The other day, I was taking the train back home from Melbourne. I looked up and noticed a scene that’s become so normal it’s almost invisible: literally every single person around us, except me, was glued to their smartphone.

Right in front of me, a little girl was holding her phone up at an angle where I couldn’t really help but see her screen. She was on TikTok, and it was dizzying. She’d look at a video for maybe two or three seconds, swipe, look for another two seconds, and swipe again. Watching her fly through content made me wonder: what is this constant bombardment doing to our attention spans?

I was chatting about this with my older daughter, who understands this digital landscape much better than I do. She told me that TikTok users can now have multiple windows open on their screens at exactly the same time. Apparently, Netflix specifically green-lights and edits certain shows so people can watch them passively while scrolling through their phones.

It took me back to the old arguments we used to have as a family—trying to watch a movie together while the kids’ faces were buried in their screens.

It begs the question: how are we supposed to actually learn, absorb new knowledge, or think deeply when platforms like Instagram and TikTok are constantly hitting us with rapid-fire stimuli?

We like to think our brains are built for this. We love the idea of “parallel processing”—the computer science term for doing multiple things at once. But neuroscience tells a different story. Sure, our brains can handle multiple automatic tasks simultaneously—like navigating a busy street while listening to music. But when it comes to focused attention, learning, or making decisions? The brain is strictly a serial processor. It has to work step-by-step.

To actually retain information and move it from our short-term working memory into our long-term memory, we need sustained focus. True creativity requires quiet, uninterrupted time. My old colleague and academic Thomas Davenport put it perfectly when he said that the sheer wealth of information on the internet actually creates a “poverty of attention.” We have all the data in the world, but none of the focus required to actually do anything meaningful with it.

So, what’s the damage? If our attention spans are shrinking, what does that mean for us practically?

• We stop learning: We lose the ability to engage with complex ideas, meaning we stop broadening our horizons and lose sight of what actually matters.
• We stop reflecting: Because we don’t give ourselves time to pause and think, we get sucked into social media echo chambers that just validate our existing biases.
• We lose real community: We’ve all seen it—people sitting at dinner with friends or family, staring at their screens instead of talking to each other. Replacing physical community with a virtual one leads to isolation and stops us from interacting with people from different backgrounds, which is disastrous for healthy public debate.
• We know less: It’s a bizarre paradox. Despite living under a literal tsunami of human knowledge, we are at risk of becoming less and less genuinely knowledgeable.

This stream of images and data is only speeding up. Tech platforms are locked in a war to capture and monetise our “eyeballs,” and they aren’t going to slow down on their own.

So, next time you find yourself reaching for your phone during a quiet moment, it might be worth asking: are you choosing to look at the screen, or has the screen trained you to look?