Human Intelligence Sharply Declining

No, it's not just you — people really are less smart than they used to be.

As the Financial Times reports, assessments show that people across age groups are having trouble concentrating and losing reasoning, problem-solving, and information-processing skills — all facets of the hard-to-measure metric that "intelligence" is supposed to measure.

These results, the FT reports, are gleaned from benchmarking tests that track cognitive skills in teens and young adults. From the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study documenting concentration difficulties of 18-year-old Americans to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) that measures the learning skills of 15-year-olds around the world, years of research suggest that young people are struggling with reduced attention spans and weakening critical thinking skills.

Though there has been a demonstrably steep decline in cognitive skills since the COVID-19 pandemic due to the educational disruption it presented, these trends have been in evidence since at least the mid-2010s, suggesting that whatever is going on runs much deeper and has lasted far longer than the pandemic.

Obviously, there's no single answer as to why people seem to be struggling with cognitive skills, but one key indicator is the sharp decline in reading and the world's changing relationship to the way we consume information and media. In 2022, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts found that just 37.6 percent of Americans said they'd read a novel or short story in the year prior — a share down from 41.5 percent in 2017 and 45.2 percent in 2012.

It would be easy enough to blame this decline on people reading less (and, presumably, scrolling online brainrot more). But according to 2023 results from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the same international consortium that puts out the PISA survey, 34 percent of adults in the United States scored at the lowest levels of numeracy, which essentially means that they lack the ability to work with numbers. A year prior, that share was just 29 percent.

Beyond changes in media consumption and the mediums in which we take it, it appears, as the FT notes, our relationship to information generally is shifting too. While there certainly are ways to use tech that don't cause harm to cognition, studies show that "screen time" as we know it today hurts verbal functioning in children and makes it harder for college-age adults to concentrate and retain information.

There isn't any reason to suggest that human intellect has been harmed, the publication counters — but in "both potential and execution," our intelligence is definitely on the downturn.

More on intelligence: People With This Level of Education Use AI the Most at Work

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