Fish have good memories and your attention span isn't getting shorter

I spoke to Prof Felicity Huntingford, who has spent almost half a century studying fish behaviour and just delivered a series of public lectures under the title, How Smart Are Fish? "Goldfish can perform all the kinds of learning that have been described for mammals and birds," she says.

"And they've become a model system for studying the process of learning and the process of memory formation, exactly because they have a memory and because they learn." She says there have been literally hundreds of scientific papers over the decades on goldfish learning and memory. I found a reference to a study on fish memory as early as 1908.

"That a species that's used by neuro-psychologists and scientists as a model for studying memory formation should be the very species that has this reputation - I think that's an interesting irony," she says. So goldfish don't have short attention spans or memories. There is no evidence human attentions spans are shrinking.