Who wants to know?

Before I began writing this blog, I asked myself a simple question: Why do I care so much about my own attention span?

I came up with three reasons. The first is that I would like to be able to pay more attention in school. Paying closer attention would in all likelyhood lead to better understanding, and most likely better grades too. My GPA certainly could use all the help it can get. 

Secondly, I'd like to be able to stop procrastinating. This applies to more than just homework. By putting off schoolwork, errands, and even laundry, I feel stressed out and rushed from time to time. Removing this stress would add to my overall quality of life.

The third and final motivation for learning about my attention span is that I would like to learn how to use my time more efficiently. This would leave me with more time to do leisurely things, like reading for pleasure or going to the gym more often.

However, you would be surprised at the amount of special interest groups who have a vested interest in knowing as much as possible about the human attention span. 

One of these groups is advertisers and marketing firms.  In a piece about how neuroscience helps marketing employees judge the effectiveness of their ads, Kim Masters of National Public Radio pays a visit to a company called NeuroFocus. NeuroFocus studies the response of the brain to commercials and advertisements to learn about how effective they are at grabbing the attention of the consumer. As a part of her segment, Masters visited the company and was attached to equipment which reads activity within the brain, while being shown a series of commercials.  "The results are supposed to show three things" Masters explains. "Whether I'm paying attention, whether I am emotionally engaged, and wheatear I am likely to remember what I am seeing."

Results from studies like this performed on hundreds of participants are valuable to advertisers because this data doesn't lie. Often times, ads are tested with focus groups. Marketers have found that sometimes members of these focus groups might not always be truthful, and often censor themselves. The drawback to this type of neurological data is that simply reading someone's brainwaves off of a screen cannot tell you how something makes them feel. It may be able to tell you if they are paying attention, or that they are emotionally engaged, but the actual feelings caused by the tested advertisements are not captured within the data.

If the work being done by NeuroFocus leads to progress in understanding why so many people today have such short attention spans, then the public will benefit in twofold. First, we can begin to address the reasons for our short focus. But more importantly, advertisers will be able to come up with commercials less annoying than this one.

You can hear Kim Masters' piece HERE.