posted on Feb, 26 2011 @ 12:39 PM
reply to post by mossme89
Attention span depends very much on the environment, habits, training of the ability to concentrate.
For example, a child used to spend a lot of time in front of TV will have a much short attention span than a child who spend a great deal of time
reading. Why? The images on TV screen are fast flashes of information, with a duration from 3-5 seconds (MTV) up to 10 seconds; the brain has no time
to analyze and concentrate on the information received before the next image. So in time the brain forms a habit to not linger more than 10 seconds on
an image or a piece of information; thus a very short attention span. As opposed to reading, where the brain not only must concentrate on what is
written, but also must use other resources like imagination.
Yet the short attention span can, with some training, be corrected and the child's brain will learn again to concentrate if you throw away the TV and
give him no other choice. We adapt.
In the digital age, as you put it, we are, most of the time, confronted with an intense stream of information from different sources in a very short
time frame, so the brain works less on concentrating and more on processing all those different inputs.
But in some African farming cultures, they have longer attention spans because they need to in order to farm.
It's because, by the nature of their life style, their brain have much less informational inputs to process, so it's used to take the time to properly
concentrate to the given task. Much less informational stress.
There are more interesting angles to this topic; with a little online research you can easily find it.
Hope it helps.
edit on 26-2-2011 by WhiteHat because: (no reason given)