Don’t Let the Goldfish Win

Work Your Attention Span

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

It used to be when somebody wished to insult your ability to pay attention, they would say you have the attention span of a goldfish. Naturally this inspired a number of studies that found the average attention span of a goldfish is in the range of 9 seconds. That is indeed a very short period of time. Observing the life of a goldfish, you seldom see them enjoy good literature, long conversations, introspective journaling, nor expressions through painting or drawing. 9 seconds is just enough time to remember that some food was sprinkled in the fishbowl or to swim a different direction to avoid your grumpy goldfish roomie. Neural research has also been done on average humans. Dr. Amen of Amen Clinics, who knows more about brains than almost anyone, estimates that most people in the U.S. have attention spans in the range of 8 seconds long.

The Goldfish are Winning?

As we examine all the splendid things people have done with their brains over the course of history, we must come to the logical conclusion that the average length of the human attention span was once much, much longer because our lives depended on it. Carefully guarding livestock, conscientiously weaving cloth, crafting, sculpting, cooking, writing, gardening, preserving, and inventing new ways to do all of these things better require much longer attention spans than 8 seconds at a time. Spoiled by the luxury of not living minute by minute to survive, most of us have more free time than our ancestors.

With free time came entertainment. A zillion things to grab our attention but very few things hold our attention. The luxury of the modern world makes it possible to survive a distracted lifestyle, mostly unharmed by our lack of attention. Some of us can afford to bounce back and forth between entertainments while we wait for our food to be delivered or our appliances to do the hardest chores. An attention spans less than that of a tiny fish seems like a setback in human progress. How do we do better?

Read Don’t Watch

The current generation typically doesn’t enjoy reading that much because it is difficult for them to maintain focus long enough to become engaged in a good story, much less good information. The average reader needs around 30 seconds just to read this far in this blog. Many will have stopped reading or have gotten distracted several times already. Consider the implications of how much educators might expect students to accomplish in a single assignment!

Around a third of people under the age of 20 consider themselves avid readers but admit that they typically read eight or fewer books per year even though they are enjoying a period of life that is uniquely suited to reading books as students. Self-described avid readers from older generations easily consume roughly twice as many books per year even with a more demanding schedule. Today, average high school students in literature courses with comparatively moderate reading assignments are overwhelmed by what would have been considered light reading five or certainly ten years ago. Most high school students never complete a single book and even fewer college students. Literacy is sliding backwards.

Reading for pleasure is the best test for a strong attention span. If you’ve never developed the habit, you should. You will at once encounter two surprising facts about yourself. First, you’ll discover that at first you will struggle to read for longer than a minute without getting distracted, even when you are reading a subject of interest to you. Extended reading is a muscle that must be worked and developed. Second, you’ll discover that once you can start reading with intensity, your life will be greatly improved. Deep engagement in excellent storytelling is deeply rewarding. Watching a story or hearing a story doesn’t work the same part of our brains as reading a story. Challenge yourself to consume entertainment in book form instead of screen or audio form.

Screen time (short-form entertainment, apps, games, TikTok, movies) have been designed for—and are much to blame for—the attention span crisis. Programming produced today is intentionally built around our 8 second attention spans to recapture our focus every few seconds with sounds, lights, and sound. “Older” movies from even a decade ago are considered unwatchable without the constant flash and glitter so there’s your answer about why companies remake so many classics. Recorded media is a little bit better (music, podcasts, books “on tape”) but still must multi-task instead of focus attentively. To extend your attention span, read rather than watch and if you must, listen with focus.    

Green Entertainment

I hope you like this term because I just made it up. Green entertainment always builds longer attention spans. How well does your soccer match go if the goalie has an eight second attention span? How does your hike progress if you can’t recall which direction to walk after a short break? How’s the chess match with your sibling turn out if you are staring at your phone instead of planning your next move? All of these are unplugged “green” entertainments.

If you grow your attention span simply by engaging in team sports, mentally stimulating logic games, gardening, hiking or a zillion other engaging tasks, you also enjoy the side benefits and gaining new skills, gaining physical strength, and maintaining appropriate distance from the snack drawer in your house. Want to double all of that benefit? Engage in green entertainment without electronic input of any kind. Yes, this means you leave earphones and devices at home. If you bring your phone “just so you can play some music” you’ll fall back into engaging mainly with your phone instead of your teammates or task. Engage your focus fully instead of splitting it with recorded media.    

Memorization Isn’t a Dirty Word

If you hang out in modern educational circles for even a few minutes, you’ll get hit with snarky comments about any educational approach that forces children to “merely memorize” material. Initially this was a reaction to approaches that never ventured beyond basics when the basics were the periodic table, the U.S. presidents, or the mathematical formulae of algebra or geometry. Sure! What’s the point of memorizing these things if you go no further? At some point, memorization was dismissed entirely, not because it is a thing that won’t serve us well as we educate ourselves throughout our lives, but because memorization became impossible in a world in which students have a shorter attention span than a goldfish.

