he CBC interview on human attention span yesterday identified the 12 seconds and 8 seconds (and then the goldfish at 9 seconds) attention span statistics as unfounded, unprovable, and as a result, unlikely and probably false. The neuroscientist being interviewed says that there is research available that shows human attention span is unlimited when the person is focused and enjoying the activity they are involved in. The 'flow' state and the 'zone' are the terms for this.
There are countless articles on attention span quoting the 12-8-9 numbers. This means that journalists are unconsciously spreading fake news by not properly checking facts and scientific references. And not just a few journalists: Time magazine, the Telegraph, the Guardian, USA Today, the New York Times and the National Post. And then there are the repetitions in numerous blogs and websites. Poor TIME Magazine - it comes up right at the topi of the list.
There are articles addressing the attention span statistic fallacy/myth. The PolicyViz article is HERE. It was written in 2016. The author says:
"I’ve written about other bad statistics in the past (here and here), and this one is no exception. It’s not correct! Look, it’s not that I don’t believe we have shorter attention spans in the past because I’m sure we do, it’s just that I don’t have a reliable number to put on it. And, by the way, I like John Medina’s (from Brain Rules fame) advice to break up instruction/presentation into 10-minute chunks, which is based on actual research on instruction."
And to compare attention span to goldfish is a second false idea. Scientists have debunked the short attention span of goldfish myth. The BBC.com writer spoke to a professor who studies fish and she says there are many studies on fish memory (as early as 1908), and fish perform the same kinds of learning as mammals and birds.
And we're only looking at the quality of journalism reporting. The Grievance Studies affair was a project to highlight poor scholarship in several academic fields. The team submitted bogus academic papers to academic journals to determine if they would pass through peer review, and several were accepted and published. You can read about it in Wikipedia which says: "These published articles included an argument that dogs engage in rape culture, that men could reduce their transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, and a rewrite of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf in feminist language."
I compare these two for poor methods, although there is a distinction between "active" hoaxes and poor fact checking.
Two more images of the Sago Palm today. A little more green as our landscape quickly goes gold, orange, red and brown.
