I‘ve been thinking about attention span lately — or more accurately, the lack thereof.

Back in 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a piece in The Atlantic called, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Over the ensuing years, researchers have been documenting a significant decline in our ability to focus and retain information. Anyone who has caught themselves reading the same paragraph twice without remembering it knows what I’m talking about.

What makes this particularly insidious is not that it feels normal — it doesn’t. It’s that it feels easier. We’re surrounded by so much visual stimulation that concentration, by comparison, starts to feel like studying for an exam.

The architecture of our information environment — social media, search engines, the news cycle — is designed to keep us moving at a fast pace. Every click, swipe and notification triggers just enough of a dopamine hit to make stopping feel bad. If that isn’t addiction 101, I don’t know what is. We didn’t opt into this — it was designed to capture us.

The result is that deep, linear thinking — the kind that follows an argument from beginning to end and actually changes how we see something — has become effortful in a way it didn’t used to be. It’s not impossible, but it feels like seriously hard work. And because effort is required, most of us default to the quicker version — the headline, the summary, the soundbite. We get the conclusion without the critical thinking, and then we move on.

I have been a reader my whole life — and I am not immune to any of this. Knowing this tendency exists makes me more mindful, but I still battle that ever-present desire to pick up the phone, versus the book on my bedside table.

What concerns me is what we lose when we can no longer read something all the way through. Not just in terms of information — but in terms of judgment. The ability to step outside a narrative, put it in context, and then ask ourselves if it feels true — that capacity is built through unhurried thinking. We can’t survive on a diet of fragments.

The good news is, there are some surprisingly simple practices that can help restore our ability to focus.

Reading on paper rather than a screen improves both comprehension and retention — there’s something about the physicality of it that keeps the brain more engaged. Closing every app or tab except the one you’re viewing sounds obvious, but the mere visibility of other open options has been shown to splinter attention before you’ve read a single sentence. And thirty minutes of uninterrupted reading daily, appears to rebuild the neural pathways that sustained concentration requires.

The brain, as it turns out, is very resilient.

Of course the irony is not lost on me that you — if you’ve actually made it this far — are probably looking at this on a screen. But let’s not worry about that for now. I will simply thank you for reading — even if you skipped to the end.

Libby

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