'Irresistible' By Design: It's No Accident You Can't Stop Looking At The Screen

Could smartphones and other screens be decreasing the human attention span? Author Adam Alter thinks so. "Ten years ago, before the iPad and iPhone were mainstream, the average person had an attention span of about 12 seconds," Alter tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. Now, he says, "research suggests that there's been a drop from 12 to eight seconds ... shorter than the attention of the average goldfish, which is nine seconds." Alter links our diminished attention spans to the "mainstream adoption of screens."