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Who pays more attention, us or the goldfish?

A decade ago, or maybe a little less, a report began to circulate indicating that the attention span of humans decreased so much that now goldfish, with their 8 seconds of attention, pay attention for longer than we humans. The report is still widely used, even though it never existed as such.

Without going into the details of who posted what and when, suffice it to say that it was indisputably proven that the original report on the subject never said that humans pay less attention than goldfish. How then did the opposite spread? Because those who distributed the report did not pay attention to what it said.

Let's see if we can be clear: a report focused on how little attention humans pay to things is invalidated because, by spreading it, the humans doing the reporting didn't really pay attention to the report, specifically the numbers that were used. .

In other words, the refutation of the veracity of the report about how little attention we humans pay is based on emphasizing how little attention we humans pay. And, without a doubt, it is so. 

For example, more than once in recent times I've come across replies to messages I've sent that are completely unrelated to the message I sent, revealing that the recipient of the message didn't even read it. And on several occasions I was able to verify that it was so.

The explanation is always the same: “I am very busy” or “I have many things on my mind”. No one says “My attention span is down to a minimum and it only lasts a few seconds. Therefore, I can't even complete reading two paragraphs of text." No one says it, but that's exactly what happens: our attention lasts the blink of an eye.

In the meantime, one must ask what we are not paying attention to when we are not paying attention to things. The obvious and short answer is that we are not paying attention to our own lives. It is said that life is what happens to us while we are looking the other way and I think it is true.

We live in a time when fiction predominates over reality, but at the same time it is a fragmented fiction in which no fragment lasts more than a few seconds and no fragment connects in a coherent way with the previous one or with the subsequent one. It is an infinite sequence of ephemeral nonsense.

At some point I came to think that if one pays attention and collects enough fragments of reality (or fiction, which is the same today), then the moment would come when one could begin to solve the puzzle. Then I realized that there is no puzzle to solve. 

Perhaps it is ultimately true that human attention spans are now shorter than goldfish because our lives are impossibly fragmented in smaller and increasingly insignificant fragments to the point that our awareness of our own selves is also fragmented.

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