media influences our ability to maintain focus. Her work has reshaped our understanding of how our interactions with technology affect our focus, intentions, and overall mental and emotional well-being.
Today, she is here to delve into these critical issues and share her invaluable insights with us. Gloria, thank you for being with us today.
Gloria Mark: Thank you so much for having me.
Phil Stieg: This is a topic near and dear to me. I talk about it all the time with my children, with the people in the operating room. It’s something I actually worry probably too much about. So tell me, why is attention span important?
Gloria Mark: Attention is how we take in information from the world. And let me go back and quote William James, who’s the father of psychology, and he says that what we pay attention to becomes part of our lived experience, so it helps shape who we are. Now, you can imagine the longer our attention spans, the more deeply we can engage and the better chance it has to shape who we are.
Phil Stieg: And I thought I’d start early on by taking you to task a little bit. You frequently refer to the concept of multitasking, which I know is a popular term, and everybody feels like they have to be able to multitask in order to be successful. But I feel like that creates an opportunity for failure because the brain cannot multitask. Correct?
Gloria Mark: That’s absolutely right. And people have this idea that we can do two things in parallel, and it’s not humanly possible unless one of those things is automatic. So we can walk and text at the same time because walking is an automatic activity, right. Texting involves what’s called controlled processing. So we have to use a lot of cognitive resources to pay attention to that texting.
We can drive and have a conversation with the passenger, because driving can become automatic until somebody swerves in front of you, cuts you off, and then all of a sudden, your attention is on that car in front of you. So multitasking for two things that involves some amount of cognitive effort is just not possible. That’s just not how the human brain works.
Phil Stieg: There are different forms of attention. Can you go into that a little bit?
Gloria Mark: I’ve been looking at attention for a long time, and I realized that a lot of people tend to think about the idea of focused attention in a dichotomous way – you’re focused, or you’re not focused. And then I realized, wait, it’s a lot more complicated than that, it’s a lot more nuanced because you could be really focused on something, and it involves a lot of cognitive effort.
So if I’m trying to read a difficult academic article, I have to be really focused, right. I have to try to comprehend. You know, I can also watch a YouTube video or I can play solitaire and be really engaged in that. And that doesn’t involve a lot of cognitive effort at all. And so I think another way to think about attention, types of attention, is in terms of two dimensions, how engaged a person is and also how challenged a person is.
There are different ways to think about attention. So one way is to think of it in terms of what’s called controlled processing and automatic processing. Now, controlled processing involves our volition, right? We can choose what we pay attention to, where we want to pay attention to. Automatic processing is when we pay attention to something, and we can’t help but do so. And an example is we get a notification on our computer screens, and it’s flashing by our screen. We have to pay attention to it. That’s how our brains work.
There is an experimental task, and I think many listeners are familiar with it. It’s called the Stroop test. And the Stroop test basically has words that are words of colors, like the word red, the word blue, but the font is actually in a different color than the name of the word.
So when you see the word blue, but it’s written in yellow, right. And you’re told to say, what color is that? You automatically respond, blue. Because reading is so automatic for us, we can’t help but respond. That’s our automatic attention at work.
Phil Stieg: What are some of the myths about attention that people think are true but turn out to be false?
Gloria Mark: So I would say that the most important one is that there is a common narrative that we should try to be focused as long as possible when we’re using our devices or for that matter, when we’re doing anything. And if you do a Google search and you search for length of focus or focus long, you’ll see all kinds of websites that come up that say “how to focus for 10 hours straight”, “how to focus nonstop”, and so on. But the problem with that is that our mind has a limited amount of cognitive resources.
We just can’t focus for extended periods without getting exhausted. And I think that this is a reason why a lot of people do experience stress and burnout, because they feel demands to be able to. They feel demands that they have to focus for long, extended periods without breaks. And that’s just not good for us humans.
Phil Stieg: Was there an aha moment? Like, all of a sudden, boom, I’ve got to study this. And why did it hook you?
Gloria Mark: Well, the AHA moment actually started when I first began to measure people’s attention spans. And it actually came about from becoming aware of my own experience, having trouble paying attention.
