It's a cute remark, but why is 50 minutes the right cutoff? For a technical talk it seems long. For an entertaining keynote it seems short. Movies are 90+ minutes.
At both the universities I’ve attended, lectures lasted 50 minutes. The odd few we had that were 100 had a short break in the middle supposedly inspired by research on how attention levels decay and recover over time. Conference talks seem to usually hover around the 60 minute mark.
I find movies have become too long — especially in recent years.
I consider 3+ hours indulgent (we get ice cream and beer, once or twice, during what used to be the reel changes here), but two and half hours is about right.
Two hours would be my bare minimum for "feature length", and when I see one and half hour "films" I wonder "why was this not made-for-TV"?
Still haven't seen some of recent movies that got recommended to me & that probably would like a lot. Because i know i just cant stop mid-movie and finish another day like some people can. And i can't justify watching a 3h movie... what a commitment... while i have no issue watching just one episode(... after another... before the sunlight screams that i am an irresponsible moron for binge-watching 6h during the week...)
The Matrix (which was being shown in cinemas recently, remastered, for the 25th anniversary), is 2 hours and 16 minutes. It feels like the perfect length to me.
Same here, regarding movies- we preferentially watch films under two hours, ideally 90-100 minutes, because that both fits between our child's bedtime and ours, and it's a better economy of time for a story in that format, rather than an indulgent marathon.
I doubt I will ever watch Heat again, unless over a couple days, and unless my child wants to I won't watch the Lord of the Rings again (and especially not The Hobbit movies; that was largely a waste of time, though I will gladly read The Hobbit at least once more before I die).
Mad Max: Fury Road (Black & Chrome version) I watched for the third time recently, but over two days.
Engaging conversation, though? I recently had the luxury of time and privilege of talking for three hours straight with a well-read college student. Not being a high school teacher anymore I'm out of touch with young-adult perspectives, and I have so many follow-up questions now.
Humans don't do well concentrating on something for more than about an hour. So fifty minutes seems like a reasonable rule of thumb.
You can improve this if you make it more varied, adding interactions, changing media, multiple speakers taking turns, that sort of thing, but having a rule of thumb helps.
And it fits calendars nicely, fifty minutes per talk, ten minutes break between, one talk per hour.
But that break was typically how long it took to get to the next class. So it might have been a break from active brain activity (as evidenced by the brain dead decisions of navigating hallways/lockers), it's not a break per se. Maybe one was determined by the other, but I remember having to hustle to get from one end of campus to the other in those 10 minutes in a very un-break like use of energy
> I remember having to hustle to get from one end of campus to the other in those 10 minutes
Yeah, personally I read it less as 50 minutes being some biological limit of human attention and more as once you go over people start thinking about how much longer you're going to be, how long it'll take to get to their class, weighing missing the end of this talk vs the start of the next one vs skipping their bathroom break/sprinting. Plus the added the distraction of people who have reached their limit getting up and squeezing their way past to leave.
