A key reason for us human beings to dominate the planet has been our reasoning power or intelligence. Unfortunately, that seems to be on the wane for our species as a whole according to this FT piece. The article notes the recent results from PISA, the OECD’s international benchmarking test for performance by 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science tests:
“…that scores for all three subjects tended to peak around 2012. In many cases, they fell further between 2012 and 2018 than they did during the pandemic-affected years. And broader in that this decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups in last year’s update of the OECD’s flagship assessment of trends in adult skills.”
There are other studies showing similar trends of declining cognitive power:
“…every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.”
The article has plenty of charts showing this declining trend including a dramatic drop in reading habits:
“This inflection point is noteworthy not only for being similar to performance on tests of intelligence and reasoning but because it coincides with another broader development: our changing relationship with information, available constantly online. Part of what we’re looking at here is likely to be a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens. The decline of reading is certainly real — in 2022 the share of Americans who reported reading a book in the past year fell below half.”
Whilst ease of information access by itself is still net positive, it is how we consume this information which seems to be the problem:
“We have moved from finite web pages to infinite, constantly refreshed feeds and a constant barrage of notifications. We no longer spend as much time actively browsing the web and interacting with people we know but instead are presented with a torrent of content. This represents a move from self-directed behaviour to passive consumption and constant context-switching. Research finds that active, intentional use of digital technologies is often benign or even beneficial. Whereas the behaviours that have taken off in recent years have been shown to affect everything from our ability to process verbal information, to attention, working memory and self-regulation.”
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