Source: MindShift

How many times per day do you check your phone? According to Gloria Mark, psychologist and author of Attention Span, people swipe from screen to screen about 566 times per day, and about half of those switches are self-motivated, meaning they weren’t prompted by a notification.

Digital technologies have been innovated quicker than humans are capable of processing, and our new tools and social media are designed to keep us tapping and swiping. This has become an issue that impedes attention span because “the mind has a limited pool of cognitive resources,” said Mark, who is a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. In a 2019 study of 84 college students in Korea, Mark’s colleagues found that the students spent 28% of class duration distracted on smartphones. These tech distractions were also associated with lower grades.

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