Short Attention Span

Aug 19, 2024 | Welcome Column

With the advent of digital media technology our society has new problems to solve about how we live our lives. Our culture has gone from word of mouth to print to radio then to television and beyond at a dizzying pace. But the human race has had problems all through its existence and we have always found at least a partial solution.

How do we solve the problem of short attention span brought on by the new technology of so many people having smart phones? In the click of a button one can now access the knowledge of millions of experts. A boon for all of us thinkers out there but what costs come with this technology blessing and how does it affect the music we love in the CBA? The same people who access the compiled knowledge of centuries can also spend hours posting on FaceBook instead of just sitting down with their friends and having a face to face chat. (At least the new technology makes face to face chats easier via apps like Zoom and Facetime).

In addition to being a huge bluegrass fan I am a huge baseball fan. I just finished reading an excellent book called Why Baseball Is Important by Susan Jacoby. In the book she discusses why the game of baseball is losing relevance with today’s society. I have written about baseball in this column before because it reflects our national identity so much, as I believe bluegrass music does too. Is that same phenomenon of declining relevance happening with our bluegrass music?

Bluegrass music is exciting. It still has relevance. But our instant gratification multimedia distraction environment might make it difficult for people of the future to appreciate it. Admittedly there are better things to do than play and listen to music but our culture needs it. How do we adapt our music to the new media environment?

Our children need it too. We need to develop independent thinkers to help the AI robots of the future and I find it very interesting and a good thing that so many schools are banning cell phones is the classroom now.

Our bluegrass community has an edge. We have Kids on Bluegrass and other programs to foster engagement with our future.

I’ll leave you with a scholarly article about music as a cognitive tool. The bottom line is that, with so many multimedia distractions, music is a gateway to kids (our future adults) for a more focused approach to solving the world’s problems. Short attention span? Try learning fiddle!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7393235

Here’s the abstract if you don’t want to read the whole article:

Although music has been utilized as a therapeutic tool for children with cognitive impairments, how it improves children’s cognitive function remains poorly understood. As a first step toward understanding music’s effectiveness and as a means of assessing cognitive function improvement, we focused on attention, which plays an important role in cognitive development, and examined the effect of a music intervention on children’s attention. Thirty-five children, aged 6 to 9 years, participated in this study, with data from 29 of the children being included in the analysis. A single 30-minute interactive music intervention was compared with a single 30-minute interactive video game intervention accompanied by computer-generated background music using a within-subjects repeated-measures design. Each intervention was implemented individually. Participants completed a standardized attention assessment, the Test of Everyday Attention for Children, before and after both interventions to assess changes in their attentional skills. The results indicated significant improvement in attention control/switching following the music intervention after controlling for the children’s intellectual abilities, while no such changes were observed following the video game intervention. This study provides the first evidence that music interventions may be more effective than video game interventions to improve attention control in children, and furthers our understanding of the importance of music interventions for children with attention control problems.

 

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