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In 2018, a decade of data analysed by leading memory psychologists at Stanford University found that people who frequently engaged with multiple online platforms have reduced memory and attention spans. And yet we seem to be doing very little to stem the tide. Earl Miller, an MIT neuroscientist and world expert on divided attention, warned in 2022 that we are now living in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. Dr Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California and author of Attention Span, has found evidence of how drastically our ability to focus is waning. In 2004, her team of researchers found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. Six years ago, it was down to 47 seconds. This “is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society”, she told a podcast in 2023. But we’re not entirely to blame if technology is making us less intelligent. After all, it was designed to captivate