Has the internet ruined our Attention Spans?

Thanks to the internet’s constant stream of information, endless notifications, and explosion of rapid-fire, short-form content, are we losing our capacity for sustained focus and deep concentration?

It seems like a lot of people think so, blaming their short-form video watching habits for their own attention declines. A quick search online will show countless people claiming they can no longer focus properly on anything – which doesn’t sound great.

I sat down with Dr. Patrick Clarke, a Clinical Psychologist and Associate Professor at Curtin University, to help us get a better perspective on what attention is, its different types, how they’re being affected by the digital world, and whether there’s any evidence that our attention spans are being affected by the internet.

Check out the episode here.

Gareth King (00:30)

Patrick, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the show.

Patrick Clarke (00:34)

Great pleasure, thanks for having me.

Gareth King (00:36)

Before we begin, can you tell us a bit about the work that you do and the journey that led you to this area of expertise?

Patrick Clarke (00:42)

Yeah, so I guess I'm comparatively new to this area, although I've got quite a history and a background working in the sort of attention space. So, a lot of the work I did through my PhD, and some of the sort of more clinically applied work I've done in psychology has been about understanding the way in which people allocate their attention to things that might signal potential danger in the environment, or be the source of anxiety, and how the way attention can be just distributed amongst these things or how you know things that seem to just pop out of the background for some people you know more threatening faces or all the rest of it might shape people’s emotional experiences.

And it was kind of through this and through some studies that we were running with where we were doing little training tasks, trying to train attention towards or away from different types of content, that I gradually started thinking about, well, if we're doing these little tasks that might take 10 or 15 minutes and hoping to see changes in the way people are processing information, it was sort of around that time, we're like, we're spending increasingly large amounts of time on our digital devices, you know, two to three hours a day and thinking that, you know, the feedback loops that might be happening between humans and their devices could be having some pretty hefty effects potentially on both, you know, their patterns of cognition and the way they process the world, but also, you know, their emotional experiences as well.

And I started to get very interested in it from there and kind of came in at an interesting and kind of critical point, I think, where people were just starting to realise that a lot of the measures that they were using in this research, which was mostly relying on people estimating how much they were using, might not be kind of a gold standard way to be doing it. And I guess I was sort of, of a similar mind thinking we need to be really rigorous in how we're sort of assessing some of these things. And it's sort of, yeah, escalated from there.

Gareth King (02:35)

I understand there's been quite a lot of research around different types of attention and the impact over time. Before we get into that, can you briefly explain what the different types of attention are?

Patrick Clarke (02:48)

Yeah, it's really interesting because we talk about attention like it's a single thing, but attention can more broadly be operationalised as a set of processes. So, I guess typically when we're thinking about attention, it's about what maintains our focus on a single thing or a subset of things. But there's a few kind of sub-processes that are involved in that. And perhaps one of the most critical ones is this process called inhibition or inhibitory control.

You know, it sort of relates to this other very broad idea about, we don't so much have free will as free won't. You know, the process of inhibiting all this irrelevant information that's bombarding our senses in the environment at any given point in time is so critical to us to actually be able to retain focus on something.

So there's this sort of, you know,  inhibition process, which allows us to retain focus on something for sustained periods of time. But then there's other processes like switching, being able to jump between, alternative bits of information that might be either in different parts of the world, but also maybe information that might be in the same part of the world. I can be looking at a piece of text and I can be looking at the colour of that text or the font of that text and different sorts of properties. So these sorts of attentional switches that might sort of happen.

And then there's sort of this, higher level processes. You've probably heard a bit about working memory and the like that are kind of, you know, use some of these attentional processes, but they're more about how much information you can hold in mind and how you can manipulate some of those processes as well. So those are kind of the some of the broad basic you know processes yeah that contribute to our experience of attention and attention focus I guess.

Gareth King (04:27)

That's interesting around the free will versus free won't point. I guess in the context of the free won't, when you're trying to shut everything out, what do we kind of max out at that we can block out or be taking in at any given moment before we start losing that focus?

Patrick Clarke (04:44)

Yeah, it's really interesting. I find a really interesting concept related to that is just this idea of load. There's only so much sensory load we can carry before our abilities start to diminish in some areas. Now there's some kind of little exceptions sometimes of those things where like a small amount of background distraction or, you know, there's some evidence suggesting that when there's some white noise in the background, people show some slight improvement in these sorts of things.

