Attention

Attention is a very broad concept, but it is defined by psychologists as the amount of awareness or focus one has on the matter at hand. It combines both diverting focus to what is necessary, but also ignoring other external and unimportant stimuli around us, which is not always easy to do. Humans already have a short attention span due to our natural ability to get distracted by other factors.

Our brains are wired to constantly seek out new information from the outside world and relay it in, especially because in ancient times, this was necessary for survival. One had to constantly be on the lookout for potential problems in their surroundings, and because of this the brain has adapted to be on this alert mode built for survival. And even though civilization has expanded and industrialized since then, our brains are still built for this inherent sense of survival.

In this present day and age, with the presence of technology and other distracting stimuli, it has become harder for our brains to focus on one particular thing because technology has become such an easy and addicting hub of information for us. And especially with the internet, where everything is constantly updated and there’s always something new to look at, technology has the ability to cause our easily distracted minds to be thrown into a loop, clicking link after link in order to catch up on everything.

However, technology isn’t only a means of constant distraction. It all depends on how you use it, and which aspects of it you interact with. Technology and the internet aren’t to blame for the natural and primatal aspects of human nature which cause us to have short attention spans, but, it can’t be denied that technology can make it worse. Because of this, the only thing we can do is be mindful of what we are directing the bulk of our attention towards and if that is what’s optimal for us.