Hello guys,
Here's a thing nobody tells you about doing your own research: sometimes you find out you were wrong :)

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I went into this one with a video already half-built in my head. Short-form video, attention spans, the whole thing. I knew roughly what I was going to say, I just needed the studies to confirm my words.

They didn't.

First, the famous statistic (the one about human attention spans dropping to 8 seconds, shorter than a goldfish), turns out to have no source. None. (wtf)

Fine, I thought. One bad statistic doesn't sink a whole idea.

Then I found the one that did.

A team went back through 30 years of published data on a standard attention test - 287 samples, 21,291 people, 32 countries, (1990 to 2021). They asked whether scores had shifted. They had. Upward! Adults today perform better on tests of concentration than adults did three decades ago. WTF 😳

I sat with that for a couple of days, because .. I wasn't sure what to make out of it.

But here's where it gets genuinely interesting, and where I stopped being able to tell a clean story in either direction.

Because there IS a real finding in here. A meta-analysis this year pooled 71 studies and nearly a hundred thousand people, and found that higher short-form video use really is linked to poorer attention and weaker impulse control. Those correlations are not small and they're not nothing.

So, yeah, I got into a rabit hole and in the end - I can't resolve that question. Neither can anyone else yet.

Which is why there's no video. But I still have all the notes. So I've put them in a PDF. Link is below.

Take it, argue with it, send it to whoever keeps forwarding you the goldfish thing.

One last thought, and it's the reason I care about any of this.

"Rot" is a word about damage that's already done. Rotten things don't come back. And if you genuinely believe that's what's happened to your attention, then there's nothing left to do about it except feel guilty.

But something's going on here for sure. The bad feeling after hours of scrolling on Instagram - that's real. I just don't think it's rot. And the difference matters, because one of those you can do something about.

​Link to PDF​

Talk to you soon,

Evie

EvieRan MSc in Psychology · University-trained coach · Author