AI Chatbots Are Reshaping How We Think, Says 30-Year Study
· Jessica Hamzelou
This week at SXSW London, I spent a lot of time moving between music showcases, film screenings, and panels packed with people arguing about AI.…
This week at SXSW London, I spent a lot of time moving between music showcases, film screenings, and panels packed with people arguing about AI. But the most grounding conversation I had was with Gloria Mark, a psychologist from UC Irvine who has spent the last 30 years studying how we actually use digital tech.
Mark’s research cuts through the typical hype. She and her team have tracked people’s attention spans and multitasking habits for decades, long before smartphones were glued to our hands. Her work shows that our ability to focus has been declining steadily, and not just because of social media. It’s a deeper shift in how we interact with information and each other. During our chat, she pointed out that we now switch tasks every 40 seconds on average, down from about three minutes in the early 2000s. That’s not a productivity hack. It’s exhaustion.
Mark didn’t come to SXSW to sell a tool or a platform. She came to talk about what happens when our digital environments are designed to fragment attention, not sustain it. She’s not anti tech either. She wants us to understand the trade offs. One key insight she shared is that taking intentional breaks, even short ones, can restore our ability to focus. The trick is making those breaks deliberate, not just switching to another screen.
What stuck with me is that the real story here isn’t about AI stealing jobs. It’s about whether we’ll have the attention left to do anything worthwhile with the tools we’re building. If we can’t focus for more than 40 seconds, the smartest AI in the world won’t help us think better.