Have humans passed peak brain power?

[biaggio]

PISA and OECD assessments show decline in performance on reading, math, and science tests. This seems to be happening across age groups. There's also an increase in share of people that self report as having difficulty thinking, concentrating, or learning new things. The article mentions us shifting to a post-literate society.

If real the article speculates that it's possibly caused by the way in which we consume information and interact with content nowadays.

https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b ... e1c54a13fc
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/com ... ain_power/ (reddit thread comment links to a freely accessible version of the article)

[ertyu]

From the article:

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.

Annecdotally, a couple of years ago I did notice in myself an increased tendency towards passive info consumption vs active, self-directed behavior. I think I have personally become stupider, but whether that's from drooling at my laptop all day, cognitive after-effects from having had covid twice, or simply age, I don't know.

I began engaging in less mindless scrolling, though not in any formal or organised fashion. A number of other forum members are already making moves towards making their screen time intentional; this article is a validation of them and, I suppose, an invitation for others to join.

Those who did make an effort to limit their screen time and make their screen time intentional: how is it working? Have you noticed any changes in your thinking and wellbeing?

[philipreal]

I'd be interested in seeing if along with the decrease in median there has been an increase in variance or at least an increase of some kind for the top performers. I'm not surprised by people being worse at concentrating/reading/etc when they simply (have to) do it less in a more modern world, but it would surprise me if today's best are generally worse than in the past, given the massive availability of resources available to learn/reason and the knowledge base that has been built up over time.

I'm thinking of it as possibly similar to obesity and modern sports performance, where the average person has declined but top performers seem to be getting better, although admittedly I haven't really checked the numbers there. They would seem to follow a similar explanation, in that modernity makes x easier->average person takes easy route and gets worse in some way->top performer does not take easy route and uses benefits of modernity to improve beyond past top performers

What this may mean is that "Have humans passed peak brain power?" in a median sense may be true (or at least an accurate current trend), but may be far from the case when thinking of the peak brain power of a single human. Takeaways: be careful about how what you're doing affects you? I'm not sure exactly what to make of this at a societal level.

[loutfard]

Those who did make an effort to limit their screen time and make their screen time intentional: how is it working? Have you noticed any changes in your thinking and wellbeing?

A dumbphone helps me make my screen time more intentional. My time online is through a desktop or laptop only. The quantity of online interaction might not be extremely different, but I speculate the quality is. Laptops and desktops seem to invite more input and avoid some of the darkest patterns, at least in my experience.

[7Wannabe5]

This forum consists of a quite literate crowd, but even here it is easier to spark a discussion based on a headline rather than an article that is 15 short paragraphs long and written around or slightly below NYT vocabulary level. There have even been active complaints about threads/topics that require the reading of maybe three Grade 15 level books. I don't think the passive feeds are lowering the level of brain function. Television has obviously been providing completely passive feeds for decades. I think it is the drive to interact at the lowest common denominator within context that reduces literacy. The mechanisms of the internet and social media reinforce popularity over intelligence. IOW, it's not just that we are constantly eating brain Fritos; it's also that we are increasingly compelled to serve up only brain Fritos.

This tendency also transcends formats. For example, the nature of a blog is towards the practice of writing an essay on a new topic maybe once per week. You do this for a few years, and then you publish a book which is just a collection of your short-form essays. The book format did not compel book length research, organization or depth. (NOTE: Jacob did not do this.) As a lifelong bibliophile and also somebody who could fairly easily pull an improvisational essay out of her ass on a weekly basis, I comprehend this difference, and I witness humans half-assing their output on the internet on a regular basis. I mean, it's extremely difficult to find somebody who isn't half-assing their output for the benefit of the internet audience, and this tendency cascades rapidly down as the audience becomes more general and/or popular.

[delay]

PISA and OECD assessments show decline in performance on reading, math, and science tests. This seems to be happening across age groups.

When I visited India their education seemed excellent. I notice China and India are not in the OECD Pisa list. Perhaps there's also a difference in country? Certainly China has taken over all the difficult engineering work, and they have a use for good engineers.

[IlliniDave]

I believe brain sizes have been shrinking comparing back to times when we were sharing the planet with Neanderthal and other close relatives. Brains are expensive so if they aren't used, nature will shrink them. It's fairly easy to survive long enough to reproduce without having to use your brain anywhere near its full capacity ("thriving" is another matter, perhaps). More and more humans are overfed and undernourished, and brain/mental dysfunctions are increasing. Fluoride in water is linked to IQ decline, and who knows what other toxins we're routines exposed to interfere with brain development. Hypernovelty is the term I've heard evolutionary biologists use to refer to the extremely rapid changes in our environment compared to the time frames changes occurred in our evolutionary ancestors. So some part of the mental falloff is probably due to inability of nature to work out countermeasures to the changes in the world around us over the last 150 years--new toxins, lousy and novel nutrition, screens and all that come with them, the relative ease of life, much higher population densities, etc.