But generally speaking, as we take in more stimulus from our environments, our ability to kind of retain focus on one specific given task starts to diminish. Head-up displays on cars was a great real-world example of them. I think they do have them now, but the displays they have are really, really minimal. And I think in the past they had these really elaborate head-up displays and, you know, the stats were showing that people who driving those cars were having accidents at much higher rates.

Patrick Clarke (05:36)

So it does tend to tax our attention, some of that sort of extraneous information, in our, in our worlds. But within that though, we are, you know, really, really good at sort of information filtering as well. And a lot of the things that we kind of take for granted, you know, at any given moment when things are reasonably sort of quiet, we're ignoring a whole bunch of sensations that are going on in our body and our clothing and all these sorts of things. And, you know, even the cocktail party effects, when there's all these different conversations going on around you that might be at a similar volume or different and you can selectively focus in on one specific conversation. It's a really incredible ability that kind of information filtering.

Gareth King (06:05)

Yeah, that’s very interesting to know, especially around just that point you mentioned too, around white noise. Is there anything that kind of supports listening to that in the background that will help you shut out everything else to focus on the one thing that's in front of you?

Patrick Clarke (06:30)

Yeah, and again, it's a kind of a bit of a threshold thing. So I think at a small and low level, and there's different kind of theories about why that might be the case, but almost like it, you know, there's part of... there's this sort of distinction between top-down attention. That's, you know, using our executive systems, this is what I want to do at this moment in time. Now, if that was all that was going on, and, you know, we're hunting in the African savanna or, you know, focused on one specific task, and then something really, really dangerous happens, or there's something that needs us to shift our attention, if all that was governing what we're doing is this sort of top-down focus, then we would be in all sorts of strife, because we need to be able to disengage from those tasks.

So on the flip side of this this bottom up stimulus driven stuff. So sudden onset things, hearing our name in the background, know, sudden sorts of things will grab our attention. So kind of the idea with having that little bit of background stuff happening is that it maybe reduces us scanning our backgrounds a little bit. And so that we're actually more likely to be immersed in that top down remaining focus rather than picking up little bits of background distractions that kind of pull us away. Now with that said, higher, you know, the more stimulus we're adding and the more information that is coming into it, the more likely we might be then to be sort of pulled away to that a bit more.

Gareth King (07:45)

Right, is that why you can listen to kind of soft background, whether it's the sound of an ocean or the rainforest you know, when you're trying to go to sleep, is that to kind of help you shut everything out and then get, to sleep?

Patrick Clarke (08:08)

Yeah, look, and that, it can vary a lot from different people. I know some people who are like, no, I just need it completely quiet. And sometimes I'm, you earplugs in and all the rest of it, but other people, it just gives them that little, you know, if they're all up in their head and chewing over the day's events or worrying, then it just gives them that little bit of external focus. But, you know, they're not listening to some soothing death metal as they're going off to sleep because it'll be a bit too stimulating.

Gareth King (08:31)

Yeah, I don't know how that would work.

Patrick Clarke (08:34)

Low level background stuff can be helpful. You other people, you know, saying they listen to music a little bit when they're studying, but also some people say they're very specific types of music that they can listen to when they're studying. I do a lot of obviously, you know, reading and writing, and I find I can just do instrumental stuff. But as soon as I'm listening to stuff with many lyrics, it starts to interfere with, yeah, the other tasks that I'm doing.

Gareth King (08:56)

Yeah, to be honest, I find that myself, you know I can listen to instrumental of almost any type of music and still keep the focus on the task. But yeah, once the lyrics are there, it's definitely way more engaging. All right. Let's get back around to the kind of internet and impact on attention spans. So what exactly does attention span mean in the context of the digital age? Has the meaning evolved as the technology has and how is it measured?

Patrick Clarke (09:23)

Yeah, so it's interesting and I think it really, something sort of comes through a lot once we start diving into some of the research on this is the kind of this interesting distinction between what we tend to do, our kind of behavioural tendencies, right? And when it comes to attention span, I think the way that's often operationalised popularly is how much we tend to sustain our focus without becoming distracted by something else. Just how much we tend to focus on one piece of information before we scroll on, how much we spend on a particular news article before we've got enough information and we skip to something else.

Often that's assessed a bit differently within the context of cognitive assessment tasks where we are really assessing, alright, how long can someone sustain focus and still be continuing to pick up bits of information that are thrown at them within the context of some sort of assessment task or similar. But I think broadly it's that kind of what's the duration that people are sustaining focus on something for is probably that general working definition of it.

