Have Humans Passed Peak Brain Power? (ft.com)
- Reference: 0176751031
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/03/17/0954252/have-humans-passed-peak-brain-power
- Source link: https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a13fc
This cognitive decline coincides with a fundamental shift in our relationship with information. Americans reading books has fallen below 50%, while difficulty thinking and concentrating among 18-year-olds has climbed sharply since the mid-2010s. The timing points to our changing digital habits: a transition from finite web pages to infinite feeds, from active browsing to passive consumption, and from focused attention to constant context-switching.
Research shows that intentional use of digital technologies can be beneficial, but the passive consumption dominating recent years impairs verbal processing, attention, working memory and self-regulation.
Some of the cited research in the story:
[2]New PIAAC results show declining literacy and increasing inequality in many European countries รข" Better adult learning is necessary ;
[3]Have attention spans been declining? ;
[4]Short- and long-term effects of passive and active screen time on young children's phonological memory ;
[5]Efficient, helpful, or distracting? A literature review of media multitasking in relation to academic performance .
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a13fc
[2] https://eaea.org/2024/12/11/new-piaac-results-show-declining-literacy-and-increasing-inequality-in-many-european-countries-better-adult-learning-is-necessary/
[3] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pweg9xpKknkNwN8Fx/have-attention-spans-been-declining
[4] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.600687/full
[5] https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-018-0096-z
Education (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this has less to do with brain power and more to do with education. Things like mathematical reasoning are to an extent learned not innate. At least in the US are educational system has deteriorated. Concern about not hurting the feelings of the less gifted and interference of religious and other special interest groups in what is taught has led to graduates with no education. I went I started work in the 1980s in chemistry we hired high school graduates as assistants by the time I retired we were hiring BS chemists for the same jobs, because high school graduates were incapable of doing the work (and paying the BS chemists relatively the same amount as we used to pay the high school graduates).
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Deteriorated by design via lack of funding among other things. Look who is in the White House. This is not a coincidence.
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"by design via lack of funding" what a joke! we spend more on education now than ever before! But it is by design, leftist indoctrination is not education and the test scores show it.
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> I think this has less to do with brain power and more to do with education.
the "peak brain power" thing is just yet another moronic headline proudly presented to you by the ft, funnily proving the point.
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Look who we have running the department of education. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also of note Financially, the couple fared poorly for several years and, despite her husband working at a quarry,[21] briefly received food stamps.
Wonder what her current opinion of food stamps is?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_McMahon
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She's not running the Department of Education. She's there to dismantle the Department of Education and sell it for parts, regardless of [1]what the public thinks about that. [newamerica.org]
And who loses in the end? Anyone with a learning disability who could otherwise become a productive member of society, and lower-income high-potential students who won't be able to afford college. What an awesome policy that helps "make America great again" by making sure the brightest among us can only reach potential if they're also t
[1] https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/trumps-proposal-to-dismantle-ed-unpopular-among-americans/
Re: Education (Score:2)
We all lose, unless the winning condition is destroying the country and then fucking off to Russia. Then one orange fuck wins, and almost everyone else loses.
Re:Education (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, this article seems to be discussing peak-education effectiveness, not peak-brain capability. We haven't even started the genetic engineering revolution yet, so we have no idea how high peak-human brain capability will get.
I couldn't read the article because of a pay-wall, but based on the quotes used I also doubt it was looking at peak capability anyway. It seems to be looking at average capability. If you wanted to look at peak capability you should be looking at how the top 0.1% are performing over time. That would show you if today's best and brightest are really declining or if it is just the average masses who are showing weaker results.
The Matrix said it first (Score:3)
1999 was the peak of human civilization.
Maybe... but not forever (Score:2)
Maybe it has reached a peak, maybe not.
It's clear that if the population peaks, and without good AI, the total brain will peak one way or another.
It's not the population peak, not yet. But adding people is just one of the factors, so other things can accelerate the peak a little.
BUT, that doesn't mean that's a stop for humankind. So that peak would be forever.
To grow exponentially we clearly needs grow, but we need to create more "space" to grow without collapse our environment.
That's exactly what a space p
Phones (Score:2)
I got my first smart phone in 2010. It's all been downhill from there.
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Absolutely this. Smart phones, dumber users.
All of your attentions are now belong to us. (Score:2)
Commercials started it... going down to 30 Sec sound bites... Now Tik Tok and Insta (etc) have cut our attention span to seconds... Commercials get LOUDER... Visuals get more compelling as our attention span gets abused. Role of facts is being "poo poo"ed by some that seem to want a more controllable, docile populace. Bring back the appreciation for lucidity! Coherency of thought! Bring back the perspicacity that builds on previous strengths. Creating a treadmill of sugary information and compelling-fals
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I heard a guy talking about "the attention economy" a while back, and just hearing that term and looking around and what's happening makes so much more sense now. Everything is a competition for a newly discovered constrained resource: your attention. And you have the power to freely give it where you wish, but a lot of people haven't realized that yet and continue squandering it.
Your attention is a scarce and valuable resource to many organizations and people. Do not freely give it to billionaires throu
Not passed peak brain power.. (Score:2)
But we have passed peak use of brain power, because clever people go to university and instead of studying a useful science, they waste their time on nonsense subjects and unscientific research like this.
