Table Of ContentPraise for Gloria Mark
“Gloria Mark is the definitive expert on distraction and multitasking in our
increasingly digital world. Her book is a must-read for anyone concerned
about our diminishing attention span.”
—Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of A World Without Email and Deep Work
“This book covers decades of Gloria Mark’s fascinating research journey
into how the rise of computing has affected our personal lives: how we are
overstressed, we multitask too much, we are constantly interrupted even by
ourselves, and our attention spans have declined to an astonishing 47
seconds. If you are interested in your well-being and how to gain agency in
this digital age, then you need to read this book.”
—Susan David, bestselling author of Emotional Agility
“Interruptions are a fact of life. This has long been true, no fancy
technology required, but today, we have bright, shiny technology, some
deliberately designed to distract and thereby to interrupt. Gloria Mark’s
book is a thorough review of the impact these interruptions have on our
lives and mental health. Some interruptions are welcomed, deliberately self-
created. Most, however, are not. All interruptions impact the focus of
attention, and attention is a critically limiting aspect of human cognition.
Don’t be distracted by my review—go read the book. It is an important and
valuable contribution to living in this world of interruptions.”
—Don Norman, bestselling author of The Design of Everyday Things
Dr. Gloria Mark is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University
of California, Irvine. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft
Research since 2012. She is a two-time recipient of the Google Research
Award and has received a prestigious NSF CAREER award. She has
previously held positions as a visiting research scientist at the Boeing
Company, a senior research scientist at the German National Research
Center for Information Technology and a visiting senior researcher for IBM
Haifa, the largest lab of IBM’s Research division outside the US. She has
had over two hundred papers published in the top journals in the fields of
human-computer interactions (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative
work (CSCW).
Dr. Mark received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. She
was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition of her
leadership and contribution in HCI. She has been a Fulbright scholar and
has received a prestigious NSF CAREER grant. She was general cochair of
the top conferences of ACM CHI 2017, was papers chair of ACM CSCW
2012 and ACM CSCW 2006, and currently serves as associate editor of the
top-tier journals ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and
Human-Computer Interaction.
Attention Span
A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and
Productivity
Gloria Mark, PhD
To my mother, who focused on what is important.
Contents
Introduction: Breaking the Myths of Attention
Part One: The Anatomy of Attention
Chapter One: Your Limited Cognitive Resources
Chapter Two: The Battle for Your Attention
Chapter Three: Types of Attention
Chapter Four: Why, How and How Much We Multitask
Chapter Five: The Consequences of Constant Interruption
Part Two: The Underlying Forces of Distraction
Chapter Six: The Rise of the Internet and the Decline of Focus
Chapter Seven: How AI and Algorithms Influence Your Thoughts
Chapter Eight: Our Digital Social World
Chapter Nine: Personality and Self-Regulation
Chapter Ten: Happiness and Our Devices
Chapter Eleven: How the Media Conditions Our Attention
Part Three: Focus, Rhythm and Balance
Chapter Twelve: Free Will, Agency and Our Attention
Chapter Thirteen: Achieving Focus, Rhythm and Balance
Chapter Fourteen: The Future of Attention
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
Introduction:
Breaking the Myths of Attention
We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet
only at the cock-crowing and the morning star.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imagine opening your laptop at the beginning of the day. Right away, you
are faced with an onslaught of emails. You glance over them, a number of
them demanding some thought, and you begin to answer them, realizing
each takes quite a bit of effort. You then switch to work on a project that
you have to finish today, take some phone calls, but then you receive a
notification of another email from your supervisor. You jump to that right
away to communicate implicitly to her that you are doing your job. But then
your calendar notifies you of your next Zoom meeting. It is only 10 a.m. but
you are already starting to feel fatigued. By three o’clock you can barely
think about that project coming due. You start to work on it and find that
you have trouble focusing and keep making mistakes.
Or perhaps your plan for the day is to work on your taxes. But you first
check Facebook and find yourself caught up in your friends’ posts. A link
to an interesting video brings you to YouTube, and then you notice
recommendations on the sidebar and become immersed in watching other
videos. You break away from YouTube and go back to your taxes but then
remember you have to send emails about that remodeling job on your
house. Once you are in your inbox you see other emails you should deal
with. Three hours have gone by and you no longer have the energy nor the
inclination to focus on those taxes.
