One obvious aspect of this hectic day and age is that people’s attention span is much shorter than it used to be. As has been pointed out before, almost nobody reads books the length of War and Peace anymore…

With all the media around us moving to shorter and shorter sound bytes and communication  happening in SMS messages and tweets, it would be natural to speculate that the cause of the shortening attention span is the influence – one can even say manipulation – of all these media. And yet it seems to go beyond a simple reaction; because there is a change in people’s inherent ability to process information in a leisurely and thorough manner.

This was pointed out to me by a client who told me he can no longer read a book, or watch a movie on TV, without stopping and getting up every half hour or so. When he was younger, he recalled, this wasn’t the case; something had changed in him. This man is in his fifties, so he isn’t your typical hyperactive millennial with earbuds in his ears and a game controller in his hand; he has every reason to be patient and attentive. And yet he can no longer do what he did before, and what countless generations of his ancestors – and mine, and yours – would naturally do.

I can attest to seeing the same phenomenon in myself… a kind of restlessness that interferes with long periods of concentrated reading. I often cringe when I open some article or blog post and discover it is a long one… and a training manager in a company I know, which still has a real library on the premises (a disappearing breed), told me that employees no longer check out books – they’d never find the quiet time to read them.

The question is, is this change in our mental machinery reversible? Would we be able to find the peace of reading, old style, even if the pressure from outside were to ease up? For instance: will a high-tech knowledge worker who retires revert to the leisurely information consumption of centuries past – or will he also have to get up every 30 minutes, with no real external cause? And what of the kids entering the workplace today, those who had never known another reality?

Do you know the answer?