Goldfish generation: Are smartphones reducing our attention span?

Information has never been easier to access. Now, thanks to phones and other smart tech, we rarely have to rely on our memory. But is this doing more harm than good, asks Áilín Quinlan.

AS A fledgeling reporter on the night news-desk of a newspaper in the early 1990s, I had to make a round of police calls every few hours.

I used a laminated call-sheet as reference while plodding through the lengthy list of numbers. After a while, I no longer needed the call sheet. Why? Because I was making the calls up to three times a night, every night, and my brain was gradually learning the numbers.

Today’s junior reporters would probably input the list into their smartphone and simply press to make the call. Would they ever get to a point where they wouldn’t need that contacts list?

Doubtful, because these days, deluged as we are with the conveniences offered by touchtone phones and instant access to information about almost everything, we don’t have to remember nearly as much stuff.

As a result, it’s feared, both our memories and our concentration are weaker. A new phrase has been coined — we have become, it seems, the goldfish generation. , yes, the attention span of a goldfish. And it’s not just adults we should be worried about — there’s growing concern about the impact of smart devices on our kids’ brains, concentration levels, and memory capacity too.

Forgotten a name? Check your smartphone. Need an answer? Go to Google. The question is whether all this easy access to information is making our brains lazy.

THANKS FOR THE MEMORY

We all have senile moments when our minds go blank and we forget something we said just minutes previously. It’s mildly embarrassing but forgettable.

However, for Joe Biden, a recent memory lapse during a Democratic Party presidential debate with fellow candidate Julián Castro became instant news. The former vice president was accused of forgetting his stance on healthcare, less than a month after he also seemed to forget the name of former president (and his good friend) Barack Obama.

However Biden isn’t the only high-profile figure to forget something so basic — former UK prime minister David Cameron forgot the name of his favourite football team, while actress Gwyneth Paltrow forgot that she’d appeared in a Spider-Man film.

Many of us have issues with word- or name-finding. The concern is, that in this modern, tech-fuelled world, with people reporting rising levels of stress - while also getting less sleep - are our memories really getting worse?

Robert Bjork, a research professor at UCLA’s Department of Psychology, believes this may be the case, particularly in terms of our ability to recall phone numbers or addresses compared to the way we were before such information was accessible on smart devices.

When Bjork recently asked his students to write down all the phone numbers they could remember, he recalls, the tally was only a tiny fraction of the numbers that someone like him was able to recall at their age.

SKIMMING THROUGH

The impact of tech on our thinking and behaviour is an area that Dr Eoin Whelan specialises in. A senior lecturer in business information systems at NUI Galway, his research looks at the effects of modern technology on people’s cognition, behaviour, performance, and innovation, or, essentially, how tech is affecting us.

It’s still, says Whelan, too early to prove that our memories or concentration levels have actually deteriorated in recent decades as a result of the advent of tech.

“There’s no scientific evidence that we are getting worse,” he says. However, he adds, mankind is increasingly dependent on tech “to remind us of things” and that “we are outsourcing our memory to tech”. And, because information is now so readily available and all-encompassing, we’re not engaging with anything in depth, he says.

We’re skimming from one hyperlink to another and not engaging with the data we read and that, he suggests, may potentially be having an effect on our recall, memory, and understanding, but we don’t know for sure.

“It is very hard to stand over a general statement that the internet is affecting our memory. There is evidence on the effects of skimming. Research shows we will recall the content of material in hard-copy format like a book or a page and that we will retain it better than we would something on a screen, because you get distracted by the hyperlinks and other things like ads, which pop up,” says Whelan.

IS TECH TO BLAME?

The effect of tech on memory and concentration can be difficult to pin down. And if we are allowing ourselves to be distracted, says Whelan, then the responsibility lies with us.

It’s easy to blame tech — we have the same memory capacity as we had 100 years ago, but we’re allowing ourselves to be distracted.

“There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence about the fact that people are feeling that their memories are getting worse. We also see a lot of articles about the negative effects of tech, but this has not been proven by rigorous academic research.

“Before the advent of tech, you went to the library and you might be lucky to find the one book on the topic you needed. Now, however, you can type in keywords and volumes of information come up. We tend to skim now.

“However, the design of tech also encourages us to skim and hop about from one thing to another, because this is how companies learn about us, by tracking what we‘re interested in. This is data they can sell on to the marketing industry.”

Whelan believes that personality type can also influence how tech affects us.

Some people are simply more “distractable” than others, he says, adding that even in this age of tech-dependency, there are many who can still stay very focused and have strong recall.

He will shortly publish the results of his latest research into the effects of problematic social media use which looks at how some personalities are more vulnerable than others to over-exposure.

“We found that people who have a tendency to be easily bored tend to be over-exposed to social media and become overloaded with information,” he says.

Managing the impact of smart devices on ourselves is essentially about self-control, believes William O’Connor, professor of physiology at the Graduate Entry Medical School at the University of Limerick: “This is about being distracted by the world, and about not really being in control,” he says, adding that the practice of mindfulness is a powerful antidote to one’s tendency to become distracted.

“I don’t think smartphones are the problem — the problem is that there are some people who are distractable, and distracted. There are also people who are focused and get on with their lives and... not become hijacked by the distractions around us.”

After all, says Dr Whelan, the world has always been changing, and tech will change the way students and young people learn and understand things, so it is up to educational institutions and their staff to evolve and adapt and use technology to enhance learning.

CHANGING BRAINS

There is no doubt that our brains are changing in response to the impact of tech on our immediate environment — they have always changed in response to new things, says Dr Sabina Brennan, a memory expert and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the ADAPT Centre in Trinity College Dublin:

“The human brain is highly responsive to experience. It is flexible, adaptable, it can change by reorganising itself and by growing new connections between neurons (brain cells).

The human brain remodels itself by changing brain architecture and by changing human behaviour. Brain evolution has been central to our survival as a species,” she says, adding that over millions of years, human innovations from harnessing fire for cooking and language for communication or the invention of tools for hunting have had a huge influence on the size and evolution of the human brain.

“So, yes, modern technology including smartphones with their capacity for storing our memories will shape our brains,” she says. However, in terms of fears about the emergence of a “goldfish generation”, she says that while there is “observational knowledge” of decline in attention spans, definitive scientific evidence underpinning this theory it is not there.

“Teachers describe the current generation of students as easily distracted with short attention spans or fundamentally different in cognitive skills because of the digital technologies they have grown up with,” she says, adding that in terms of scientific evidence, it is currently unclear whether research supports these observations.

However excessive screen-time appears to impair brain structure and function. “Much of the damage occurs in the brain’s frontal lobe, which undergoes massive changes from puberty until the mid-20s,” she says.

Research on the impact on cognition is sparse so it’s difficult to draw conclusions.

A study, published in the journal  Neuroscience by researchers at the University of Sussex, has shown that simultaneously using mobile phones, laptops and other media devices could be changing the structure of our brains.

Published in 2014, it found that people who frequently use several media devices at the same time have lower grey-matter density in one particular region of the brain compared to those who use just one device occasionally.

Meanwhile, recent research from the Technical University of Denmark suggests the collective global attention span is indeed narrowing due to the huge amount of information the public is faced with every day, something being branded as information overload or “info-besity”.

So, yes, it seems that while smart technology, is certainly having an impact on our brains and our lifestyles, science has yet to prove the detail of exactly how this will affect our thinking, memory, and concentration in the long term.