[ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 9:46 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

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> *>…* *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson
> *Subject:* [ExI] Attention Spans Decreasing?
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> >…So what do you think? Do you think your attention span has decreased
> over time? Do you think the attention spans of your associates and family
> members has gone down?  Kelly
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> There is no doubt we are seeing decreased attention spans everywhere.
> Before I get to that, this commentary postulates a related ability we have
> gained as we have lost the ability to focus for long periods: the ability
> to filter irrelevant info at a remarkable speed and effectiveness.
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### I recently read "The World until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond - he
mentions that bilingual and multilingual persons tend to score better on
some measures of executive function, especially at conflict tasks (the ones
that require managing conflicting information, switching between contexts,
and, not surprisingly, switching between languages). It is clear that our
informational environment, even within the "normal" range (no extreme
environmental deprivation), can have significant differentiating effects on
our minds. It is likely that dealing with information the internet way
molds our minds, especially our executive function, in a different
direction from the traditional way. I wonder if we become more
hunter-gatherer-like: not focused on anything in particular but paying
attention to a lot of clues, rather than farmer-like, ploddingly but
thoroughly tilling the same small plot.

Rafal
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