Full transcript of the episode (it gives away every surprise)
Interactive experiment
A button
Nothing forces you to press it.
A glowing button, with no instructions. Each press may, at random, bring up a small reward: a star, sometimes a “jackpot.” The presses are quietly counted.
You didn’t press it.
Well done: a button that might reward you at random is one of the hardest objects to ignore. Here is why.
The Pigeon and the Screen
Your attention has become the most coveted resource in the world. Here is how it gets captured.
In the 1950s, at Harvard, the psychologist B. F. Skinner shut pigeons inside boxes equipped with a button. If every peck brings food, the pigeon pecks when it is hungry, then stops.
But if the reward comes at random, once in ten times, once in fifty, the pigeon becomes tireless: thousands of pecks, without a break.
You know this button. It is in slot machines. It is in the gesture of pulling the screen down to refresh. It is in every notification: maybe nothing, maybe the message you were waiting for.
It is the uncertainty of the reward that makes the gesture irresistible.
Dopamine is often described as the pleasure molecule. It is really the molecule of anticipation: its neurons go into overdrive when a reward is better than expected, and even more so when it might, or might not, arrive.
What you are chasing is not the reward. It is the “maybe.”
Interactive experiment
A news feed
Just like on your phone. Scroll.
A fake, endless news feed that the reader scrolls through. After a while, the site interrupts and tells them how far they have scrolled.
This feed had no end.
It was designed that way. An endless feed removes the natural stopping points: the bottom of the page, the end of the chapter, the credits. Nothing tells you: that’s it.
In 2006, the designer Aza Raskin invented infinite scrolling, to make browsing simpler. He now estimates that it costs humanity the equivalent of 200,000 lifetimes every day. He publicly regrets it.
You may have read that our attention span is now only eight seconds, shorter than a goldfish’s.
That figure is based on nothing.
It comes from a 2015 marketing report that cited a source nobody can find. No study supports it. And goldfish have excellent memories.
The real question is not how long your attention lasts, but: who are you giving it to? In 1890, the psychologist and philosopher William James was already writing about it.
“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
Let’s do something strange for a website. For sixty seconds, do nothing. Read nothing. Listen to what is around you.
Nobody took those sixty seconds from you. They were yours.
In this adventure, other people weighed on you…
Groups, the rules of the game, words, money and screens: in every episode, other people were there, inside your head.
We never think alone.
And that may be our greatest strength: it is together that we learned to count, to measure, to understand.
Sources
- Charles Ferster and B. F. Skinner, Schedules of Reinforcement, 1957.
- Wolfram Schultz, Peter Dayan and Read Montague, “A neural substrate of prediction and reward,” Science, 1997; Christopher Fiorillo, Philippe Tobler and Wolfram Schultz, “Discrete coding of reward probability and uncertainty by dopamine neurons,” Science, 2003.
- Aza Raskin, interview with the BBC, 2018.
- BBC, More or Less, “Busting the attention span myth,” 2017.
- William James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890.