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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

    > now that attention spans are so short

Oh please, this is Internet nonsense. Google tells me:

    > Psychologists and neuroscientists find no structural decline in the human brain's ability to focus. Sustained attention limits remain largely unchanged.

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I and pretty much everyone I know has repeatedly mentioned how difficult of a time they're having reading books, code (software eng. friends), or even watching the first half of a movie without feeling the need to open their phones and scrolling Instagram.

The parent comment may be a joke, but it's unclear if it is. This makes it possibly the best kind of joke.

How many of these people before simply paused the movie to get a snack or converse a bit?

I don't think that's the same as having the compulsion to be online and having very little interest in long time-span activities.

Is it not? Perhaps phones make us better at (and finding more joy in) quickly switching tasks, rather than in reducing maximum sustained attention.

At least this study would seem to suggest something similar.

This is all very anecdotal (and thus not quantifiable) - but I find the need for others and I to check their phones far more distracting and frequent than the need for getting up and stretching your legs and/or getting snacks during a movie.

then I suppose you and everyone you know has basically broken their brain with toxic social media. Or similar?

my spouse and I (30s) had no problem sitting through the new Spider-Man movie without opening up our phones.

Yep, I would say social media, especially in us Gen Zs, has made us more cynical and worried about the state of the world, apart from the obvious attention span problems.

We live in India, so for example, the rise of online (and offline) hatred towards us has definitely had an impact.

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