No, the average person’s attention span isn’t 8 seconds, and it isn’t shorter than a goldfish’s. That number came from a 2015 Microsoft Canada report that credited a website whose figures nobody could trace, and an attention researcher told the BBC the idea of one “average attention span” is close to meaningless. What the best evidence does show is narrower, and more useful: we switch between screens and tasks much more often than we used to.
You’ve probably seen the claim in a slide deck or a headline. Here’s where it came from, why it doesn’t hold up, and what the real findings mean for your own focus.
Where the 8-second figure came from
The claim usually goes like this: the average attention span fell from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds today, one second less than a goldfish’s 9.
In 2017, Simon Maybin of the BBC World Service program More or Less followed it back to its source. By then it had appeared in Time, the Telegraph, the Guardian, USA Today, the New York Times and the National Post. All of those references led to a 2015 report from Microsoft Canada’s Consumer Insights team, which surveyed 2,000 Canadians and studied the brain activity of 112 people as they did various tasks.
But the famous number wasn’t from Microsoft’s own research. The report credited it to a website called Statistic Brain. Statistic Brain listed its sources, the US National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information and the Associated Press, but when Maybin contacted them, neither could find any record of research behind the figures. His attempts to reach Statistic Brain got nowhere.
So the most quoted fact about attention spans has no study behind it that anyone could find.
Why “average attention span” doesn’t mean much
The bigger problem isn’t the missing source. It’s the idea of measuring one number at all.
Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University who studies attention, told the BBC that an average attention span is “pretty meaningless” and “very much task-dependent.” How much attention you give something depends on what the task asks of you and what you bring to it.
That matches everyday life. You can lose focus on a dull form in a few seconds, then spend three hours lost in a game, a novel or a conversation. Neither is your “attention span.” They’re two different situations.
And the goldfish? The same BBC investigation found no evidence that goldfish, or fish in general, have particularly short attention spans or memories. Both halves of the comparison fall apart.
Lots of people still believe it
The myth has staying power. In September 2021, Savanta ComRes surveyed 2,093 UK adults for King’s College London’s Policy Institute. Half of them (50%) wrongly believed the average adult attention span is just eight seconds.
The same survey found people were more likely than not to feel their own attention span is shorter than it used to be: 49% said so, against 23% who didn’t. That feeling is worth taking seriously, even if the 8-second number isn’t. It just needs better evidence than a goldfish.
What researchers do measure
When people say attention spans are shrinking, they usually mean one of a few different things. They’re worth keeping apart.
How long we stay on one screen
The strongest evidence comes from Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied how people work with screens for more than two decades. In an interview published by the University of California, she explains that in her first study, begun in 2003, people’s attention averaged about two and a half minutes on any screen before they switched. In the last five or six years, her team found an average of 47 seconds, and half of all observations were 40 seconds or less. She says other researchers have found similar averages, of 50 and 44 seconds. Her more recent work uses computer logging, among other methods, to record how long people stay on each screen.
She gave the same headline numbers in a 2023 CBS News interview, where she said there is scientific evidence that attention spans are getting shorter.
This is real data, but notice what it measures: how long people stay on one screen before switching. It doesn’t measure how long a person can concentrate, and it doesn’t show a fixed limit in the brain. Elsewhere in the University of California interview, Mark makes a related point: people aren’t built to focus for long stretches without breaks, any more than they can lift weights nonstop.
How long a topic holds the public’s interest
A 2019 study in Nature Communications by Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and colleagues looked at something else: how quickly the public moves on from a topic. On Twitter, a hashtag in the hourly top 50 stayed there for 17.5 hours on average in 2013 and 11.9 hours in 2016. The authors found a similar speeding up in most of the other datasets they studied.
It’s easy to read this as proof that your own attention span is shrinking. But the authors say clearly that their “collective attention” is different from attention in cognitive psychology, which is about how an individual focuses. Their study is about how fast topics come and go across a population, not how long you can read a page.
How heavy multitaskers handle distraction
A 2009 Stanford study in PNAS by Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner compared people who often use several media at once with people who rarely do. The heavy multitaskers were more easily distracted by irrelevant information and did worse on a test of switching between tasks.
That study is about an association, not proof that multitasking causes the difference. A 2018 review in PNAS by Melina Uncapher and Anthony Wagner found the research is still sparse and mixed. On balance heavier media multitaskers did worse in several areas, but many studies found no difference, and the direction of cause and effect is still an open question.
What this means for your own focus
Put together, the research doesn’t say your brain has been rewired down to eight seconds. It says something more practical: the moments when you could switch away have multiplied, and most of us take them.
That’s good news, in a way. A fixed limit in your brain would be hard to change. Switching is a habit, and habits respond to small changes in your setup.
A few ideas, starting with Gloria Mark’s own suggestions from the University of California interview:
- Notice the switch. Mark calls this meta-awareness: catching yourself as you reach for another tab or app, and asking whether you meant to.
- Use natural stopping points. She suggests “hooks,” like an upcoming appointment, to pull yourself out of something you’ve drifted into. A timer works too.
- Think about the end of the day. Picture how you’ll feel at 6 p.m. if you spend the next hour the way you’re about to. It’s easier to close an app when you can see what it’s costing you.
- Cut the interruptions you didn’t ask for. Turn off notifications for anything that isn’t a person who needs you. On an iPhone, you can change them app by app in Settings.
- Plan what you’ll do instead. A switch away from work goes faster when there’s nothing else ready. Our list of things to do instead of scrolling is sorted by how much time you have.
- Put a limit on the apps you drift to. If one or two apps take most of your switches, a daily limit cuts down how often they win.
If the drifting is mostly into feeds, our guides on how to stop scrolling and how to stop doomscrolling go deeper on the setup side.
When a limit you can skip isn’t enough
The last tip has a catch. Limits you set for yourself are easy to wave away in the exact moment they matter, which is the same moment your attention is already halfway out the door.
That’s why we built PeerPause. You set a daily limit for the apps that eat your day, and when you reach it, the app locks. To get more time, you ask a friend, your Time Buddy, who accepts or denies. It won’t fix a dull task or a long day, and it only works if your friend actually answers. Being someone’s Time Buddy costs nothing, but limiting your own apps needs PeerPause Pro.
Whether you use an app or not, the takeaway is the same. Your attention span isn’t a number stamped on your brain, and it isn’t smaller than a goldfish’s. It’s something you spend, a few seconds at a time, and you get more say in where it goes than the headlines suggest.