Memorization is an excellent way to build your own attention span, but it is also a necessary skill to master anything complex. I assigned memorization tasks to my elementary age children to build that muscle. Do they still remember those poems, presidents, or geography? Probably not but when they move into the logic stage around age 13 and the rhetoric stage around age 16 or 17, they will prosper greatly having built that mental muscle and never letting it atrophy throughout life. Learn how to fill your brain with the intellectual ammunition you need to pursue more complex subjects.    

Keep Technology Caged

AI Isn’t Your Academic Friend

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

At least in theory, students can now grab their essay or paper prompt from their educators, load that prompt into an AI (artificial intelligence) text generator, add a few specifications and— voila— their essay or writing project is finished to perfection! Now, some students might suppose, there’s plenty of time left in the day to do other things in their now cleverly cleared schedule. Is this a win?

The obvious answer to this question is no. Let’s explore why.

The simplest reason why having AI complete your assigned writing projects is NOT a win is that you are cheating when you do so. Having anyone else, even if that person’s “brains” are made of the digital input of hundreds of thousands of documents stolen from the internet, is cheating because you completed none of the work and none of the thinking needed to address the assignment. This is literally a no-brainer.

Why do your mean-old educators insist that you personally employ brain and hands to write when AI can oversee such time-wasters for you? Is technology not here to help us? There will come a day when AI has its place in your life that will be helpful rather than a hindrance. My prediction is that AI will have its moment in the sun for a while longer until thinking-humans begin to yearn for bespoke, hand-made, human originated music, art, video, and literature. AI will eventually find its spot in more helpful areas than creating more genuinely human activities and, of course, cute cat videos. For now, AI isn’t your academic friend.

While it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway: those who never learn to read (because AI summarized your whole reading assignment in a single simple paragraph) nor write (because AI took only 60 seconds to finish your assigned task) are consigned to the sorts of lives led by people who are illiterate. Those that don’t read and write are no better than those who can’t. The implications for the future of humanity are, to say the least, bleak if most students hand off all major tasks of academic development to something that is not much more than a fast complex database filled with other people’s words and ideas. Even if something like the plot-line of the movie Terminator unfolds once Skynet takes over, nobody would notice. They’d be too busy generating weird cat videos or deepfake videos of your siblings.

What’s in store for those who insist on using unsanctioned AI in coursework? As quickly as AI is being promoted as a grand new way to improve education, human educators are developing ways to catch its use and stop it. AI has plenty of useful applications in the real world, but its use must be consigned strictly to learning enhancement not knowledge replacement.  

One might argue that nobody really needs to learn algebra or calculus (that’s what calculators do) or chemistry (the periodic chart is handy online) so why learn to read or write if AI will take care of these tasks for us? We are on a rapidly swirling whirlpool towards our own demise if we relegate our future to the menial chores of cleaning up after our more intelligent AI overlords.

For now, you should know this:

·        All your educators can check for your use of AI in written projects of all sizes. A bloated database of word soup will read that way because that is how most AI has been trained to write.

·        If your work “reads” as AI, we will offer diminishing benefits-of-the-doubt in our responses. Applying a grammar checker or a spelling checker doesn’t change your work to read as AI generated content. None of your educators are buying that excuse. There are, at least for now, very specific tells when work isn’t written by a human. If your work is scanned as digitally generated, you will be removed from classes for cheating.

·        If you have dabbled in using unsanctioned AI for your submitted coursework, stop now. When your honest peers have progressed in their studies by mastering assigned skills through use, you’ll be trapped at whatever level you achieved before you started turning to digitally enhanced “help” to finish your work for you.

Only time will tell if my distrust of AI diminishes or increases but, so far, I’m not encouraged by what I see coming at us down the road. We are all going to be targeted relentlessly with fast, cheap, easy ways to remove humans from needing to accomplish the basic tasks of thinking thoughts and recording them skillfully and responding to others thoughtfully and cleverly. When all of that is gone from us, what will there be?

Step Away from the Screen

The Demise of “Focus”

By Regan Barr with The Lukeion Project

Has this ever happened to you? You’re out to eat with friends or family, and someone whips out his phone and begins scrolling. Recently we visited a restaurant where we were seated next to a group of ten friends. By the time we left the restaurant, over half of them were staring at their electronic devices and not interacting with the group. We assumed they’d planned this outing as a “hey, let’s get together and catch up” time, but most of them weren’t really interested in catching up. They were instead being fed a constant stream of entertainment.

When was the last time you read a book cover-to-cover in under a week? …mastered a new skill, discipline, or body of knowledge? …got through an entire movie even though the first 10 minutes moved a bit slowly? If you’re like many people today, the answer might be “it’s been so long, I can’t remember.”

Lately, I’ve been noticing a lot of articles on how high school and college students have never read a single book. They’ve appeared in The Atlantic, AP News, The College Fix, and The Hechinger Report (which focuses exclusively on education-related topics). We’ve noticed the same thing in our classes at The Lukeion Project. For some students, just reading the instructions for an assignment is too big a task! This is a sad commentary on our society. We no longer exercise our imagination, like we do when reading a book; we’re just fed a constant stream of visual content.

