Our attention span is shorter than a ... hey! What's that?

Mobile phone technology, the internet and TV have made their mark. On our brains.

According to a study by the Microsoft Corp., human attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2002 to eight seconds in 2013.

Even more significant: The attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds. Longer than ours.

Which reminds me of my friend Brianne, who bought her daughter some items for her goldfish this Christmas – and then accidentally poured the fish into the sink and killed it. Fortunately, goldfish are cheap, even if Brianne's daughter's memories aren't. According to Google, you can buy a goldfish for about $1, which is pretty good for something with an attention span longer than ours.

But getting back to the attention-span study: Researchers found a decrease in attention span across all age groups of their subjects, who were Canadian.

The idea that they used Canadians begs the question of whether researchers used the metric system or our imperial system to measure things. Of course they measured time and the clock is not metric – if it were, I presume there would be 100 minutes in an hour, 10 hours in a day, 10 days in a week and 100 weeks in a year. If that were the case, the Canadian year would be just over 694 days!

But to get back to the attention-span study: Researchers said a major factor in the decrease is the use of smartphones, which they said reduced humans' ability to focus on one task.

Did you know that the first smartphone was created in 1993 and 1994 by BellSouth under the name Simon Personal Communicator? I didn't. Personal digital assistants – popularly called PDAs – were the forerunners of smartphones. They included such brands as BlackBerry and Palm Pilot. Which reminds me, when I was the Daily Republic sports editor, we used Palm Pilots to transmit articles from remote sites. They worked roughly half the time. The other 50 percent of the time, the articles left the phone – there was no folder for sent emails – and went somewhere in the ether. The sports writer was left to dictate their article over a pay phone from somewhere in Lodi or Auburn.

But back to the attention-span study: Researchers found good news out of our smartphone-controlled lives. We can multitask better, probably due to the fact that smartphones require that skill.

I'm not sure whether that means I'll be able to pat my stomach and rub my head now – or is it the other way around? Are you supposed to pat your head? Speaking of that, did you know that legendary University of Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt's maiden name was Pat Head? Seriously. I wonder if she could multitask.

But back to the attention-span study: The takeaway, despite the sexy goldfish angle (idea for a band name: Sexy Goldfish), is that our brains adapt. Since we're now in the information age, we've sacrificed some attention for the ability to multitask, which I'll discuss as soon as I finish posting a clever update on Facebook.

The human brain is amazingly adaptable. And goldfish are terrible at texting, so we win.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.