[jacob]

PISA and OECD assessments show decline in performance on reading, math, and science tests. This seems to be happening across age groups. There's also an increase in share of people that self report as having difficulty thinking, concentrating, or learning new things. The article mentions us shifting to a post-literate society.

If real the article speculates that it's possibly caused by the way in which we consume information and interact with content nowadays.

The FT article is behind a paypall as most FT articles tend to be (no, I'm not interested in sketchy ways of circumventing it).

However, I'd suggest that the name of the thread is wrong. Humans may very likely have passed peak ability to pass PISA or old school IQ tests. OTOH, tests measuring that ability/speed for task-switching or quickly picking out the relevant data in a [visually] cluttered informational environment are likely increasing. This is in no small part due to how we now consume and interact with information now as opposed to how we did it 20 or 40 years ago. You can see this effect rather strongly in Luddites who have not kept up with the change in format and interface technology. They can read a newspaper or operate machinery where each function has a corresponding button on the front panel alright. However, they are borderline retarded when it comes to e.g. touchscreen interfaces with context-menus or hyperlinked information. Their minds are simply not able to "compute" that if they choose an option, the screen will change and present new options while redefining the action of the button they already pushed for another function. Their.brains.can.not.understand. A device like the iPhone with its single home button makes zero sense to them. Even if you explain it, there's nothing in their brain for your explanation to latch onto. The concepts [of interacting with something they can't see physically] are beyond them.

Minds are immensely adaptable. I suspect a lot of these "decline" is due to using 1980s metrics to measure something that much of the world has moved past except in the school system that professes to prepare students for the future (that is now deprecated).

[loutfard]

However, I'd suggest that the name of the thread is wrong. Humans may very likely have passed peak ability to pass PISA or old school IQ tests. OTOH, tests measuring that ability/speed for task-switching or quickly picking out the relevant data in a [visually] cluttered informational environment are likely increasing.

Certain brain functions more in line with the current information environment are probably adapting and evolving positively. Quickly picking the relevant data from a cluttered informational enviroment might be. If I read Adam Gazzaley correctly, task switching is probably not.

[jacob]

Then there's this: https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com ... dent-today

I'm still not convinced that people are getting dumber and/or smartphones are what's making them so. There's something to be said for the effect of those who became professors or even grad students discover, much to their dismay, that most of the other students couldn't care less about what's being taught. They're just there for the degree because that's what one does.

If so, students fiddling with their smartphones is just a more visible way of demonstrating their lack of interest than doodling in the margins or daydreaming which is what students did in my day and age. (Personally, I was doing basic quantum mechanics in my margins, while the literature teacher was trying to have a conversation about we thought that might have motivated fictional characters from a century ago.) An argument for this is that the old-guard has blamed pretty much every new media format on the decay and decline on young minds going from smartphones, computers, TV, radio, and all the way back to ... books!

The other factor is that the fraction of people going to college is still rising. This means accepting even dumber students relative to when current teachers where students themselves and calibrated their own [too high] standards. Insofar institutions grade on a curve, teachers also have to teach on a curve. This requires dumbing down the material AND lowering expectations at the same time. This is why 1980 high school curricula is now 2020 college curricula.

My supposition is that it is not the population that is changing but that sampling sizes are expanding to the dumb side. One way to check this would be to look at samples where the sample is still close to the entire population. This would be the lowest school grades.

Fun fact: It's possible to find 100 year old research texts on psychological development asserting that the mental age of the average adult is somewhere between 13 and 16 years of age. In that regard, I don't think we're doing worse now. I suspect humanity might even have advanced by a few years.

[7Wannabe5]

It also might be due to increasing trend towards geriatric paternity. For example, unlike some well-known spurious studies linking autism to some otherwise extremely beneficial aspects of modernity, those correlating autism and other psychopathologies to paternal age are quite robust and sensible. This leads one to wonder about the demographic that might be best served by suppression of information correlating average acquired status of adult males within modernity and their clearly sharply decreased sperm quality. What if when a 29 year old female glowing with level yellow radiant beauty gazed upon an affluent level orange man of 40, she saw a grim future dragging dull-witted children to after-school tutoring and doctors appointments, but when she gazed upon a 22 year old level green buck with no bank, she saw a happy future with bright, curious, healthy children skipping beside her down the hiking path?

