You know how irritating it is when you’re trying to explain something complicated and your victim’s attention … hey! I’m talking to you! … begins straying. Well, there’s bad news. According to a study published in Nature, the International Weekly Journal of Science, attention span is even more fragile than previously thought. John Duncan and Robert Ward of the MRC Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge, UK, and Kimron Shapiro of the University of Calgary, have shown that visual attention is more complex than what people thought was a “high-speed switching device” which could accept interference and keep on its original track.
They’ve found that even momentary interference creates a “sustained state” which can influence behaviour _ in other words, humans are by nature even more easily distracted than we ever imagined. Hey! I’m talking to you!