空间注意力 通道注意力

“The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds – the same as a goldfish,” said the BBC in 2002. “Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things,” Ted Selker, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the British news agency. “If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating.” Boy was he right.

英国广播公司(BBC)在2002年说： “网络浏览的令人上瘾的特性可以使您的注意力跨度为9秒钟，就像金鱼一样。我们的注意力跨度受我们做事方式的影响，”麻省理工学院告诉英国新闻社。 “如果我们花时间在网络上从一件事转移到另一件事，就会养成不专心的习惯。” 男孩，他是对的。

No time has it been more evident that our attention spans have been severely diminished than on today’s web. Twitter, for example, asks us to reduce our thoughts to just 140 characters, while 12seconts.tv asks us to do that same in just twelve seconds. And the average length of the 12 billion videos US Internet users consumed via the web in May? Just 2.7 minutes. Clearly, our attention on the web is fleeting.

没有比现在更加明显的是，我们的注意力跨度已大大减少。 例如， Twitter要求我们将想法减少到140个字符，而12seconts.tv要求我们在十二秒内完成相同的操作。 五月份，美国互联网用户通过网络消费的120亿个视频的平均长度是多少？ 只需2.7分钟 。 显然，我们在网络上的注意力正在转瞬即逝。

In May, web usability consultant Jakob Neilsen found that the more words you add to a page the more people skim it. In other words, our short attention spans can’t handle long articles and we end up just skipping to the bottom. In my time as a blogger, I’ve generally found that shorter articles or articles that are broken up with sub headlines and bullet points or images tend to get more comments those that are mainly lengthy blocks of text (like this one, for example).

5月，网络可用性顾问Jakob Neilsen发现，添加到页面上的字词越多，浏览该页面的人就越多 。 换句话说，我们的注意力不足，无法处理长篇文章，最终我们只能跳到最底层。 在我担任博客作者的那段时间里，我通常发现较短的文章或带有副标题，项目符号要点或图像的文章往往会获得更多评论，而这些评论主要是冗长的文本块(例如，像这样的文本) 。

In the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, author Nick Carr asks if the Internet is making us stupid. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy,” Carr writes. “My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.”

在《大西洋月刊》的7月/ 8月号中，作者尼克·卡尔(Nick Carr)询问互联网是否使我们变得愚蠢 。 卡尔写道：“沉浸在书本或冗长的文章中曾经很容易。” “我的想法会陷入叙述或论证的转折之中，我会花数小时在漫长的散文中漫步。 这种情况已经很少了。 现在，我的注意力通常在两到三页之后就开始漂移。”

Carr blames his heavy use of the Internet over the past few years for rewiring his brain to make it harder to absorb information that doesn’t come in bite-sized chunks. He probably has a point.

卡尔归咎于他在过去几年中对互联网的大量使用，原因是他重新动了脑筋，以致于难以吸收一小块的信息。 他可能有一点。

注意如何工作 (How Attention Works)

The part of your brain located between the medulla oblongata and the midbrain is something called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS is something like a filter between your conscious and subconscious. It’s involved in primitive functions like the ability to be awake or asleep, and the ability to direct attention toward certain stimuli.

您的大脑位于延髓和中脑之间的部分称为网状激活系统(RAS)。 RAS就像是您的意识和潜意识之间的过滤器。 它涉及原始功能，例如清醒或入睡的能力，以及将注意力引向某些刺激的能力。

“The job of the RAS is to filter and screen all incoming stimuli and ‘decide’ which stimuli should merit the attention of the conscious,” writes Dr. Kathie Nunley. There is a hierarchy at play that determines what our brains decide to pay attention to. Physical needs come first, but after that our brains tend to gravitate toward novel experiences. Our shortened attention spans can be blamed on the heightened pace at which we encounter these novel experiences in today’s media saturated world.

Kathie Nunley博士写道 ：“ RAS的工作是过滤和筛选所有传入的刺激，并“决定”哪些刺激应引起意识的注意。 有一个层次结构在起作用，该层次结构决定了我们的大脑决定关注的事物。 身体需要首先出现，但是之后我们的大脑倾向于吸引新的体验。 我们缩短的注意力范围可以归因于我们在当今媒体饱和的世界中遇到这些新颖经历的步伐加快。

“At one time a young child could master or learn his surroundings and they remained relatively unchanged. A toy or two, a dozen people, a home sparsely decorated. Even the world outside the home had relatively limited novelty to offer after the first few years of ones’ life. This allowed the RAS and attention to be drawn to other things, primarily self-made choices and more complex types of thinking and learning of abstract concepts,” says Nunley.

