Your Attention Span is Shorter Than That of a Goldfish. Or is it?

“The Statistic Brain website looks pretty trustworthy too. It even says they "love numbers, their purity, and what they represent" - just the kind of people with whom we, at More or Less, can get along.

As if to prove it, the number-lovers at Statistic Brain source all their figures. But the sources are infuriatingly vague.

And when I contact the listed sources - the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine, and the Associated Press - neither can find any record of research that backs up the stats.

My attempts to contact Statistic Brain came to nothing too.

I have spoken to various people who dedicate their working lives to studying human attention and they have no idea where the numbers come from either.”

Reading time: 3 min

The human vs goldfish attention span claim

A claim you may have heard is that human attention span is decreasing, to the point where goldfish now have a longer attention span than humans.

After conducting extensive research (read: looking at the first page results of a Google search), I generally got the following from many sources (with more or less similar wording):

“Humans now have an attention span