Gareth King (10:13)

Yeah, OK, so I guess it's not really any one kind of defined measure. Obviously, if you want to try and focus on something that's five seconds long, that's a lot easier than something that's half an hour. OK, let's go back to that research that we touched on. What's it been showing over time in this context?

Patrick Clarke (10:55)

In terms of research on attention?

Gareth King (10:57)

Yeah, and the impact of the digital world.

Patrick Clarke (11:00)

Yeah, absolutely. So I think as you know many people would know there's the research on attention spans as it pertains to how much time people are spending on individual bits of information within online forums, whether that be social media or sort of other formats, has gradually reduced over time. we are, you know, most of these sort of behavioural measures are suggesting that the amount of time that we're sort of attending to or focusing on that sort of information has reduced a bit.

Now, I guess there's been all sorts of, you know, concerns about flow-on effects for attention and learning. And there is this real subjective sense, I think, from a lot of people who will volunteer it, that, you know, I just, I can't retain focus for longer periods of time, and this is an ability that's being diminished. The really interesting thing is, is that there is just no evidence that the abilities themselves have diminished.

If you sit someone down in a room, you give them one of these, you know, cognitive tasks that have been used over decades, there has just been no evidence of any decline generation on generation. These abilities are good and they tend to be either, you know, sustained or are slightly better than they were. So it's interesting in the sense that what we are actually doing behaviourally is occurring over shorter durations. But when we have the proverbial gun to our heads or we're in a situation where it's like, just do this thing, we can actually call on that ability without too much difficulty.

Gareth King (12:34)

Yeah, right. So I guess then it just kind of comes down to several factors, one of which would be kind of interest and engagement with whatever's in front of you. But how long does it take for, I guess, the brain, as you said, we're driven by shorter and shorter types of content. How long does it take for us to be able to go, okay, I'm going to focus on something long form now and be fine. And then something short form. Is there kind of movement within the ability over time?

Patrick Clarke (13:10)

Look, I think 100%. And it's one of those general kind of truisms a bit, that while we've got this kind of base level of ability, right, and when we think about things like working memory or this inhibitory control ability or anything else like that, these things seem to stay pretty intact across the lifetime. They're not sort of changed or diminished. But, we tend to get better at what we practice in terms of, you know, habitual, you know, behavioural sort of things. So when we practice switching between lots of different, you know, fast paced things, as, you know, is often the case in the demands that are put on us from work and all the rest of it, we get practiced at switching from one thing to another thing to another thing. And we can go from, you know, detailed conversation on one thing to another, you know, quick email firing on a different topic and all the rest of it. And we're very practiced at that.

But I think as a lot of people report then when it comes time to write, Here's this slightly more onerous thing that requires me to focus on this kind of thing and I need to push myself through it a little bit, they experience more challenging difficulty to that and my suspicion is that that's partly because we are practicing a lot of switching between lots of sort of small bits of information and perhaps also becoming accustomed to getting little bits of information really really quickly out of things that it's sort of shorter and shorter durations so that yeah it feels harder to do these other things.

Gareth King (14:37)

I guess the connection I'm trying to draw on that then is a lot of people say that they can focus and get a lot more done in, say, a working from home kind of environment, because they don't have all those distractions when they're in the office. So say you're trying to sit at your desk in an office or wherever you work, and you've got people coming up to you, interrupting you, you've got emails flying around, all of that thing. Is there any research or evidence into when you say stop your focus, talk to somebody and then try and get back into something, is there any lag on how long that takes?

Patrick Clarke (15:13)

Definitely, yeah. And born out by lot of research. So even sort of switching between two similar tasks, if we're, I don't know, going from one verbal task to another verbal task, but then to a visual spatial task, it'll be more challenging switching to that other. And this is kind of like what they call set shifting. We shift from one sort of intellectual set to another set.

So it's almost like, you know, when we're talking about attending to a single thing, well, you know, if we're reading an article or something, obviously, there's no single thing, there's many many different words but it's all kind of thematically gathered but when we switch from focusing on that kind of thematically related content to having an unrelated conversation to then trying to, okay where was I, what was I doing again, all right that's it. There is that little bit of a cost in time.

