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‘Junk Food’ Is Killing Your Attention Span (But It’s Not Too Late to Fix It)

The mere presence of a smartphone is enough to impair your focus because a part of your brain is always thinking about it.

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The human attention span is under attack. It’s been undergoing a bombardment campaign delivered by a coalition of distractions that, according to a growing body of research, is starting to win the war as human cognitive performance is declining across the world in measurable ways.

This is all according to a New York Times op-ed by Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. Part of his argument is based on the work of UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark, whose surveys show that adults in the United States are struggling with basic literacy and numeracy, while record numbers of teens are reporting difficulty concentrating. The fact that all these numbers started declining around the time smartphones and algorithmically-driven content platforms arose, somewhere around 2010, is not a coincidence, argues Newport.

Our attention spans were already getting wrecked, then came short-form video apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels came along to deliver a one-two punch that seems to have laid our attention on its ass, further reducing attention and resulting in poor cognitive outcomes. We’re at the point where even the mere presence of a smartphone is enough to impair your focus because a part of your brain is always thinking about it, always aware that it could have an important notification on it, or it could be the instant gratification your brain needs when it encounters the tiniest moment of friction.

‘Junk Food’ Is Unsurprisingly Frying Your Brain

Newport likens TikTok and its ilk to Doritos and Oreos, just another kind of ultra-processed slop. He mentions that they are “Frankenfoods,” packed with salt, sugar, and fat, specifically engineered to give us nothing we need and too much of everything we don’t.

The distractions don’t end at our dopamine slot machine entertainment apps. Newport cites Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, which found that office workers are on average interrupted every two minutes, resulting in work being fragmented constantly, creating an environment where longer, sustained work sessions are becoming increasingly rarer.

Pair a world of distraction with the early stages of our new world, one in which AI tools have been found by several early studies to reduce our critical thinking skills, with some brain imaging research finding decreased neural connectivity among people who rely on AI for writing tasks, and all combined to create a world and a species in decline, as we seem to be willingly giving up our one major evolutionary advantage: the power of our brains.

Newport argues there are practical steps you can take individually and collectively to stop the decline in its tracks and reverse it. He cites a study that surveyed 317 high schools in the Netherlands and found that over two-thirds reported improved “social climate” and improved focus after banning phones.

If we have any hope of fixing this, we have to collectively attack the problem the way the federal government once addressed the declining physical health of American citizens, by admitting that these modern technological wonders are dulling our mental edge by providing us with a nearly unlimited supply of junk food. Large-scale behavioral change is possible. It’s just a matter of whether a society recognizes the problem early enough to respond, and whether it has the will and the cognitive ability, in this case, to respond at all.

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