However, a BBC radio programme called More or Less, couldn't find evidence to back up Microsoft's report. It spoke to Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychologist at the Open University, who says there are problems with the idea of measuring attention spans and it's all down to the individual person, "so attention-switching ability may well have developed in recent years, in the age of the smartphone and the internet. But because someone's distracted by their smartphone… it doesn't mean that they then don't have the ability to control and sustain their attention when they carry out another task."

This suggests we're getting better at switching our attention quickly between different tasks; we can multi-skill better than before so we can achieve more things. This is useful in the modern workplace where we need to turn our hand to many different jobs.

But for people who want to grab our attention, such as advertisers, they have to think of clever ways to make us sit up and take notice of them. And there are still times when something demands our full attention, without any distractions, like reading or listening to this article. Did you make it to the end?!

词汇表 distraction 分散注意力的东西，分心的事情

focussed 专注的

task 任务，工作

attention span 注意力持续时间

shrink 缩小，变小

zero in on something 把注意力全部集中于某事

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