Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown of AsapSCIENCE explain through whiteboard animation, the commonalities between fish brains and human brains and offer at least one example in which a goldfish’s brain works better than that of a human.
What about attention span? One particular report found that the human attention span is down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to 8 seconds today. Our use of the internet and devices is theorized to play a role, but either way goldfish have a nine-second attention span, trumping that of a human.