Humans Are Getting Dumber

If you’ve had an inkling that everyone on Earth seems significantly dumber than they once were, you might not be wrong. Some smart people from the University of Michigan found that the human race has been struggling with its cognitive abilities. While it’s definitely a vibe you can feel in the air, it’s also noticeable in measurable, statistical metrics, especially among young people.

Specifically, the study, as reported by the Financial Times, found that regardless of age, people across the board are finding it more difficult to concentrate, and losing their ability to reason and problem-solve. The trend seems to have started around the mid-2010s and took a noticeable leap during the pandemic.

Researchers used benchmarking tests that track cognitive skills in teenagers and young adults, Futurism reported. It’s got to feel bad to have been a participant in that study and know that your responses are one of the reasons a major university is declaring that everyone is getting dumber.

We can all offer our hypotheses for this marked cognitive decline. If you say, “Kids are getting high all the time with legal weed and frying their brains!” Well, this very same research group just a few months ago announced that adolescent drug use has fallen dramatically. So it can’t be that. Maybe the answer is our current obsession with short-form content; maybe the endless scrolling is ruining our collective attention spans.

We’re spending a lot of time looking at screens, soaking in tiny bursts of entertainment instead of sitting down with a single long-form work that requires more of our time and focus. Not every idea vital to understanding the world and each other can be succinctly summed up in a TikTok or tweet.

The authors of the study note that we’re not necessarily getting less intelligent. Instead, it seems there’s other stuff soaking up our attention that isn’t as intellectually beneficial as the stuff we were doing pre-mid-2010s, a time when it seemed like everybody was at least a little bit more into reading than they are today.

We’re not living up to our potential. We’re just one big planet of slackers right now and a lot of people are willingly offloading everyday mental tasks to AI chatbots. At this rate, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get any better anytime soon.