Learn about why our collective attention span is shrinking; how you can increase your productivity by building “deep work” skills; and why eyeball planets may be our best bet for finding alien life. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Why Is Our Attention Span Shrinking? — https://curiosity.im/2Gz2XE5 You Can Build "Deep Work" Skills to Increase Productivity — https://curiosity.im/2GzBu5g Eyeball Planets May Be Our Best Bet For Finding Alien Life — https://curiosity.im/2GA3wOj If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about why our collective attention span is shrinking; how you can increase your productivity by building “deep work” skills; and why eyeball planets may be our best bet for finding alien life.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/finding-life-on-eyeball-planets-our-shrinking-collective-attention-span-and-deep-work-skills
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why our collective attention span is shrinking; how you can increase your productivity by building “deep work” skills; and why eyeball planets may be our best bet for finding alien life.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Why Is Our Attention Span Shrinking? — https://curiosity.im/2Gz2XE5 (Ashley)
New research suggests our collective attention span is shrinking. I said COLLECTIVE attention span, by the way; not the INDIVIDUAL’s, but the collective’s. A collective attention span is all about how long a hot or trending topic stays hot, or the speed at which our public conversation moves. How long can we collectively obsess over a movie, a book, or a hashtag before it loses its appeal? To measure our communal attention span over time, a team of European researchers turned to data, naturally. As in: the past 40 years of movie ticket sales; Google Books data for books written in the past hundred years; scientific citation data going back 25 years; and 2010s data from Reddit, Wikipedia, and Google Trends. They crunched the numbers on how popularity moved on all these different platforms. They measured popularity by the rate of commenting on Reddit, for instance, and by the amount of time something spent on the "trending" charts on Twitter. Was our collective attention span shrinking as time passed? They found that indeed it was — but not in every arena. From 2013 to 2016, hashtags went from staying in Twitter's top 50 for an average of 17.5 hours to 11.9 hours. They found similar shrinkage on Reddit and Google Books, and in movie ticket sales. Wikipedia and scientific citations, though, suggested a fairly constant collective attention span. So what’s going on? The researchers created a mathematical model that predicted a lot of the shrinkage they saw. It treated media as "species that feed on human attention," and assumed that human attention was both finite and predictable — drawn to a few basic things, including "hotness" and novelty. Their model suggested that our collective attention span shrunk due to growing competition; an increasing number of "species" hope to "feed" on our delicious attention-food. Basically, faster rates of content production and consumption are shortening our collective attention span. Just like you work faster when you have a long to-do list, we consume media faster because we're inundated with entertainment options. If we had less media to consume, or we just insisted on consuming more slowly, our collective attention might grow back. So for now, when you open social media and feel like you can't focus, try not to worry. It's not that your personal attention span is shrinking; there's just more media competing for it. [ad lib]
You Can Build "Deep Work" Skills to Increase Productivity — https://curiosity.im/2GzBu5g (Cody)
Speaking of attention spans, it seems like it’s tough to maintain your focus these days. You’ve probably gotten at least one notification on your phone since you started listening to this episode of Curiosity Daily. In spite of all this, there’s a skill called “deep work” that you can build to take your productivity to the next level. The term "deep work" was coined by Cal Newport, an author and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Here’s how he defines deep work; quote, "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skills, and are hard to replicate," unquote. Basically, stuff you do with no distractions, and total focus. Some examples include writing a book, creating music, or solving a difficult problem. In contrast, there is shallow work. That’s what he calls "Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create new value in the world and are easy to replicate." Stuff like reading emails, filing expenses, and other easily checked items on your to-do list. In our distraction-heavy society, Newport argues that the ability to access a state of deep work is becoming both more valuable and more rare. Spending more time in deep work than in shallow work is key to accomplishing more with your time. Great, so you can do this by just blocking off time to do the thing you're trying to do, right? Well, not exactly. According to Newport, the notification-heavy lives we live have trained our brains and reduced our attention spans. He told Entrepreneur that you have to treat your attention with a lot of respect, like a professional athlete might treat their body. You can sharpen your work skills with intentional practice focusing and removing distractions. According to Newport, this will help you learn difficult things faster and create to the best of your ability.
[FIRST ALERT]
ASHLEY: Today’s episode is sponsored by First Alert. There are three things every homeowner wants their home to be: smarter, safer, and more fun. What if I told you OneLink by First Alert can cover that whole trio?
CODY: First, meet your family’s new best friend, the OneLink Safe and Sound. It’s a hardwired smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarm with a premium home speaker, AND it’s Alexa enabled — all in one sleek device. It’s built with First Alert safety technology and provides an immersive, great sound experience. The Safe and Sound elevates any home — but it gets even better than that!
ASHLEY: That’s right! OneLink by First Alert also offers the OneLink smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarm that works with the OneLink Safe and Sound. The device is easy to install and protects against both smoke and carbon monoxide. If smoke or CO is detected in the home, the smart alarm will notify you using exclusive voice and location technology, and send a notification to your smart phone, whether you’re at home or away.
CODY: A smart home should start with smart protection, and OneLink by First Alert welcomes you to a smarter, safer home. For more information, visit one-link-dot-first-alert-dot-com. One more time, that’s one-link-dot-first-alert-dot-com.
Eyeball Planets May Be Our Best Bet For Finding Alien Life — https://curiosity.im/2GA3wOj (Ashley)
ASHLEY: According to an astronomer named Sean Raymond, eyeball planets may be our best bet for finding alien life. CODY: What’s an eyeball planet?
ASHLEY: I’m so glad you asked! It’s a planet shaped like an eyeball! But also, it’s a place we might be able to spot pretty easily, and that might be able to sustain life. And we should be able to find one near a red dwarf, which is the oldest and most common type of star in the galaxy. Since they're also relatively dim, they have a relatively small habitable zone. That’s the zone a planet can orbit within and still support life. And having a smaller habitable zone than, say, the one we have here on Earth around our yellow dwarf star, is actually a good thing, since the closer a planet is to a star, the easier it is for us to spot it here on Earth. But a close orbit also means that a planet is likely to be tidally locked, meaning that one side of the planet always faces the sun (just like how the same side of the moon is always facing the Earth). A planet tidally locked to its sun wouldn't have a day-night cycle, so one half of the planet would be encased in ice and the other would bake under constant sunlight. Not exactly a hospitable environment — OR IS IT? A planet like that would look a lot like an eyeball. Think of the hot spot facing the sun as the pupil. But that pupil would have a surrounding iris as well — a strip of land with a more temperate climate, where liquid water would be able to flow. And it would flow, since melting ice from the frozen half would trickle into huge rivers flowing towards the desert half. Once it reached that blazing region, the water would evaporate, precipitate, and begin all over again. The result would be that any residents of that ring of life would be living in perpetual twilight, with a never-setting sun. Still, they'd certainly be living. Since these planets are so much more plentiful and so much easier to spot, we'll almost certainly find our celestial neighbors there before we find them anywhere else. So how many of these "eyeball planets" are there? Probably a lot, and they're going to come in several different flavors. The kind I’ve been talking about so far have all been tidally locked, but there are other possible formations. Depending on how fast the planet rotates, the landscape of such a planet might form a striped pattern or a double-eyeball pattern where both the western and eastern hemispheres have their own hotspots. But whether we find aliens there or not, we should be giving serious consideration to these types of planets when it comes to humanity's eventual interstellar destination.
CODY: Read about today’s stories and more on curiosity-dot-com!
ASHLEY: Join us again tomorrow for the award-winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m [NAME] and I’m [NAME]. Stay curious!