Reclaiming Attention: The Problem Is Not Your Age

It happens in the middle of a page. The book is good, the armchair is the usual one, the afternoon asks for nothing, and yet, between two paragraphs, the hand has wandered on its own to reach for the phone. You find yourself with your thumb on the screen and the book lying open face down, like someone who catches themselves humming a song they don't even like. And behind the annoyance, a suspicion looms that is almost never voiced out loud: is something happening to me? Is it age?

It is best to answer quickly and in no uncertain terms: what you are noticing is not a matter of your age. The dispersion that worries you has not been measured in seventy-year-olds; it has been measured, above all, in office workers in their thirties and forties, in front of their computers, during working hours. It is the story of an era, not of an age. And understanding it—where it comes from, what science says and what it does not say—is the first step to reclaiming something that matters far more than productivity: the freedom to decide where you place your mind.

The woman who timed our distraction

Gloria Mark is not a digital wellness guru. She is a psychologist, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and has spent more than twenty years asking a seemingly modest question: how long does our attention stay on one screen before jumping to another? Her first study is from 2003. Back then, a working adult lasted an average of two and a half minutes—150 seconds—on the same screen before switching. When she repeated the measurements around 2020, the average was 47 seconds. And this is not an anomaly from her lab: the figure, she says, has been replicated by several teams, and when pooling studies from 2016 to 2020, the average comes out the same. Forty-seven seconds.

From two and a half minutes to three-quarters of a minute in less than two decades. The number is striking, and headlines have milked it for all it is worth. But Mark adds two details that almost never make the headline. The first: half of the time, nobody interrupts us. The phone doesn't ring; we just pick it up. The second: recovering concentration after an interruption takes, according to her measurements, nearly half an hour. Do the math on any given day and you will understand that feeling of reaching the end of the evening tired without knowing exactly why.

There is a third detail, and it is almost good news: the figure has been stable for about five years. Perhaps we have hit rock bottom. Mark herself, who could easily profit from alarmism, declares herself an optimist: she believes that the attention span can stretch again, and points out that people, companies, and even countries are moving in that direction—in France, the legal right to disconnect from email outside of working hours has existed for years.

The goldfish that never was

You might remember the headline: human beings now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. The figure came from a commercial report by a tech company, not from a scientific journal, and it should be taken for what it is: a slogan with scales.

The heart of the matter is more interesting. Scientists who study attention do not believe that "attention" exists in the singular, as a species-wide reservoir that empties year after year. Attention depends on the task, the moment, and who is paying it. The same person who cannot stand a thirty-second video prunes rose bushes for two hours without looking up, or stays up until dawn with a novel that has captured their pace. The reservoir is the same as always; what has multiplied is the number of hands tugging at it.

The news that doesn't make the front page: sustained attention matures late

In 2015, a team from Harvard Medical School and the Boston VA healthcare system published in Psychological Science the largest study ever conducted on sustained attention: 10,430 people aged between 10 and 70. The test was deliberately boring: black-and-white photographs fading into one another every eight-tenths of a second—mostly cities, occasionally mountains—pressing the spacebar for cities, staying still for mountains. Four minutes of designed monotony for the mind to wander. That is exactly what it measures: the ability to stay.

The results dismantle the predictable script. The ability to sustain attention improves rapidly during adolescence, yes; but it does not peak at twenty, like reflexes or rapid memory. It continues to fine-tune slowly for decades, reaching its peak around age 43. From there it declines, and here comes the nuance that changes the picture: it does so gently, at less than a fifth of the rate at which it grew during adolescence. A downhill slope so gradual that the incline is hard to see.

And there is more. With age, it is not just the capacity that changes; the method changes as well. Older participants responded with more caution, rushed less, and—most tellingly—monitored their own performance better: after a mistake, they slowed down and adjusted, and this self-monitoring grows steadily throughout adulthood. The study calls it "strategy." You know it by another name: experience.

Let's be honest about the other side, because this Notebook is not here to sell you one-sided curves. The decline after 43 exists, is real, and is measurable. And a four-minute laboratory test does not describe your Tuesday afternoon. But the map it draws is clear: sustained attention matures late, declines slowly, and becomes more careful with age. Quite far from the total blackout that the stereotype takes for granted.

What the 47 seconds do not mean

Now look back at the starting data with these glasses on. The 47 seconds measure a behavior: how long it takes us to switch screens when we work surrounded by screens. They do not measure the capacity of a brain, and no one has proven that the human faculty for concentration has diminished, let alone that it has done so forever. What we have is an environment designed to fragment—each application competes for your very resource, and not by chance—and a learned habit of interrupting ourselves. What is learned can be unlearned.

That is the difference between resigning oneself and taking action. If attention were a faculty that the years gradually extinguish, there would be little to do. Since it is a habit within an environment, there is a great deal.

The craft of returning

The practices that Mark herself uses and recommends are hardly heroic and not at all technological. Attention, she says, is driven by goals: it follows what is right in front of us, so write down on a piece of paper what you want to do this afternoon and keep it in sight; it seems like a small thing, but it is a rudder. Everyone has their good hours—there are larks, owls, and mid-afternoon people—and the difficult tasks deserve your best hour, not whatever is left over. Breaks work when they come before exhaustion and are tailored to each individual; Mark is wary of stopwatch recipes that are the same for everyone, and she would know. For clickbait content—she calls them attention traps—she does not demand heroic abstinence but rather scheduled windows: a short while, and then the door closes. And she adds two old remedies: twenty minutes of nature and a daily period of silence or meditation.

There is something about this stage of life that works in your favor and that Mark does not need to tell you: the day is more yours than it was in your forties. Those who work in an office suffer the pace of others; you can design your own, choose the best time for what matters, and leave the screen for when the time is right. Rarely in adult life are the owner of the schedule and the owner of the attention the exact same person.

There remains the oldest practice of all, the one this Notebook has championed since its very first list of books: reading slowly. A book is the opposite of an attention trap: it does not compete for you, it waits for you. Every sustained page is reclaimed territory.

In Thenomba's Senior program, Stage 8 of the journey—Understand your mind—dedicates an entire section to this everyday neuroscience: memory, attention, emotions, serenity, studied without alarm and in good company, under the motto of its sheet: "Knowing oneself is not weakness: it is wisdom." Understanding how one's own attention works—when it performs, what hijacks it, how it returns—is one part of that self-understanding. As for the other part, that of continuing to provide a world for the mind, we already spoke about that when discussing the cognitive reserve.

William James wrote more than a century ago that each person's experience is what they choose to attend to. Put simply at the end of the afternoon: your life is not made of your years; it is made of your hours, and your hours, of what you look at. The 47 seconds are not a sentence. They are a snapshot of an era, and snapshots of an era grow old. This afternoon, the book on the nightstand can last an entire page. And the next one, too.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.