Young people’s shrinking attention spans are nothing to worry about. Here’s why | Marion Thain | The Guardian

Even more fundamentally, it is time to consider what types of attention we aspire to and why. What psychologists sometimes call unifocal attention (what we would think of focused rather than diffused attention) is only one way to attend, and it’s not always the most useful – as Chris Chabris and Dan Simons showed in their 1999 experiment known as the “Invisible Gorilla Experiment”. Asked to count the number of passes in a basketball game, the experiment’s subjects failed to notice the person in the gorilla suit dancing through the middle of the match. Focus trained intently on one thing can blind us to important but unexpected events. A more diffused focus might exercise different cognitive muscles and bring different rewards
— Read on www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/26/young-people-attention-spans-online-world