I had moved from Germany to the US, that was in the year 2000, began as an assistant professor. I t was a different country, it was just a different work culture. And so I began to wonder if it was just me. Am I the only one experiencing this difficulty in paying attention? I realized I was switching my attention like mad, just trying to keep up with all my different deadlines and projects. So I started talking with other people.
Other people started saying, yeah, I’m experiencing the same thing. And so then I thought, well, I can study this. And that was the AHA moment for me when I first started studying this and realizing that this seems to be a widespread phenomenon.
Phil Stieg: I was wondering what your feeling is about the impact that digital media has on our attention spans and the way we communicate.
Gloria Mark: It has a big impact. Let me give you a story. I’ve been working at Microsoft Research. I started in 2012. The smartphone had been out for about five years, but it wasn’t as intensely used as it is now. And there is a shuttle bus that takes people from all over Seattle to the Microsoft campus. And when I first used to wait at this shuttle stop, I would meet people and we talked with each other, and starting maybe five or so years later, everybody waited at the bus stop, looking at their phones, and we lost the ability to talk with each other and meet others.
Phil Stieg: But it also changes the way we communicate. I think it truncates your sentences. Your sentences are abbreviated. In my mind, they’re less emotional. They don’t wax poetic. So I think it has an impact on the way people express emotion towards each other. Is that what you have found in your studies?
Gloria Mark: Well, I would say that it’s not just smartphones, but I would say it’s our broader media environment. So, yes, if you’re texting, it’s very hard to write long passages when we text. Twitter or “X” forces us to write in terms of short snippets. TikTok videos feature short form content. We’re seeing that everywhere. We’re being reinforced to have short attention spans by all the media that we use.
Interstitial theme music
Narrator: Paying close attention to just one thing usually means making a special effort to ignore distractions. When we concentrate on a specific task, we often don’t notice what we’re not expecting to see.
That includes something as obvious as a gorilla.In the 1990s, cognitive psychologists at Harvard University conducted an experiment to test selective attention—the ability to focus on certain stimuli and ignore everything else.
They showed participants a video of six people: three wearing white shirts, and three wearing black shirts. The instructions for the experiment were simple.
[SOUND FX squeaking sneakers and a basketball being passed around].
[AUDIO EXCERPT Selective attention test video]: “Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball.”
Narrator: After about 30 seconds, participants were asked how many passes they counted for players in white. Participants were then asked a second question:
[AUDIO EXCERPT Selective attention test video]: “But did you see the gorilla?”
Narrator: Around 20 seconds into the video, a person wearing a gorilla suit had entered from the right, walked slowly through the game for about nine seconds, stopped halfway to pound their chest, and then exited to the left.
About half of the study subjects didn’t see the gorilla at all. It might as well have been invisible.
The Invisible Gorilla has become one of the most famous psychology experiments of all time. It supports a concept called “inattentional blindness,” which describes how people can overlook what’s right in front of them, simply because their attention is directed toward one specific task.
That’s not because something’s wrong with their vision. Rather, it has to do with how our brains process, interpret, and store what we see. The Harvard psychologists concluded that in general, we consciously “see” less of what’s around us than we think we do.
But recent research is challenging that conclusion.
In 2023, scientists from NYU restaged the experiment. They found that if the “gorilla” was leaping or moving quickly—much faster than in the original video—participants were more likely to spot it.
This suggests that maybe people aren’t so oblivious after all, even when we’re keeping our eye on the ball.
Closing theme music.
Phil Stieg: Gloria, tell me, what’s the most surprising thing in your career that you’ve learned about attention span?
Gloria Mark: One thing that surprised me the most is, and it’s very obvious when you think about it, is that we are as likely to self-interrupt as we are to be interrupted by something external to us.
We had collected data of external interruptions that people experienced and internal interruptions, and we looked at the data on an hourly basis and we found that in 1 hour, when external interruptions declined, the next hour people’s internal interruptions increased. And what this said to me is that people were just determined to have a pattern of interruptions.