“一次，一个幼儿可以掌握或学习他的周围环境，而他们相对保持不变。 一个或两个玩具，十几个人，一个稀疏装饰的房屋。 在人的生命的最初几年之后，即使是家外的世界，其新颖性也相对有限。 这使得RAS和注意力可以吸引到其他方面，主要是自制的选择以及更复杂的思维方式和抽象概念的学习。” Nunley说。

Today, though, television, the Internet, and other external stimuli “have trained our minds to perceive and interpret quickly and be ready to accept the next presentation.” That’s why we have trouble reading long articles — our brains are ready to jump to the next stimuli before we’ve fully absorbed the first.

但是，今天，电视，互联网和其他外部刺激“已经训练我们的思想快速地感知和解释，并准备接受下一个演示文稿。” 这就是为什么我们在阅读长篇文章时会遇到麻烦-在我们完全吸收第一个刺激之前，我们的大脑已经准备好跳到下一个刺激。

(Note, newer research has presented more complex models of how we pay attention to things, but they’re really beyond the scope of this blog post.)

(请注意， 较新的研究提出了关于我们如何关注事物的更复杂的模型，但它们实际上超出了本文的范围。)

当今的互联网专为短时间关注而打造 (The Internet of Today is Made for Short Attention Spans)

140 character posts. 12 second videos. Constant activity streams. Acronyms up the wazoo (er, I’m sorry, AUTW). Today’s web is built for short attention spans, and it seems to be getting worse. Many new services appear almost explicitly designed to cater to shorter and shorter attention spans.

140个角色帖子。 12秒的视频。 持续的活动流。 wazoo的首字母缩略词(对不起，AUTW)。 当今的网络是为缩短关注时间而构建的，并且似乎越来越糟。 许多新服务似乎都是明确设计的，目的是为了迎合越来越短的注意力。

Look at stimTV, for example, which presents viewers with ultra-short video clips and asks them to make snap judgments on whether the clips deserve their attention or not, before quickly loading up the next clip. Not only does stimTV operate on the premise that anything over a few seconds long would cause us to lose interest, it doesn’t even think we have the attention spans to do the channel surfing ourselves.

以stimTV为例，它向观众展示了超短视频剪辑，并要求他们在快速加载下一个剪辑之前Swift判断这些剪辑是否值得关注。 stimTV不仅会在几秒钟长的时间内使我们失去兴趣的前提下运行，甚至不认为我们有足够的注意力来进行自己的频道冲浪。

Worse, as our attention spans get shorter, the information overload is becoming more and more of a problem for many users. As Nunley said, the pace of novel experiences has increased substantially since the birth of television and the Internet. Our attention is spread so thin, it is no wonder that we can’t devote much time to any one thing.

更糟糕的是，随着我们关注的范围越来越短， 信息过载对于许多用户而言已成为越来越多的问题。 正如Nunley所说，自电视和互联网的诞生以来，新颖体验的步伐已大大提高。 我们的注意力分散得如此之细，也就不足为奇了。

我们对此怎么办？ (What Do We Do About It?)

There’s really no simple answer to that (except turn off the TV and the computer and go read a book, fly a kite, take a walk, etc.). I think ideally, we need to stop focusing on getting so much information, so quickly. It’s okay to miss some things. It’s okay not to put up a post about every breaking story as soon as it happens. It’s okay not to tweet everything you see or do. It’s okay not to have 5,000 friends.

确实没有简单的答案(除了关闭电视和计算机，然后去看书，放风筝，散步等等)。 我认为理想情况下，我们需要停止专注于如此Swift地获取大量信息。 可以错过一些东西。 最好不要在每一个突发事件发生时就发布一个帖子。 不发布任何您看到或做的事都是可以的。 没有5,000个朋友也可以。

I think that instead of designing services that help us create more and more micro content, we should be trying to create and promote services that help us to filter the best of the more intelligent, thoughtful fare.

我认为，与其设计能够帮助我们创建越来越多的微型内容的服务，不如说我们应该尝试创建和推广能够帮助我们筛选出更智能，更周到的票价中最好的服务。

What are you thoughts on the effect of the Internet on attention span? Let us know in the comments.

您如何看待互联网对注意力跨度的影响？ 让我们在评论中知道。

翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/what-the-heck-happened-to-our-attention-spans/

空间注意力 通道注意力