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-pin-down 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. (Read more from “Human Intelligence Sharply Declining” HERE)