We have developed unbreakable bonds with our computers and phones
for much of our waking hours. When you hear a chime on your phone
signaling an incoming text you cannot ignore it. The ubiquity of
smartphones and internet accessibility has changed norms of both work and
personal life with expectations for us to be available 24/7. It is not
uncommon for people to report that they wake up in the middle of the night
and check their phones for emails and text messages. I have heard this a lot
during my research. Any individual who tries to disconnect pays a price for
not keeping up with information and messages. Between our competitive
world of work and our interconnected social web of relationships, no one
can afford to be out of the loop.
A new type of behavior has emerged with the rise of computing where
we dynamically switch our attention among different apps, screens and
devices. As a research scientist, I have been fortunate in that I have been
able to watch (and empirically track) this pattern of attention-switching, and
with it, stress and exhaustion buildup, over the last twenty years as we
became more reliant on our devices. Simply put, our use of personal
technologies affects our ability to pay attention. What I have seen is that in
the last two decades, human minds have collectively undergone a striking
change in how they focus on information. But I have also seen how stress is
associated with attention-switching—we need to take this seriously as the
World Health Organization identified stress as a health epidemic of the
twenty-first century.1 At the time of this writing, the world has been
struggling through a pandemic, people are spending more time than ever on
their devices, and stress has increased.
I am, by training, a psychologist, but I almost didn’t become one. The
microbiologist Louis Pasteur wrote that “chance favors the prepared mind,”
and it was by chance and with a mind open to opportunity that I entered this
field. The truth is, I started out as an artist and never thought I would do
anything else. I studied fine arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art,
specializing in painting and drawing. I was deeply entrenched in abstract
expressionism—so deeply, in fact, that years later when I read the
notebooks that I kept while painting, I couldn’t make sense of them. The
writing was too abstract from my current perspective as a scientist.
After graduating, I received a fellowship from the British Arts Council
and went to London to paint murals. But during that year, I experienced the
reality of how difficult it was to make a living as an artist. I also learned
that one recent talented art school graduate was now studying to be a dental
hygienist to make a living (a fine profession, but not one that requires years
of art training). I had also heard that another artist I knew was working as
an elevator operator. While some people might be so dedicated to their art
that they were willing to spend eight hours a day at a job that they didn’t
like to support their passion, I quickly realized that this life was not for me.
Fortunately, I was also good at math, and I knew that it was a lot easier to
make a living using those skills.
This is how I ended up at the University of Michigan pursuing a master’s
degree in statistics, which would pave the way for me to study psychology
and computer usage. But at the time, I just needed to work, and so I applied
for a research assistant position with Manfred Kochen, an information
scientist. When I came into his office for the interview, Dr. Kochen asked
me: Can I code? (no); Do I know fuzzy set theory? (no); Do I know
network theory? (no). I picked up my backpack and started to walk out of
his office. Dr. Kochen then called after me, “Well, what can you do?” I
turned around and told him that I could paint. He told me to come back and
sit down.
Dr. Kochen told me that before getting his PhD at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in math, he took classes at the Art Students League
in New York. We then talked about art for two more hours. Finally, he said
to me, “I have a grant to study the discovery process. Do you think you
could work on that?” With the arrogance and naivete of youth, I told him
most certainly I could. I knew how artists made discoveries. I just needed to
find a way to describe it in scholarly terms. I dived into studying cognitive
psychology, and that work eventually grew into a paper presented at a
conference. I became immersed in the world of psychology and information
science, ultimately getting my doctorate at Columbia.
Chance crossed my path again when, in my first job after graduation, I
was hired at an information technology company to apply psychological
ideas to study technology use. This company, Electronic Data Systems, had
set up a laboratory affiliated with MIT. Known as EDS, it was
experimenting with how computers could support business meetings and
had set up a conference room with networked computers so that we could
study how people collaborated. The company had the foresight to believe
that they needed a psychologist to understand how people used computers
during business meetings. Today, networked computers in a conference
room are not something we would blink at, but back then, I remember
feeling thrilled, thinking that I had stepped into the future. The idea that I
could study technology use in a real work setting was exhilarating.
