Where the number came from
In 2015 Microsoft Canada published a report on how people use media. One page said the average attention span had dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013, one second less than a goldfish. It was covered everywhere.
Microsoft didn’t come up with those numbers. The report credited them to a website called Statistic Brain.
In 2017 the BBC’s More or Less tried to trace them. Statistic Brain named the US National Library of Medicine and the Associated Press as its sources. Neither could find any research that backed the figures up.
The goldfish part is wrong too
Experiments have shown goldfish remembering things for months. And nobody has a way of measuring a goldfish’s attention span in seconds, so the comparison never meant anything.
What the research says
There isn’t a single human attention span. How long you stay focused depends on what you’re doing, how interested you are, how tired you are, and whether anything interrupts you. The same person can skim a contract for four minutes and read a novel for four hours.
Something has changed, though. Researchers who track what people do on their computers have found that the time spent on one screen before switching has dropped a lot over twenty years, from a few minutes to under a minute. That’s about switching between tasks at a desk. It doesn’t mean people can’t concentrate, and it isn’t 8 seconds.
Why it stuck
It’s a handy statistic for anyone selling short content. If people can’t focus for more than 8 seconds, then making everything shorter isn’t a choice, it’s just biology. Numbers that suit an industry tend to get repeated without much checking.
Why we’re telling you this
We make an app with short lessons, so the goldfish line would suit us too. But it isn’t true, and the real reasons short lessons work are better anyway: spreading practice out helps you remember, being tested helps you remember, and a five-minute session actually happens while an hour-long one gets put off. Our methodology page has more.