High-income countries = technological havens (Score:5, Insightful)
Smart phones make people dumber. And kids raised with smart phones never pass through a time in their lives where they feel they need knowledge in order to survive. They can look up anything they need on the phone, or text someone to help. AI, even as it currently exists, is going to accelerate this.
Social media exacerbates the natural habits formed around smart phones. Short, staccato bursts of info become the norm, and hard to think about problems, or subjects where you can't learn about them without consuming vast amounts of information, like most sciences, actual history outside the big flashy subjects, and other areas that lead to developing real brain power, are seen as wastes of time. Why study astrophysics when you could just follow an astrophysicist or two on social media and pretend you know astrophysics by regurgitating tweets and memes?
Nobody really seems to be thinking about the long-term consequences of our current tech obsession. We even see backlash to the suggestion we ban smart phones from classrooms because people addicted to their digital leash want to be certain their kids stay addicted too. There's no easy fix to any of this, save maybe de-incentivizing social media consumption. And the only way that happens is by making it less profitable for the big businesses currently profiting off of dumbing down our entire society.
Minor issue: Those social media companies currently have their C-Suite buddying up to the current ego-maniac in chief. I don't see it changing in the US anytime soon.
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> Smart phones make people dumber. And kids raised with smart phones never pass through a time in their lives where they feel they need knowledge in order to survive. They can look up anything they need on the phone, or text someone to help. AI, even as it currently exists, is going to accelerate this.
That doesn't make someone dumber; it makes them less knowledgeable in certain areas. Smart people today are learning to rely less on accumulated knowledge of facts and instead are focusing on building capabilities. I'm a software architect, but I don't spend nearly as much time learning all the details about the tech stacks I work with as I did 20 years ago. I have Google and now AI to help with that. Instead I put my efforts towards learning how to communicate more effectively, how to build influence at wo
Eugenics? (Score:2)
Because of reasons, eugenics is considered evil. It needn't be, though. Why not encourage people with good genetics to have more kids, and discourage people with poor genetics from doing so?
Intelligence is one possible target. Reducing heritable diseases is another.
Of course, I can already hear it: "Why are you discriminating against my family of obese, diabetic school dropouts?"
Re: Eugenics? (Score:2)
I think we can all agree the Nazis shut the door on that one.
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Define which genetics you want to encourage. Sir John B. Gurdon shared a 2012 Nobel Prize of Physiology or Medicine. I recently saw a short video where he was read notes from his teacher in school. Essentially, he had no scientific aptitude, couldn't absorb material, and finished 250 out of 250 in his class.
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I'm not a fan of slippery slope arguments, but this is one that is VERY slippery.
Once you start talking about encouragement of behavior, it doesn't take much for a malevolent actor to mutate that into discouragement of behavior. Now we've gone from "you guys are smart, please have kids" to "you have a disability, do NOT have kids regardless of how much you want to."
Oddly, that's exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930s. Except now we have genetic testing and surgical sterilization techniques. No fuc
That's a leap of a headline (Score:2)
There is clearly a shift in how newer generations think vs older generations, and that is clearly due to internet access, social media, availability of information, and the way that younger generations consume information in small bits very fast vs. sitting down to read a long book or something. That is clearly a change that is difficult for current testing paradigms to measure.
That doesn't mean younger generations are dumber, which implies a single dimensional range of smart vs. dumb, they just act an
Not genetics, it's the environment (Score:1)
People are not socialized and educated the same as they used to be. And they are spending too much time in video games which don't make them smarter.
If you literally spend 10,000 less hours educating yourself and 10,000 hours more playing video games, then you will obviously have less stored knowledge to work with, you will have used/exercised your brain less, and you'll have lower critical thinking skills. You'll also have lower spatial skills because you didn't do real things in the real world (like c
natural selection (Score:4, Interesting)
Who is having the most babies? The best and brightest? Or the dumbest? QED.
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It could just be micro plastic pollution, or the damage done by COVID, or the post-truth world, or any number of things.
Unfortunately finding a control population that hasn't been exposed to those things is not easy.
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Yeah I bet on plastic pollution combined with decades of exposure to leaded fuel, and tire and brake dust
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Leaded fuel? You mean that thing we phased out almost 3 decades ago? We can probably rule that out at least.
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Duh, 18 year olds are spending 10 hours a day staring at TicTok which creates an attention span of 30 seconds. They use AI to do their homework. They don't study much and very few of them have hobbies like building electronics, ham radio or programming anymore. Any adult can see where all of that leads to; now there is hard data backing that observation up. The huge shift is to doing massive amounts of passive watching instead of actively participating,.
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> Who is having the most babies? The best and brightest? Or the dumbest? QED.
In the U.S. anyway, there's one political party that's apparently pro-baby (or higher birthrate anyway), yet anti-education; which seems odd, unless the goal is a lot of uneducated sheeple who can't think critically and are easily manipulated - oh, wait. /s Seems popular with about 49.8% of the voters though ...
Re:natural selection (Score:4, Insightful)
That was the premise behind the film [1]Idiocracy [wikipedia.org] that came out in 2006. Worth watching IMHO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
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Unnatural selection: who's running the information services you're feeding on, people who want you to be smart, or people who want you to be a dumb AF manipulable piece of human trash?
Change and decay in all around I see (Score:2)
You could have written the same in the 1850s (German, Italian and Irish immigration), the 1920s (eugenics), or many other times in the past. People always think we've peaked and the new generation is terrible, partly because it's the old generation that is setting the (soon-to-be-outdated) parameters on what the important skills are.