YouTube Shorts Have Effectively Changed Our Brains -- And, It Comes at a New Cost

In less than two decades, the average attention span has decreased by a factor of over 300%.

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In an interview with CNN, Dr. Gloria Mark, broke down recent findings:

“In 2004, we measured the average attention on a screen to be 2½ minutes,” Mark said. “Some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.”

When asked why this phenomenon has arisen, Gloria, author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity, cited "a switching cost" as the antagonist.

“A switch cost is the time it takes you to reorient back to your work: ‘Where was I? What was I thinking of?’ That additional effort can also lead to errors and stress.”

In our ever-changing world, there's no doubt we spend far more time switching between tasks than in the past. But, even the minutia of how we consume content is changing.

In the past, logging onto the internet meant physically sitting down at your computer to perform a task. Then, smartphones put social media in our hands, allowing us to peruse the latest updates and blogs at our leisure.

But today, content is pushed to us, through pings, alerts, and little hits of dopamine -- colliding with our intentions of peace and productivity each day. Founded in 2005, YouTube has now taken suit from the boom of TikTok, providing incentives for creators to post short-form content.

Thus, perpetuating our ever-shortening attention span, and perhaps, re-engineering how the brain works for future generations to come.

Although social media and short-form platforms have allowed us to consume more information faster than ever, it seems as though it comes at a cost -- a switching cost.

Hey, I'm Hudson! I write about social media, marketing, and modern entrepreneurship. Hit follow for more stories like this one.