Now with that said there's also you know amounts of time over which it's actually, you and you've probably heard about pomodoro techniques and these sorts of things where it can be helpful to focus for, I don't know, 20 minutes on a task and then have a brief break and these sorts of things. It's because we are, you know, very time limited in sustaining that high level of focus sometimes too.

Gareth King (16:12)

OK, can you train that high level focus? Or is it something that our brain caps out at?

Patrick Clarke (16:27)

You can train it, but it's one of those things that I think again relates to habits that we use across many, different contexts and settings. And when we practice that switching again and again and again, I think it does come at the cost sometimes of that ability to maintain that focus. But as is kind of popularised as well, things like mindfulness are probably among those techniques where it's about kind of just that immersion in that present moment and building the focus in and around that rather than switching between multiple different things so yeah I think absolutely it is possible we haven't necessarily lost those abilities permanently where we're perhaps just not as, not as practiced or not as inclined to be using them as frequently as perhaps we were in the past.

Gareth King (17:23)

Okay, can you tell us a bit about, the notion of brain plasticity? And then if it is adapting to whatever we're feeding it, essentially, you know, how does that evolve? And I guess has the brain changed from, where we would have been 500 years ago to, to now, Or is it a very natural, biological thing?

Patrick Clarke (17:44)

Look both in some ways. So, and I think particularly when it comes to humans, one of the things that probably sets us apart a little bit from, you know, some other mammals and perhaps some of our other sort of great apes, is the fact that were with perhaps a higher degree of plasticity and learning potential. You know, you see, a giraffe or a foal or something that's born immediately within an hour it's up and it's walking and all these sorts of things but we have these ridiculously immature infants that are kind of highly dependent on us for a long period of time.

But within that there's this greater flexibility and capacity to learn you know different types of information. You see this across amazingly diverse different sorts of cultural norms that we see and the ways in which humans have been able to adapt to incredibly different conditions all across the planet which has been one of the reasons that we've sort of you know been so successful in that regard, but there is some pretty fundamental neural architecture that we're operating on. You know it's that classic we've got all this very stone age hardware operating on this sort of 21st century software.

So, there are things that we can just get like you were saying before overloaded with. There’s only so much stimulus that we can kind of take in from our environments. And as you were sort of saying, I think our environments have changed just, insanely, immeasurably, you you referenced the last, you know, 500 years, but even beyond that, since, you know, agriculture sort of got going, you know, 10 to 12,000 years ago, and the sort of industrialisation of the worlds that we're living in, we've gone from these very small communities where we kind of knew and we're able to predict the behaviour of sort of absolutely everyone to this, you know, very highly industrialised and centralised cities where we interact with many, many people with a sort of a shared set of rules about how that goes, but many people that we're sort of unfamiliar with.

But also beyond that, the amount of information that we're exposed to, I think, in our daily lives, someone brought from 500 years ago would be very overwhelmed by the sort of environment in which they found themselves, I would imagine. So I think perhaps one of those key abilities that we've perhaps been improving on over time and adapting considerably is that filtering capacity, being able to very rapidly screen what within this sea of information in front of me is the really critically important information and what around it is sort of perhaps a bit less important.

Gareth King (20:25)

I guess obviously the environment of the internet is just kind of relentless. It's constantly throwing everything at you. So I guess gaining that ability to filter out the shit and focus on what's good is a helpful thing. So, is that just us kind of adapting to the environment?

Patrick Clarke (20:33)

Yeah, you can kind of see, adapting into the environment, but I think that that sort of information flow, you remember that you might nearly be old enough to remember the early days of dial-up internet where you'd sort of connect, you'd connect to things and then you'd hear the tone, you'd go away and you make a cup of coffee as the computer loads up and all the rest of it.

Gareth King (20:55)

Yeah, I do remember, yeah.

Patrick Clarke (21:05)

But the amount of time now that it actually takes for us to get any webpage or any sort of information is so much faster than it used to be. So, we've probably got a lot more information coming at us a lot more rapidly than it was before. And I guess we're kind of employing tools both within our own cognitive systems, but even, I mean, control F these days, the amount of time within this vast document, alright, what is the absolute critical bits of information that I need to sort of seek out of this, so that I can fulfill whatever task it is that I'm trying to do and move on to the next kind of demanding thing that's going on.

Gareth King (21:27)

I guess leads me next to kind of the world of social media. We safely assume that people are hooked on these kind of quick dopamine hits and seek out that short form content which gives them that. So are we almost just tuning ourselves into this TikTok-y type stuff at the detriment of thinking that we can watch a two-hour film or something?

