Fragmented attention wears out the mind. Neuroscientists explain why nature and art are the real therapies to reactivate the brain.
That constant scrolling, the endless notifications, the WhatsApp messages that leave us no respite and the TikTok videos that keep us glued to the screen until late at night. If your winter has more or less passed like this, balanced between fear and at the same time the desire for a healthy disconnection, now unable to read a book to the end and alongside friends and colleagues who cannot even follow a conversation longer than a few seconds without getting distracted, well you are in excellent company: the data tells us that we live in aepidemic of inattentionwhich increase the diagnoses of type disorders ADHD even in adulthood, and that the syndrome “Fomo” (Fear of missing out), which pushes us to always check social media for fear of missing something, information, an event, is increasingly widespread.
The problem is that the brain is more affected by this continuous hyperactivity than we think: if for years science had focused on stress as the “first enemy” of our mental well-being, today neuroscientists are aiming for another objective, namelyfragmented attention. Our mind is profoundly tired, we are no longer capable of concentration and this affects all aspects of daily life, from work to social relationships. «The brain, like any other organ, has a functional reserve that can be used to deal with stressful situations or particular stresses», he tells Panorama Giancarlo Cerverivice president of Italian Society of Psychiatry. «However, if he is continuously exposed to the same type of request, he ends up changing his way of functioning. His great plasticity leads him to act in a regime of constantly fragmented attention, but this adaptation has a cost: cognitive fatigue appears over time. It is therefore important to give him moments of recovery, limiting the continuous stimulation of social media and digital devices. It’s like the muscle of an arm or leg subjected to incessant effort: without adequate breaks, its performance inevitably decreases.”
Brain exhausted by smartphones and social media: the scientific breakthrough to regenerate it in summer
In this summer of 2026, while the fashionable trend is to take advantage of holidays to train the body with the boom in “performance” travel and resorts with gym packages and personal trainers – lest we ever arrive in September with flaccid biceps and abdominals no longer “turtle” – a change of perspective would be appropriate. The real exhausted organ that needs to be regenerated is the brain, and it wouldn’t take much to get it back on track. «There is a system in the brain called Default mode networka network of areas that is activated when we are not focused on a task and let our thoughts wander. It’s his rest mode,” he says Paolo Calabresihead of the neurology department of theIrccs Policlinico Gemelli in Rome and ordinaryCatholic University. «Today we know that this system is fundamental for cognitive and emotional balance, and that its alteration is involved not only in attention disorders, but also in neurodegenerative diseases such asAlzheimer’s. To activate this system we can set ourselves, in the months of “rest”, to rediscover beauty, art and nature: visiting museums, walking in a park or along a mountain path among the greenery are activities that allow you to activate the brain circuits that produce beneficial effects on mental health. Beauty can become a true form of therapy.”
Less performance, more art and more nature. In the United States the “Attention restoration theory“, according to which the natural environment helps to regenerate the attention circuits consumed by digital life through what researchers call “soft fascination”: a spontaneous involvement that allows the brain to recover energy. True luxury may therefore not be an exotic or performative holiday, but the recovery of creative thinking.
The power of soft fascination against the risk of cognitive decline
And while Great Britain – after Australia – has announced that it wants to ban social media for children under 16, theAnglia Ruskin University, Cambridgein the largest survey of its kind ever carried out, asked more than 50 thousand people from 58 different countries to describe their experience with nature, discovering that contact with it promotes a sort of “cognitive quiet” in which thoughts and emotions can be processed without the continuous effort required by concentrated attention.
In this state it becomes easier to welcome emotional difficulties with understanding, allowing you to face negative thoughts and emotions with greater awareness and feel more connected to others. And all this within reach (all you need is a bit of nature, or a museum) and within your wallet (just in the right year, when you also have to save on petrol and plane travel is a risk).
The prescription of art to regain memory and mental health
Won’t everything be too basic and simplistic? “It definitely isn’t,” he concludes Paolo Calabresi. «Just think that in many neurodegenerative pathologies, beauty itself becomes a form of therapy: visiting stimulating places, perhaps in company, means combining the benefits of movement with those of sociality. And this is a crucial aspect, because loneliness represents one of the factors that can favor the onset and progression of neurodegenerative processes. Some epidemiological studies have in fact shown that people who perceive themselves as lonely have, in subsequent years, a higher risk of developing diseases such as Parkinson». Even more so since last February Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Culture have started a national protocol on the so-called “art prescription”, with the aim of including museums, theatre, music and other cultural activities among the treatment support tools. Attention is paid especially to people with depressive disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. In other words, at least in some cases, alongside the drugs the doctor could also prescribe a dose of beauty.
The paradox is all here: we spend our days with the fear of missing something, while what we are really losing is our attention, without which there is no memory, no creativity or relationships, and for this reason perhaps this summer the most precious asset to pack in your suitcase will not be a new device, but a few hours of silence, nature and unplanned time. The brain, after years of hyperconnection, could thank us more than we imagine.
