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“I can’t do anything for more than fifteen minutes without looking at the mobile.” A while ago, in Xataka we published A very interesting report about how we had become an eternally decentralized generation. In it, a good number of testimonies and several experts talked about one of the common places of our time: the feeling that we are losing our ability to pay attention.
But is it true?
The question is not absurd, of course. Especially since the debate is not so much whether memory (attention or other cognitive abilities) changes with the use of mobile devices. Of course they change. They change functionally and do so at a structural level. As Manuel Sebastián explained to usResearcher at the Cerebral Cartography Unit of the Complutense University, “we know that the text that includes links (hypertext) seems to be remembered worse in general, which is totally logical because they constitute distractors and the role of attention is critical in memory” .
However, as Sebastián reminded us, “the fact that information is processed differently is not necessarily bad.” The question is whether the changes are worse, if they are leaving us more helpless in the face of certain phenomena of the world.
What about our attention? A few months ago, a team from the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Vienna this question was askedbut it is not something to answer. After all, to do so we need to be able to go beyond personal sensations and find attention measurements in numerous contexts, times and ages. Measurements, in addition, that they were not theoretical but were vinvulated to solve concrete problems. Where could they find such data?
There was only one answer: in Intelligence tests.
That huge tailor drawer that are intelligence tests. For decades, psychologists have been passing intelligence tests to millions of people and, thanks to this, we have a huge base of psychometric evaluations. Well, among that huge amount of data: there is attention tests.
Once they realized this, the Researchers gathered 179 Studies with 287 independent samples from 32 different countries over 31 years: that is, they gathered evidence of more than 20,000 people and examined whether throughout these three decades a decay of attention was identified.
The results are … counterintuitive. When they examined children, adolescents and young people, They realized that their scores remained stable over the years. When they examined adults, they found that, in fact, The scores improved. Yes, you have read well: our attention has been improving for years.
So we are not losing attention capacity? As Adam Grant saidProfessor of Organizational Psychology at Wharton, the problem has never been attention, it is motivation. If we want to use our attention we have the ability to do it, the problem is that we usually do not want. We are so surrounded by interesting and attractive things that we end up letting us fall into multitasking.
And, of course, that has consequences. In fact, it is likely that these consequences are the most notice and those that produce the feeling that we are losing the ability to pay attention.
Come on, we are “cheating” ourselves. For example, we know that “pay attention” to various media at the same time (watch a movie while we consult the mobile) It has a negative effect on memory. That is, we remember worse what we see while we do other things. The fact is that when we begin to remember the movies worse, we attribute it to our attention and not to the way we saw the movie. Everything is confused.
And you have to be careful with that, because if we do not start from reality, it will be impossible Dominate again Our attention capacity.
Image | Cristofer Maximilian
In Xataka | Do not leave for tomorrow what you could do today has left us a hidden problem: Precrastication
*An earlier version of this article was published in February 2024
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