Scientific American | How to build kids’ ‘cognitive endurance’ in an age of distraction
The ability to run “mental marathons” is a skill children can learn through simple, but dedicated, practice
You’re halfway through a challenging exam when you notice your focus starting to slip. The words on the page blur together, and you find your mind wandering to what you’re going to have for dinner that night. Does that sound familiar? This mental fatigue isn’t a character flaw—it’s a universal human experience that reveals something essential about how people’s minds function.
We are behavioral scientists who study how economic circumstances shape human cognition and behavior. In a recent study of more than 1,600 children, we found that the ability to sustain mental effort over time—or “cognitive endurance”—functions much like physical stamina. Almost universally, the longer people spend on a task, the worse they perform on it. But just as athletes can train to run longer distances, kids are able to strengthen their capacity for sustained thinking through simple but dedicated practice, allowing them to continue to perform at a higher level for longer stretches of time. In an era of social media and short-form content designed to minimize mental friction and demand minimal effort, the capacity for sustained thinking may be getting less practice than ever—making it more important to understand how it develops and how it can be strengthened.
