Focus
Is the human attention span really 8 seconds?
No. The claim has been traced repeatedly and no original study has ever been found. Attention depends on the task, not on a fixed number.
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Questions students actually ask
Straight answers, with the sources named — and the tool that does the work at the end of each one.
Speed
- Does aim training actually make you better at games? It trains one narrow component well, and the marketing is about the other components.
- How much of your reaction time is your computer? Thirty to forty milliseconds can disappear before your nervous system is involved at all.
- What caffeine actually does It blocks the signal that you are tired. It does not remove the tiredness, and the difference matters.
- Why your scores bounce around so much A single result is mostly noise. The interesting question is how many you need before it stops being.
- What one bad night actually costs you The effect is larger than caffeine, larger than practice, and you are the last person able to notice it.
- What is a good reaction time, really? A browser test centres on 273 milliseconds, and a surprising amount of that number is not you.
Memory
- How to memorise a number you only see once Everyone already chunks. The techniques below are what happens when you do it deliberately.
- Are you a visual or a verbal rememberer? The gap between your two scores is real. What it means is narrower than the learning-styles industry claims.
- Why you remember things that never happened A famous experiment makes almost everyone confidently remember a word that was never shown.
- What actually changes about memory as you age Less than people fear, and not the parts they usually worry about.
- Working memory, and the number seven The most quoted number in psychology is a misreading of the paper it came from.
Words
- What counts as a good typing speed Forty words a minute is average. What that is enough for is the more useful question.
- Should you switch keyboard layout? Probably not — and the most cited evidence for switching was produced by the man it is named after.
- How to actually type faster Slowing down until you stop making errors is, counter-intuitively, the fastest route to a higher number.
Focus
- The goldfish attention span statistic is made up It has been traced repeatedly and there is no study at the end of it.
- Why streaks work, and when they stop A streak is a commitment device. It works until the day it becomes a reason to quit.
- Why you are slower after lunch It happens whether or not you eat, which is the clue to what it actually is.
- Does music help you concentrate? It depends almost entirely on whether the music has words and whether the work does.
- Does brain training actually work? You get better at the test. Whether that helps anywhere else is a much harder question, and mostly the answer is no.
- The Stroop effect, ninety years on You cannot choose not to read a word you are looking at. That is the whole finding.