All of these are signs of a modern ailment: we’ve lost the ability to FOCUS.

How did we arrive at this point? One of the answers is that “social media” is NOT “social.” Often, it’s just the opposite. We watch people on a screen whom we’ve never met, while ignoring the friend or family member that is in the room with us. A recent poll from Gallup found that teens spend an average of nearly 5 hours a day on social media. An article posted on Exploding Topics found that the average American checks her mobile device 159 times a day. We’ve gone well past “connected”; we’re now officially “distracted.”

Bite-sized information is now the norm, so we never get to practice focusing. We read headlines instead of articles. Editors have learned they can influence people’s opinions simply by writing a good headline. This has spawned a whole industry of people who now actually READ the article looking for bias in the headline. Sometimes there is contradictory evidence in the article itself.

So how do we begin to rebuild focus?

1. Disconnect from the electronic world. You might be surprised at what your mind can do when you’re not connected to your TV or phone. Try having a real conversation. Ask your children if they learned anything that surprised them today. Have a game night with the family. Perhaps have a “reading hour” where your entire family agrees to read (a book printed on paper!) for at least an hour. And make sure everyone gets through their book.
2. Go outside and connect with nature. Take a hike. Go to the zoo. Go to a park. Buy some goats. Do some gardening. Take your dog for a walk. 
3. But most important: Practice focusing. Be fully engaged at your dinner table. Take up a creative hobby that requires your full attention, like woodworking or welding. See how long you can go without checking your phone.

The people who accomplish great things have learned to focus. The future belongs to those who can focus!

Read Out Loud?

4 Benefits (and more) of Reading like the Ancients

Dr. Sue Fisher at The Lukeion Project

    When was the last time you read out loud? If you have small children around you, you probably do this on a regular basis, but as those children get older and can read for themselves, this practice generally drifts away. Reading becomes a solitary affair, usually undertaken in silence except for the occasional sharing of a quip or a quote.

    For this reason, it often comes as a surprise to my students that it was the customary practice for the Greeks and Romans to read out loud. In the pre-technological world, recitations were common forms of entertainment and public speeches were an important part of civic life. Reading aloud was not just for public affairs, however. Reading out loud privately was a customary practice well into at least the 17th century.

    Today, however, reading out loud after childhood is associated with incapability. The image of a dim-witted gomerel attempting to sound out easily pronounced words is an image all too readily conjured up. Anyone who has enjoyed a well-narrated audible book, however, knows that literature in the hands of a skilled reader can enhance the text and bring that book to life in ways that simple reading often cannot.

    While the modern world does not always afford the time and place for reading aloud, there are both practical and esoteric advantages to be gained when one adopts this practice. 

 

Better Focus:

    When reading a difficult text or something that is not necessarily of deep interest, it is all too easy for our minds to wander off. Soundbite culture has only added to this problem. The practice of reading out loud is an easy remedy to this problem because it incorporates more than one sense to get the job done. Engaging your mouth and your ears along with your eyes and your brain makes it harder to lose attention. 

 

Better Speaking:

    Reading out loud forces the speaker to pronounce the words they are encountering. Science has shown that people recognize words in blocks rather than by syllable. This is what makes it easy to mix up words that begin and end the same way. When reading silently it is easy to identify the word as a block and quickly move on. A reader may not be able to pronounce those words gracefully if at all. Likewise, out loud reading forces a speaker to slow down, take pauses that allow for processing of the text, and also imbue the words with feeling. All of these practices are foundational for good public speaking. 

 

Better Appreciation:

    Some works are written to be heard as well as read. Imagine Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech or Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky. You likely imagined them being spoken or heard rather than reading them. Impassioned words, meter, rhyme, and other literary devices all can be seen with the eyes but were created for the ears. This is where their interest lies, and they simply cannot be fully appreciated without being read out loud. 

 

Better Editing:

    Reading out loud is the simplest and most effective tool for editing your work. The very thing that keeps most of us from reading aloud, the fact that it slows you down, is the very thing that makes reading out loud such an effective tool for editing. Reading out loud provides an opportunity for the ears to hear what the eyes might miss. For instance, while reading aloud, a person naturally pauses in places and these pauses can be excellent indicators of where commas or periods are needed. Running out of breath is a good indicator that a sentence is a run-on and needs to be divided. Lack of clarity becomes more apparent. The list goes on and on. 

 

    While these are some of the practical, academic reasons for targeted out loud reading, there are some less measurable benefits as well. The greatest of these, in my opinion, is the opportunity it provides for camaraderie. Studies have shown that reading to children is as much about bonding and relationship as it is about the story and skills themselves. This is not something that disappears when people reach a certain age. Sharing a story, or an article, or a poem or a speech out loud provides opportunities for common experiences and discussions that strengthen relationships; the benefits of this, in turn, are immeasurable.