I recently came across a video from Jared Henderson called "Why we can't focus." And at a time when so much is vying for our attention, and I feel like I have so little time to be creative, it got me thinking.Your attention span is shrinking. Mine is, too.Research from psychologist Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, shows our average attention span on screens has plummeted from two and a half minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds today. That's barely enough time to finish reading this paragraph before your brain starts wandering.Stay with me.For writers, this is a problem. Our work requires sustained focus. We have to imagine whole worlds, then manage to hold them in place while we find the right combination of words to create them on the page. But we're operating in an environment engineered to fragment our brains. The news is constant, and it's mostly bad. Emails come in, work tasks come up, we wander. We feel the need to fill every free second with content, content.Henderson says in his video essay, "Books, you have to give your attention to. But phones, screens, the internet, videos—they steal your attention. That's why I say that it's a hostile design environment. It is an environment that has been designed in order to steal your attention and thus rob you of your ability to focus as much as possible because people make money from it."Here's what psychology research tells us actually helps. - YouTube www.youtube.com Understand...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - 3 days ago