Cliché Theories: Attention Span

That up there is a new title. I know, I'm doing one of those classification thingies to make it easier to find posts. I'm getting better at this.

This new idea was sparked when I came up with this theory and decided it needed to be written down. My first idea was to immediately text Lauren (who does psychology) and tell her about it, but it was 3 in the morning and thought it would be quite rude to have her thinking about stuff when trying to sleep. Either way, from now on I'm going to occasionally do a post with one of my theories in it, so that there is a written form of the things I think about. And if I write it, you can't argue about it and say I'm wrong. Because you know what's great about being agnostic? The ability to think properly. See, all of these scientists that surround me do indeed have immense knowledge and understand how things work, if indeed the path that they follow is correct. I on the other hand, might be more correct than they are because I think outside the box.

Life as an agnostic is great. I'm not bound by words spoken by morons in large, white coats. That analogy works for both atheists and religious nut-cases if you think about it.

Anyway, my latest theory is to do with attention spans, and why what we do affects it. The basic principal is that kids have much longer attention spans than adults, and teenagers have the shortest attention spans at all. I haven't actually done any research for this, so knowing my luck every psychologist in the country is going to turn around go, "Yeah... we know."

Either way, this is how I came up with the theory.

I was thinking about the difference between kids' TV and adults' TV. Josh recently showed me three episodes of Dragonball Z. The intention was to just show me one, to show me how awesome it was, but it turned into three because we waiting for ONE THING TO HAPPEN. Seriously, the job for the animators was ridiculously easy. It was three episodes of people standing around saying shit like, "He must be hiding his power level!" and, "He can't win!" and then finally something stupid happened that was supposed to relate to something that happened in the first episode. As an adult, this was the most boring nonsense I've ever had the pleasure of not paying attention to, but as kids we ate that shit up. You remember, right? It was so easy to be engrossed in things that just didn't matter.

Now take a look at everything we watch today. It's all quick-cuts and massive explosions. A conversation can't last more than three minutes before the movie becomes drivel. Now think back to the Teletubbies.

"I'm the bear. With brown fuzzy hair." I don't give a fuck! And yet, as children, we did. We really gave a fuck that that bear had brown fuzzy hair, and that lions were scary on the top, and scary underneath.

So now you see where I'm going with this.

"But kids needed things like the teletubbies that repeat things a thousand times so that they can learn the words."

And here's my next point, Audience. Let me finish for once. Jesus Christ.

I think our attention spans are driven by our need to talk. When we're small and tiny, we weren't very good at conversation. So we listened. We listened so hard. There is no time in our lives where we listen more than when we were like three years old.

And then we grew up a bit, and suddenly listening to people became boring because we were rude teenagers who just wanted to interrupt all the time.

"And if we look at Darwin's theory of evolution-"
"FART!"
"Listen, kid, if you have the audacity to interrupt me in my lesson with loud, annoying noises, do you think you could have the courtesy to actually fart?"
"POO."
"Okay, yeah, don't do that one. Or do, and then you can fuck off out of my classroom."

Oh memories of teaching. What a joy it was.

Anyway, it soon levels off and we gain the ability to listen again, so long as we have visuals.

So that's it really. When we're kids, we listen but rarely talk, when we're teenagers we never listen and talk all the fucking time about nonsense, and then when we reach adulthood a sort of equilibrium is established.

And if you were to plot that against our attention spans, then you will find that it has a positive correlation, exactly like the length of women's skirts and the economy. The higher they are, the better the market is.

Next time on Cliché Theories: Did dinosaurs really invent the iPod?

Okay, that's a lie, I won't be doing that.

Pete out.