Shakespeare’s plays were considered popular entertainment when he first wrote and staged them in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Often today, the name Shakespeare carries certain high-brow or elitist connotations, but in his own time, Shakespeare wrote for everyone, from the aristocrats of Elizabeth’s court to the tradesmen who took an afternoon off work to come and stand amongst the “groundlings” at the Globe Theater and see a play (and perhaps heckle the actors a bit).

Concretely, this means that the average Elizabethan had sufficient vocabulary and attention span to watch a three-hour play by the Bard and consider it a rip-roaring good time—worth losing an afternoon’s wages. Today, if the average American sits through a full Shakespeare play, understands it, and doesn’t begin to squirm with impatience, it’s something of an accomplishment.

This is just one example of the ways that the human interests and attention spans have transformed over the last 500 years, particularly since the advent of computers and other electronic devices which have integrated themselves into every aspect of our lives and every room of our houses.

The mind-altering effect of our device usage appears to be ongoing. A Time magazine article from last year reported on the work of Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist who has been studying the relationship between computers and human behavior for 20 years. Mark and her team have conducted studies in which they observe people using electronic devices and identify each time the subject’s focus shifts to something new. In the early 2000s, the typical electronic-user shifted his attention every 2.5 minutes. Today, the average has dropped to just 47 seconds. Consider that for a minute (or, at least 47 seconds): When we’re using a laptop, tablet, or phone, we’re typically staying on track for less than a minute at a time.

Of course, a lot of factors impact attention spans, including how interesting we find the task we’re trying to pay attention to, how much sleep we got recently, and what social or personal stressors we’re enduring. But screens offer a particularly alluring labyrinth of distractions, and our diffracted use of devices builds habits of distractibility.

Our brains simply get used to the jolt of novelty that arises from switching tasks frequently (like checking your email while trying to complete a project—something I’ve already done a few times while writing this article.) And most electronic devices and apps are designed to take advantage of and encourage our psychological penchant for novelty. Thus the devices form, or at least encourage, bad mental habits. The Time article quotes Dr. Adam Brown, co-director of the Center for Attention, Learning, and Memory at St. Bonaventure University in New York, who says, “the more you engage in task switching, the more your brain wants to wander and look for that new thing.”

This rut of inattentiveness has implications for our work lives. As Mark explained in an interview with the American Psychological Association’s podcast Speaking of Psychology, the more we multitask, the more errors we make. Our performance also slows because it takes time for us to reorient ourselves after an interruption (whether self-imposed or not). Brown reiterates that when we succumb to the siren call of the Samsung Galaxy (or whatever phone brand you prefer), our brains have to shift gears to begin a new task. This mental stuttering slows down our work.

I’ve certainly found this to be an issue in my writing life: The fewer distractions—digital or otherwise—the more quickly and coherently and substantively I can write. Conversely, even the simple act of keeping a tab with my email open in my browser can draw me away: When I see the parenthetical number on that tab change, indicating that a new message has come into my inbox, I’ll instinctively click on it in search of that tiny dopamine hit served up by the latest email—breaking my train of thought in my article.

But the problem goes well beyond work inefficiencies. According to these scientists, inattentiveness also causes anxiety. Mark tells Speaking of Psychology that individuals’ stress levels tend to spike the more that they task-switch.

We see this play out in our usage of technology, as outlined above. But even beyond that, the modern way of life as a whole seems to be nothing other than distractibility writ large, which may be one reason anxiety is on the rise. Our day-to-day living is often a hectic ordeal complicated by the modern way of life. We live in a fast-paced environment, besieged by information, administrative tasks, competing work/life priorities, anxiety-inducing headlines, all of which makes it difficult to attend to one thing at a time, to settle securely into the present moment and the riches it has to offer.

So often, we are bifurcated, divided, teleported, mentally inhabiting several locales at once, and the present is lost to us. This is a tragedy, because the present is where we actually live our lives. It’s no wonder we become stressed when we lose touch with the peace of the present.

Habits of inattention. Work ineffectiveness. Mental anxiety. These may be the fruits of undisciplined electronics usage. But the most poisonous fruit might be the effect that short attention spans have on our very humanity.

At the end of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes the case that human happiness consists, at least in part, in contemplation. In our active, work-oriented culture, such an assertion may strike us as odd—absurd, even. Really? Just thinking makes us happy? But it makes more sense if we realize that happiness comes from possessing what you love, and that knowledge—that is, contemplation—is the truest form of possession. We wish to live with those we love, for example, because in being together with them they are truly present to us, we “know” them deeply, and thus we hold them in our hearts. The same thing may be said of any good thing that we love: When we contemplate it, it becomes more deeply ours, engendering joy and happiness.

But for contemplation, we need focus. We need quiet. We need an absence of distractions. So if it’s true that our attention spans are being degraded, we may risk losing something even more precious than productivity: We may risk losing that which is distinctly human, that which makes us us: our ability to understand and know things at a profound level, which is a corollary to our ability to love deeply and meaningfully.

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