Where did our attention spans go, and can we get them back?

The Oxford English Dictionary announced its word of the year at the end of 2024: brain rot. The term relates to the supposedly negative effects of consuming social media content, but it struck a chord more widely with many of us who feel we just don’t have the mental capacity we once did. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying our waning attention spans for 20 years. She tells Madeleine Finlay why she believes our powers of concentration are not beyond rescue, and reveals her top tips for finding focus. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod