Although the book the Plateau effect deals with much more than our attention span and ability to listen, its research is shining a light into an uncomfortable reality: many people might be losing their ability to listen and concentration due to the myriad distractions from tech devices and other gadgets.
In the premise a professor came to the realization that his students were not listening. He then set out to understand why and to quantify his students' listening skills.
What he first did was to stop students in mid class and ask to repeat what the teachers was talking about. The test was conducted over many class grades, beginning with first graders, all the way to higher ed. What was noticed was that the smaller the children, the better their attention span. But the older children, or teenagers displayed a much lower degree in right answers when the teacher queried them on the lesson.
There is a natural loss in older people whose listening comprehension, not ability, dimishes with age. And what is more telling is that people actually perceive themselves as being quite good at listening.
In fact, when asked to repeat the content of a ten minute presentation, only half were able to do it, and 48 hours later that percentage had climbed to 75%.
The problem is also that the brain can process many more words than the average speaker can say. That means that our brain is left with much too much ability to wander off in different thought. And that is also because our adult brains, being more developed, are also capable of distracting themselves with parallel thoughts, like sending flowers to a wife, or watching a squirrel on a tree.
Listening plateaus, or the levels at which the listener can recall or hold their attention was then quantified in a neat experiment conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in which people were made to listen three different videos, one about a couple fighting over how to paint a room, another was an instructional video on voting, and the third spoke about the reading of Facebook's privacy policy.
Although the experiment was much more involved than our summary, testing the results of the adults in the test showed dismal results. Only 18% of subjects got all the answers right, although women fared much better. Women got right answers in 66% of the cases, while men only at 49%. That statistic shows that men, in general listen to about half of what is said, regardless of what is said, or who says it.
Distractions then, especially the ones offered by modern gadgets really can have serious consequences. The lower the level of perception, and the lower the amount of information retained, the more mistakes the human being can make.
An example: 1.6 million accidents occur each year by people who are engaged in some gadget use, be it phone or other.
What's worse, is that living with gadgetry has completely erased the work/private life boundary.
It seems important then, that some more research and training be done to increase listening abilities and to separate the mind's quest for constant information from futile if not dangerous meandering, with meaningful concentration on subjects that are important to our lives and decision making.
Partial Source : Scientific American 5.4.13
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