Patrick Clarke (22:00)

Yeah, it is interesting that and even, I don't know, I went and just I was watching an old film not that long ago. I think it was something like Groundhog Day and I was like, wow, editing has changed so much, even sort of in the last 20 years or so. And whether that's a result of, you know, the kind of fast paced information that we're using to, you know, receiving so much. And it is interesting that phenomenon, because obviously, potentially one of those effects of short form video content amongst a whole bunch of other things is that, you know, the tendency to dwell for a longer duration on specific bits of information and our tendency to kind of have shrunk that window. Always that interesting thing though is that ability is intact. So, when we're kind of required to do it or there is a demand on us to kind of do something like that, it doesn't seem to have disappeared. So, I think it's in that middle space where there's our kind of desire or tendency to want to do these things is kind of reducing, but maybe the demands of certain contexts or situations, whether that be university study or something else, say, no, no, you need to sit and really soak up this information.

Those things can collide sometimes. So things that I get curious about is whether or say short form video content exposure that people who engage in higher levels of that, whether they might need a higher threshold of anxiety or sort of imperative about their impending deadline to actually get them moving with it because the amount of requirement that the environment has to push on them before they sort of draw on that cognitive ability might potentially be higher.

So, I guess, again, it's that kind of, the ability seems to be there, but you're absolutely right that what we tend to do across these multiple settings seems to be kind of shrinking and there may be consequences for that in terms of particularly when performing tasks where we need to kind of have that slow, more sustained focus over a longer period.

Gareth King (24:12)

Does that manifest, you know, any changes once we're away from devices?

Patrick Clarke (24:17)

It's hard to say because a lot of the time when we sort of seek to assess it in a research context, most often we do that, we take people away from their devices, we put them in a room that's not particularly stimulating or anything else, and we give them these sort of validated cognitive tasks where they have one specific thing that they need to be doing.

So, when those sorts of contexts are implemented, people seem to perform fine, know, they are absolutely, you know, no problems in performing those abilities. I think it's when we are in those sorts of contexts where we have our devices and we have those sorts of distractions. you know you might, you've had that experience or know people who just almost get that, that itch where things are a little bit boring or a little bit quiet. And, you know, they just, pick up my device and, you know, engage with that a little bit.

And I think, you know, even sort of, anecdotally things like there are potential positives associated with just sitting with a little bit of discomfort at times I think as well and you know just small anecdotal things like our tendency to sort of spontaneously engage with strangers you know so, I remember when I when I was a lad you know before a tutorial or a class or something at university where, you know, there would be other people you stand around you were just standing around and there was nothing else to do. So you did kind of have a bit of a chat and engage in these sorts of things.

And I think the tendency for us to sort of switch to our devices as a bit of a sense of comfort in some ways could diminish some of those opportunities at specific points in time. With that said, I think there is the reverse side of it is that people have very rich online lives in many ways as well. So you know, while there's a lot of scrolling and all the rest of it that goes on, I see a lot of young people, you know, sharing amazing artworks and really creative endeavours online and connecting with a whole bunch of other people who are doing interesting similar things. So, I think there can be those negative consequences, but also perhaps the potential things that people are gaining from some of those are overlooked at times as well.

Gareth King (26:31)

And I guess that would obviously just come with being more native to the digital world and the possibilities are say, we mentioned a few minutes ago around dial-up internet, if you told someone that's say 13 years old about that now, it would seem completely alien. But that level of slowness and offering compared to what there is now is night and day. And that's only in what, what 30 years max. Insane.

Patrick Clarke (27:02)

Yeah, and if that, and it's kind of acceleration, yeah, which has been incredible.

Gareth King (27:08)

So, beyond just shifts in our attention, how does, our social media habits impact us in a wider sense? Do we get affected differently by engaging and spending so much time on social as opposed to anything else digital?

Patrick Clarke (27:23)

Yeah, look, I think there has been some very legitimate and very large concerns around social media use and some of the mental health impacts. Interestingly, I've gradually come to the conclusion that a lot of them are quite overstated. And I think it's been in part because of the way it has been measured in the past has been people's kind of guesses of how much they're using, which largely seems to be, you know, doesn't overlap much with how much they actually use.

