So I was asked to co-design a test to see the attention span of a family member and mine and basically report how that goes down. Here is what went down.
I asked my uncle to do a series of tasks around the house. The following tasks included:
- Get a score of 10 points in Flappy Bird (Yes I still have the game somehow)
- Clean up his room neatly
- Vaccum the living room
- Search online for 10 random facts about animal rights (indirectly helping me for my digital artefacts)
He was given the time of 30 minutes to finish all these tasks.
Let us hear what he has to say about this test.
He mentioned how this test was kind of stressful, as everything had to be done in just 30 minutes. He tried to do the easiest one first, which he thought would be the 10 random facts. But then he realized he had other tasks that required more time, which created more stress when he thought about the bigger tasks he had to do. In the end, he wasn’t able to complete any of the tasks perfectly.
But it doesn’t matter, even I failed miserably at this.
But what can I take away from this little attention experiment?
Well the older we get, our attention span grows smaller and smaller. Our concentration for tasks gets harder as we age, which is kind of scary if you think about it. Although we will be pushed to do more tasks with time pressure as the motivator when handed out with a plethora of tasks, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be top notched material?
My uncle also mentioned how he was distracted several times as well for starters, he wasn’t taking this very seriously. But overall, he just kept getting distracted on other things like his mobile phone etc.
“The attention spans of human brain are getting shorter. We have lost almost four seconds of our attention span in the past 15 years. This means we cannot concentrate on a thing for more than 8 seconds on an average.”
References
- Factfile. (2018, January 13). 53 Interesting Facts About The Brain. Retrieved from https://thefactfile.org/brain-facts/
The Erryl Classicz 