They were just determined to be interrupted. And if it’s not coming from something outside of us, then they’re going to interrupt themselves.
Phil Stieg: Your studies are related to attention span for sure, but it’s really also about, again, this concept of multitasking, alternating attentions and how the digital age, the computer has magnified our need to alternate so suddenly, and then also the emotional response that our bodies have to that. Explain that for us, please.
Gloria Mark: Well, we have found that there is a correlation between switching our attention and the stress we experience.
I’ve done studies where we have people wearing heart rate monitors in their workplaces so that we can get a measure of what’s called heart rate variability, And we see a very strong correlation between shifting attention and stress. So it definitely affects our emotional experiences.
Phil Stieg: I was also particularly struck by that story about the company that agreed with you, surprisingly, to shut off the email for a while and tell us what that told you in your study.
Gloria Mark: So it did take me six years to find a company that would be willing to do that. But I was very interested to see what would happen if we turn off email in a company. Would we get people to focus longer?
We had people in a workplace turn off email for five days, so one work week, and we had them wear heart rate monitors. And indeed, we found that they focused significantly longer on any screen, and we also found that their stress went down.
People reported it as an enjoyable experience. And they also reported that it was much more of a social experience, because instead of sending an email to someone, they would actually talk to someone face to face if the person was nearby. Sometimes they would even walk to another building to talk with someone. They valued it so much, or they would pick up the phone to talk to someone. It changed their experience of work.
Phil Stieg: What was the company’s response to it? Did they feel like they got the same value?
Gloria Mark: The company did find it valuable, but they were not willing to institute this as a policy. They weren’t convinced enough.
Phil Stieg: (laugh) I figured as much!
Gloria Mark: Yeah.
Phil Stieg: Let’s take this to our children. We’re seeing now that mom and dad put their kid in the backseat, in the car seat, and they give them an iPad and say, here, be happy. How does this constant exposure to digital interactions and scrolling and that affect the development of their brain?
Gloria Mark: I do worry about that because executive function doesn’t really mature in kids until roughly about the age of ten. And executive function you can think of as the CEO of our mind, the director of our mind, and that helps us stay on track, it helps us filter out distractions, helps us make decisions as to what to pay attention to.
And when that’s not fully developed, then young kids who are using these devices are much more susceptible to distractions. And there’s so much information that they can access on a smartphone or tablet. And I worry that it’s teaching kids bad habits.
Phil Stieg: Yeah – I mean, I don’t want to trash digital media. It’s changed our life and it’s here to stay. Your brain and my brain is probably toast already, but I’m really worried about my children’s brain.
Gloria Mark: I absolutely worry about that as well.
Phil Stieg: The increased use of digital media in schools now allows kids to not only have whatever they’re learning, but they jump into their email or somewhere else and then back to it. What’s the evidence that that’s the best way to go about teaching versus just put a book in front of them?
Gloria Mark: There is some research that shows that it’s a lot healthier for kids to read, especially to read on paper. And I think that kids need to be exposed much more to reading paper books and paper materials.
Phil Stieg: So the question is, for the parents out there, how do they help their kids navigate all of this stuff? Do you say you get breaks from social media? Give me your cell phone, give me your iPad. Or how do they get their kids through this?
Gloria Mark: I think one of the most important things is for parents to set examples for kids.
Don’t put the phone or computer first before your child. If your child wants your attention, give your attention to your child. Show them. Teach them that they come first.
It’s really important to teach children that relationships matter and, and teach them the art of conversation. Right. Engage your child in conversation. It’s so important. That’s how they learn to interact with people.
Phil Stieg: It strikes me as an overwhelming challenge to be a parent now.
Gloria Mark: It is. But I think the best thing that we can do as parents is to give time to our children and we can teach our children what it means to have a deep conversation with them. And I have found with my own kids that when they experience this kind of deep and probing conversation, that they get an appetite for it. Right. And they understand the importance of it.
Phil Stieg: But isn’t that antithetical to what social media is about? You’re looking at social media and boom. On the side as everything’s flashing to distract you versus staying focused and attentive to what actually is going on. A talk with mom and dad. Oh, my God, what a precious moment!