So, what's been measured is how concerned people are of their social media use, which quite logically is related to how concerned and anxious they are about the world more broadly. So, you've gotten these sort of correlations between people's concern over social media use and concern more broadly. And it's almost led to this conclusion, well, social media use is associated with anxiety and depression and these other sorts of factors.

Whereas when we actually measure these things using mobile phone data or other sorts of things, these are really, really low associations and often they're just non-existent. We just simply don't find them when we measure them in the other ways. Now with that said, I think what does seem to come out is that it depends. You know, as with a lot of things, I think you can engage with things in ways that are immensely enriching. You know, we can connect with networks of people who have very similar shared and overlapping interests and build each other's capacities and share knowledge in ways that just was not possible previously.

Now, the flip side of that, I think if people have a tendency to worry. And I often recall as an example, I remember that at the start of Covid where everything was so much uncertainty out there, and everyone was sort of scanning information constantly trying to figure out, you know, how does this affect? How fast is it spreading? Is this in our country? You know, who's being affected by it?

Isomeone's sort of habitually concerned about lots of different things in their world and they have that tendency to engage with social media in that way where they're just on the lookout for threatening or negative stuff, that's really has the potential to skew their perception of the world in ways, because as we know, these things don't just randomly select information, they feed you more of what you are potentially engaging with and interested with.

So, I think in those sorts of contexts and we know of other examples of well, so particularly people with eating weight and shape concerns. Seeing reels full of Instagram influencers with flawless bodies probably isn't going to be something that's going to be particularly helpful. So, I think the consensus that a lot of researchers are beginning to move towards, albeit gradually, is that social media use isn't a single thing necessarily and it really does depend on the way in which it's engaged with in terms of what its potential consequences might be on mental health.

Gareth King (30:29)

I know we've touched on it a little bit, but you know, in the context of our emotions, even our identities or how we relate to each other, is there any impact on the way that, I guess, we navigate the digital world crossing over into the way real life or they seem like very different ways of being?

Patrick Clarke (30:46)

Yeah, look, I think there is quite a bit of research in that space and particularly within the social psychology field more that has looked at, the sort of way in which sort of online social environments potentially overlap with our extended social groups and the like. And there has been bits of research sort of suggested that we are perhaps tending towards a larger number of more casual engagements with people online as opposed to a smaller number of really high-quality intimate friendship relationships.

And I think there's sort of variations in that expression as well. So sometimes people who have very active online presences are perhaps more likely to have a very large number of, you know, very wide social network. But in terms of that really close, high quality friendship groups, that might be comparatively lacking. But of course, there's huge variation in that, you know, across people generally. But I have seen a little bit of research that suggests some of those effects, yeah.

Gareth King (31:53)

When it comes to attention and how much we're kind of feeling like we're losing it when we're online and engaging with things, you know, I was once speaking to a young guy, I think he was about 21 years old, and he was telling me how his attention span was shot these days. But then he explained to me that while he would be studying for university exams, he would have the notes on one screen and be watching a movie through headphones, you know, and with his phone next to it.

And then that's what made me think about this in the first place. It sounds like the attention span is maybe not shot, it's kind of a different way of taking in information, because I personally don't think I could handle that. But if someone is claiming that they're worried that their attention span is getting hurt through consumption of the digital world and online stuff, is there any strategies they can employ to try and reclaim their focus? Or is it simply a matter of just paying attention to something else?

Patrick Clarke (32:56)

I think, it's a fascinating example that you were sort of identifying there, that kind of, you know, on the one hand, is it in some ways almost a superpower that you've got this content kind of going in the background and you're still being able to engage.

But it's interesting, it's almost, you know, an extended example perhaps of that having a light bit of music in the background that just kind of dampens our tendency to switch away. I guess if you're so used to a really high level of stimulus operating perhaps you're almost dampening that tendency to switch away by turning up the volume on the on the information that's in the background potentially.

And it's, yeah, it is really interesting that, the thing that I'd be curious about, and again, I'm almost sort of thinking about the next research project as you're talking about it is the possibility, I'd really be interested to find out whether or not someone who has that tendency would perform better, say, on a memory task or something, when they do have that background information versus when they're just in a room with no distractions and they're sort of taking that information in and it might be a bit more of a kind of a habit type thing.

So, it'd be really interesting to kind of investigate it from that perspective. I think to the question of are there things that we can do to kind of, maintain or retain that high level of focus when we need it to be there. Absolutely. it's kind of coming back to that, we get better at what we practice, I guess, is part of it.

