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This week I went to SXSW London. There has been music, movies and lots – and I mean lots – of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to speak with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies.

Early in his career, his biggest concerns were about the potential impacts of Internet use and email on our brains. We may laugh at these concerns today, but it is true that as technologies have become ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans have begun to diminish.

Mark fears things will only get worse. The title of our session was “Have We Lost Control of Our Brains?” Unfortunately, Mark told me, the answer is yes.

About twenty years ago, Mark began to wonder how our use of devices might be affecting our attention span. She set up what she calls “living labs,” using sensors and trackers to monitor adult volunteers’ attention, mood and behavior as they use devices.

In 2003, she discovered that the average user had an attention span of about two and a half minutes. This is the amount of time people can spend focusing on one thing before moving on to something else. “It surprised me at the time,” she told me during our Wednesday session. “I thought, Wow, that’s really short.”

But when she repeated the experiment in 2012, she found that attention spans had decreased to about 75 seconds on average, she said. In research she conducted between 2014 and 2020, attention spans declined further, to just 47 seconds on average. Yeah.

And that's not good for us. Mark told me that she found switching our attention so often to be stressful. “We would ask people to wear heart rate monitors, and… we would see a direct correlation between a rapid shift in attention and increased stress,” she told me.

All these distractions also make it harder for us to get things done. “It just takes longer to complete a task if you switch attention,” she told me. "It's not good for performance. It's not good for our emotional well-being."

And it's for adults. What about the effects of digital technologies on children? A few months ago, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Google were ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to a 20-year-old woman who accused the companies of creating products that caused her to develop an addiction as a child.

Just a few weeks ago, Meta settled another lawsuit, this one brought by a rural Kentucky school district. The district had also accused the company of making addictive products harmful to students and requested more than $60 million to cover the costs of their mental health needs. About 1,200 other school districts are filing similar lawsuits against social media companies.

But social media isn't always bad. This can offer some people, including those from marginalized groups, the opportunity to make connections that might otherwise be difficult. A 2024 survey of LGBTQ+ teens found that while some described social media as a place of rejection and fear, others described it as a place where they felt a sense of belonging, where they could develop friendships and cultivate their identity.

The truth is, we can't say for sure what effects social media use has on children across the board, says Mark. “There have been many, many studies, and to date the evidence is inconclusive,” she told me. (Despite what you might read in best-selling books on the subject.)

Mark hopes that large, long-term studies can finally begin to shed some more light on this question. An effort of this nature is underway in Australia, which banned social media for under-16s late last year.

Given this uncertainty about 20-year-old technology, I wondered if Mark had any thoughts on the potential impacts of AI, an obviously much newer offering that, in the space of a few years, seems to have become deeply integrated into our digital lives.

She told me she was worried.

When we put effort into doing something, like evaluating or summarizing content, we're doing what's called "deep processing," she told me. “When you're actively involved with information, you process it at a very deep level,” she said. “Then you are more likely to learn it, understand it and retain it.”

This doesn't happen when most people use AI bots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. When we ask these tools to write, summarize, or evaluate for us, we are no longer performing this depth of processing. “You hand over your cognitive work to AI,” she said. “And that’s not good for us.”

The risk is that our cognitive abilities weaken over time. “If you don't constantly exercise your muscles, they can atrophy,” Mark said. “And that’s exactly what can happen to our minds.” People with weaker critical thinking skills are more likely to fall prey to misinformation, she added.

Interactions with AI-powered “synthetic companions” can be just as harmful. Human relationships take work: time, effort, and understanding. None of this is necessary if you are establishing a relationship with a sycophantic robot. The “muscle” we are at risk of atrophying here is emotional intelligence, which surveys show is already in decline, Mark said.

She doesn’t paint a particularly rosy picture.

“If we continue on this trajectory, attention span decreases, loneliness increases, boredom increases, emotional intelligence decreases, and, according to studies, our sense of purpose also decreases,” she said.

Fortunately, she thinks we can fix things by changing our relationship with these technologies. The key factor is effort.

The more effort we put into something, the more deep satisfaction we will get, Mark told me. This means making an effort to read a book rather than skimming the summary, and meeting friends in person when you can. Try not to use GPS in places where you can probably do without it.

“I love technology; we can’t give it up,” she told me. “[But] we must learn to create new life routines. »

This article was first published in The Checkup, the weekly biotechnology newsletter from the MIT Technology Review. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday and read articles like this first, sign up here.

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