Gloria Mark: Yeah. Or a talk with anyone. It doesn’t have to be mom and dad. It could be uncle and teacher or another child as well. It is antithetical with social media. And, yeah, we’ve really got ourselves in a dilemma.
Phil Stieg: We’ve bashed digital media. Are there ways that digital media can be used to minimize stress?
Gloria Mark: One of our research findings is that when people do what I call rote activity, and this is when you’re really engaged with something, and there’s not a lot of cognitive effort, we find that people are happiest when they do that.
They’re a lot happier than when they do some hard, focused work. And why? Because it’s less stressful, and it gives their cognitive resources a chance to kind of relax and refresh. And if you have a tough problem to solve, sometimes the problem can incubate in the back of your mind, and you can come up with a solution.
And so doing a simple, easy activity is not necessarily bad, and I do that myself.
The problem is not the fact that we’re doing this kind of rote activity, say, playing a mindless game on our phones. The problem is not being able to pull out when we need to and when we neglect doing things that are important.
So it’s really important that we set limits when we’re doing this kind of rote activity. There is a time and a place for it. If you’re waiting in a doctor’s office, there’s no one around, you could just turn your attention to some very simple, engaging game that makes us happy.
Phil Stieg: To do that. I would submit that takes a fair amount of personal insight, don’t you think? You all of a sudden feel your heart rate going up, your blood pressure going up, and you have to say, oops. These are signs that digital media has just gotten me. I need to step back and take a break, which happens a lot at work. Per your data, your book would suggest that this is a very big problem.
Is there more that we can do in the work environment to kind of, like, quickly decompress so that we can get back to being productive?
Gloria Mark: Yeah. So during the pandemic, my university offered a course in mindfulness, mindfulness based stress reduction. It occurred to me that some of these ideas in mindfulness can be applied when we’re using our devices.
We can become what I call meta-aware. To become aware like this, we have to probe ourselves, and we have to keep asking ourselves, how do I feel? Do I feel stressed?
Or you have an urge to go to social media. And you can ask yourself, do I need to go to social media right now? Or we can ask ourselves, is it time to take a break? Am I feeling exhausted? Am I starting to read the same sentence over and over again? In which case, yes, it’s time to take a break now.
This meta awareness is a skill that can be developed, and I practice it all the time. And at first, I would forget to do it, but now it’s become second nature.
And so when I’m working, I probe myself and say, okay, is it time for a break? Am I starting to feel tired?
There’s a number of people who talk about doing a digital detox, where you simply cut off digital media for a period of time. I’m not a fan of that. The reason I’m not a fan, is that it’s like going on a crash diet. It’s fine when you’re off media, and then you come back and you have the same habits. And I would so much rather that we develop new habits.
But really importantly, it’s so important that we gain agency over our behaviors that we learn the skill of how to control our attention.
Phil Stieg: So intermittent fasting from social media doesn’t work (laugh). How do we in this world achieve psychological balance in the digital age?
Gloria Mark: There are rhythms in our attention. There’s times when we are at our peak focus, when we have a lot of cognitive resources that we can devote to something, and there are times when we’re just in a valley and we’re just kind of sapped.
I think it’s important to understand your personal rhythm – when you’re at a peak, when you’re in a valley, and adjusting your behavior with your devices accordingly.
Attention is goal directed. We pay attention to what our goals are, and if our goal is to work on a deadline, that’s what we pay attention to. If our goal is to avoid a deadline, we go to social media, right? That can be a goal as well. Having a goal to procrastinate, we don’t think of it as a goal, but it is,
But I would say the most important thing is to put front and center the idea of well-being in this digital age.
That is the most important thing we should be striving to do, not the idea of pushing ourselves to be productive, driving us to our limits and getting ourselves exhausted.
Phil Stieg
Dr. Gloria Marks, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your ability to transform the digital world and our emotional well-being into common language, hopefully helping our listeners so they can achieve balance in their life.
Thank you so much. For being with us.
Gloria Mark: It was my pleasure.