Attention span test
How long can you keep paying attention?
This is a game, not a medical test. It can't tell you anything about your health. What it can do is show you how long you keep answering a phone that almost never rings.
It runs while you get on with something else, so your result takes exactly as long as you last. If you'd like an answer in ten minutes, try the vigilance test.
Attention isn't one thing
Most online attention tests measure how quickly you react when you're already concentrating. That's useful, but it isn't what most of a working day asks of you. Noticing something rare, while you're busy with something else, is a different skill.
Researchers call it vigilance. Norman Mackworth studied it in the 1940s with a clock whose hand occasionally jumped twice as far as usual, to learn why wartime radar operators missed signals as a watch went on. Accuracy fell off notably after about half an hour, and researchers have been picking at that finding ever since.
How this test works
The phone rings every 1 to 5 minutes, at random, so you can't time it. You have up to a minute to notice and a few seconds for a small task. Then you go back to whatever you were doing. Your score is how long you keep it up.
What your time means
Honestly, not much, and we'd be suspicious of any site that told you otherwise. We can't give you a percentile for your brain. We can tell you where you stand among the other people on the board today, and that's the entire science.
A long hold also depends on things that have nothing to do with you: your browser, your notifications, whether your laptop decided to sleep. We wrote up what we measured about that. A short hold might just mean you had a meeting.
About that goldfish
You've probably read that human attention spans have fallen below a goldfish's eight seconds. The BBC went looking for the source and couldn't find one. Please don't repeat it, particularly to a goldfish.