Mind
Has human attention span really dropped below a goldfish's?
The 8-second claim is false
Has human attention span really dropped below a goldfish's?
No. The claim that humans now have an 8-second attention span shorter than a goldfish (9 seconds) originated from a 2015 Microsoft Canada report that was never peer-reviewed and has been widely debunked. Sustained attention in controlled lab settings has not meaningfully declined. Attention is highly context-dependent — boredom drives switching, not incapacity.
Source: Radesky & Christakis (2016), Pediatrics; critiques of Microsoft (2015)