Are AI chatbots making us lose control of our brains?

Early in her career, University of California, Irvine Psychologist Gloria Mark's biggest concerns were the potential impacts of internet and email use on our brains. We may laugh those concerns off today, but it’s true that as the technologies became more ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans began to shrink. Mark is worried that things are only getting worse. Around two decades ago, Mark started wondering about how our use of devices might affect our attention spans. She set up what she calls “living laboratories,” using sensors and trackers to monitor adult volunteers’ attention, mood, and behavior when they were using devices. In 2003, she found that the average user had an attention span of around two and a half minutes. That’s how long people could spend focused on one thing before moving on to something else. “That surprised me at the time,” she said. “I thought: Wow, this is really short.” But when she repeated the experiment in 2012, she found that attention spans had shrunk—all the way down to around 75 seconds on average, she said. In research she conducted between 2014 and 2020, attention spans shrank further still—to a mere 47 seconds, on average. Yikes.