Category Archives: Articles

Screens present a unique minefield of distractibility, with their constant flow of notifications and information—and that’s by design, says Gloria Mark, a professor [emeritus of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. … “It’s not just the fact that there’s algorithms catching our attention,” Mark says. “We have this sense that we have to respond, we have to check.”

Read the full story on TIME.

Gloria Mark, UCI Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics, gets the full hour to talk about her latest book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity. Luckily there’s a few people left with long enough attention spans to write about it, so we can have a little agency to regain, shore up the decline of this capacity and achieve some balance. “I thought that everybody is affected by how they use their devices and I thought that it’s really important to spread the message to a much broader public than academia because I think people can… improve their lives. People are exhausted, they feel overwhelmed, so I think people are looking for ways to get out of this mess that we’ve gotten into,” says Mark.

Listen to the full podcast.

“We have a part of the brain called the executive function that’s responsible for self-regulation. For kids, it’s not fully mature, and yet they’re exposed to (social media) before their executive function mind (can help them manage it),” Gloria Mark, [Chancellor’s] professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine and author of  “Attention Span,” tells me over the phone. “A lot of adults have trouble with that as well,” she adds. … “One of the biggest things parents can do is limit screen time and be better role models themselves,” Mark said. “Get off screens and pay attention to your child so that they don’t learn that it’s normal to have a phone between you and another person.”

Read the full article on USA Today.

Informatics Professor Gloria Mark explains why letting your mind wander is good for your brain, and how to regain your lost attention span.

Salon talked recently to Mark about why we keep throwing ourselves into “attention traps,” the myths of sustained focus and learning how to find the “empty time” in our distracted days while still living in our real and infinitely diverting world.

Read the full interview on Salon.

Gloria Mark, [is] a [Chancellor’s] professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Mark’s investigations explore the impact digital media is having on our lives. Her research has found evidence that attention spans appear to be declining. This theme and how we can reclaim our focus are discussed in Mark’s new book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, which draws on her years of research. … Mark said there are a number of factors that may be playing a role in our increasing distractibility, and our psychology is just as important a factor as technology.

Read the full Newsweek article

Gloria Mark is a Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. She’s been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012 and is a recipient of the Google Research Award and the NSF Career award. She’s the author of the new book, Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life, which unpacks how our brains operate in the digital world, why we can’t focus, and how we can take back control to find more success in our careers but also more health and wellness in our lives. We unpacked myriad topics, including the anatomy of attention and the forces of distraction.

Listen to the podcast

UC Irvine informatics researcher Aaron Trammell explores subject in new book