So, to the extent that we can kind of practice some of those mindful tasks a bit or in different contexts, and it doesn't have to be, it can be this little five minute app type things that are helpful for those sorts of things, but all sorts of just minimal little tasks. You know, you've probably caught yourself sitting there eating a sandwich, listening to music and scrolling on your phone all at the same time, just that sort of bombardment of stimuli, thinking about just identifying single tasks and going, no, no, I'm just gonna do that.

Beyond that though, I think actually being a bit more deliberate when we are taking on tasks that we know needs that focus rather than treating them as things that we can switch into and out of, is probably something that's quite useful as well. Because as we're saying, you switch from one thing to another thing to another thing, right, now I need high intensity focus. It's almost like, all right, well, what's gonna be ideal in terms of being able to do that?

Patrick Clarke (35:27)

Cause you know, the problem with phones is I remember when procrastinating, I would be cleaning the coffee machine and doing all these sorts of things. Phones are such rewarding and really low level procrastination. You don't have to do much to kind of get a bit of a kick out of them. And they're right there. So I think moving your device far away from you while you are needing to do that, you know, probably a lot of people are used to working with one or two or three screens these days as well, can have some efficiencies with it, but at the same time you're getting more stimulus there and you have that capacity to switch a bit more so reducing that down and then going all right do I need to be online for the next half an hour while I'm reading this thing or doing whatever else it is.

So again it's kind of like well when you do just get that little this is boring I'd really like to just switch to my phone, your phone's not there, okay I guess I'll keep going with this sort of thing or I'll just just look up this unrelated thing that I'm looked to, the internet's not okay okay that's why I'm focusing on it. So it just increases the threshold that it takes you to actually step away from that task and almost guides you back a little bit. So I think some of those sorts of techniques can be sort of very helpful, and also sometimes just accountability.

So I think when you can have a situation where you're like, right, I need to do this within this next half hour and you tell someone else then that who's in turn is going to be accountable for you for whatever they're doing, these sorts of things can help you kind of push through some of that as well.

Gareth King (36:53)

So I think, you know, sounds from everything that we've gone over today, there's not really any real consensus or evidence that the internet has permanently altered our attention spans or the ability to focus. And it sounds like it's more environmental, and if the time is spent kind of crafting that environment that you know is going to work best for you, whether, you know, as we, as we touched on earlier, it is working from home and not having those distractions or, you know, putting in some headphones with a bit of white noise. It sounds like that's actually the key factor in, what is going to help people concentrate, not so much, you know, claiming that the internet has ruined their attention spans. Is that correct?

Patrick Clarke (37:41)

Yeah, look, and I think that's the immensely reassuring thing that has sort of happened from what I've kind of systematically, you know, investigated through the literature reviews showing these abilities seem to be largely intact. We have not permanently compromised our attention or our cognitive capabilities in ways that aren't retrievable. What we have changed and changed pretty massively are our attention related habits.

So how much we tend to do these things and that sort of reclaiming of attention then involves, all right, well, how do I change these habits? How do I set things up so that I can create an environment where I'm more likely to be able to immerse myself in the things that are gonna be helpful in that context sometimes, yeah. But no, very reassuring that we haven't busted our brains fundamentally and permanently.

Gareth King (38:28)

That's, that's very good to know for anybody that is a bit concerned about that. What can people, you know, how can they follow you with what you're up to?

Patrick Clarke (38:37)

Yeah, sure. I guess I'm on Blue Sky and LinkedIn, a little bit and post bits and pieces of the research that we put out in our labs. We are, I guess I've been, part of a research project here in WA with Healthway looking at how young LGBTQ+ people are using social media and the like in ways that can be really enhancing for their mental health. So, recognising that this is kind of something that's endemic amongst young people and can be used for potential great benefit.

But also beyond that, really interested in how this can be shaping mental health both for better and for worse sometimes. And because it is such a changing landscape and environment, there's always sort of new and interesting things out there for us to be sort of understanding and what sort of impacts it's having on both our emotions and how we process the world and our cognitive capability. So it's something that we'll kind of keep chipping away at as they come up. But yeah, no, please by all means have a follow and we tend to put research out as we find it.

Gareth King (39:46)

Thank you so much for joining us today, Patrick. That was great.

Patrick Clarke (39:50)

Been a great pleasure, Gareth. Thanks for having me.