[Henry]

The seminal event for me was when there was a congressional scandal of revenge porn and Nancy Pelosi came out and said something to the extent "that's why I tell my granddaughters not to film themselves giving blow jobs." But to my old age astonishment, her granddaughters objected saying something to the extent "Nana, when you were our age, you didn't have the opportunity to film yourself giving blowjobs. Since our generation has been afforded this ability, we need you to create laws to punish the recipients of our filmed blow jobs in case said recipients get angry when their friends/brothers/fathers show them videos of also being recipients of our filmed blow jobs." My point is, that an archetonic technology shift changes a culture in profound ways. The printing press started wars that would not have started wars prior to the advent of the technology. I don't think it's about passing peak brain power, it's how the culture measures peak brain power. More likes is now the barometer. Not judging of course, just saying. And now their are children who were raised by the more likes generations so things that were once culturally communicated through the generations has been discontinued.

[7Wannabe5]

@Henry:

Have you read the Teen Vogue interview with Elon's daughter who transitioned? It has been pointed to as a model of what now constitutes "cool."

[Henry]

@Henry:

Have you read the Teen Vogue interview with Elon's daughter who transitioned? It has been pointed to as a model of what now constitutes "cool."

I have not. But there once again, technology is involved. There is a brick phone to smart phone advancement in this arena as well.

In the late 90's I worked next to a woman who once worked at Johns Hopkins institute for what I think was the unit called sex change. They were the pioneers in this. The main doctor has since renounced the procedure. The woman I knew was a part of a team that conducted a rigorous psychological battery of questions for the "candidates" as not all were accepted to undergo the procedure. I remember her saying a cluster of applicants were raised by grandparents. Because I lived in Manhattan and had access to the community through a family member, I knew a few men who transitioned, and believe you me, they weren't fooling anyone.

Because of advancement in technology, that has changed. But here's thing, from my understanding, they don't conduct the psychological tests anymore. The same way the new generation doesn't worry about sending money on Venmo, or posting blow job videos, the same holds for transitioners i..e there was a corresponding culture shift that coincided with the technological advancement that removed the psychological tests as a potential roadblock to sales.

[7Wannabe5]

@Henry:

Yes, I grok what you mean. There's also the Sam Rockwell monologue in "White Lotus", and Miranda July's "All Fours" to consider. The funny thing is that my most superficially culturally conservative poly-partner is towards a hot mix of the Shane Patton character and the Frank (Sam Rockwell) character. My point here being is that the internet has also made the edgy accessible to all those who publicly disdain the edgy. Although, I suppose this is really no different than the essential human plot line revealed in "Peyton Place."

Maybe there should be two forms of testing; one for Dull Edgy and another for Edgy Dull.

[Henry]

I had to have a serious conversation with two business associates last week and there is nothing more I hate than having serious conversations with business associates. I'd rather get into a kickboxing match with a Kangaroo who has no respect for my balls. They were concerned that someone hadn't texted us back in the last hour. I said listen, you two are acting like Jan Brady waiting by the phone worried that Tommy Touchdown is not calling because Marcia has her tongue in his asshole. I said maybe it's true, maybe Marcia does have her tongue in Tommy's asshole. I don't know. But we have to think that maybe technology has turned us into the equivalent of 1970's 13 year old girls because of the instantaneous communication we have become used to because of technological advancement. Turns out they were right, and I was wrong, Marcia was in fact tonguing Tommy, but I did have a valid point nonetheless.

[7Wannabe5]

@Henry:

Yeah, that's true and also interesting, because the Jan behavior you described is pretty much the classic example of "weak submissive" behavior. OTOH, "strong submissive" behavior would be not waiting by the phone AKA "actually having a life and/or options" and "topping from the bottom" would be deciding to call Tommy yourself, in the hope that he will eventually flip you.

So, I guess the follow-up question would be whether behaving like a weak submissive results in lower standardized test scores? I would say yes, because it is emotionally and cognitively draining behavior, and also tends to lead to magical thinking and wide assortment of irrational biases. For example, consulting a Magic 8 ball about likelihood Tommy will call you is not unlike waiting in panting expectation of your favorite internet pundit's take on what to do with your stock market funds or about your sagging flesh sack.

[thai_tong]

Annecdotally, a couple of years ago I did notice in myself an increased tendency towards passive info consumption vs active, self-directed behavior. I think I have personally become stupider, but whether that's from drooling at my laptop all day, cognitive after-effects from having had covid twice, or simply age, I don't know.

I began engaging in less mindless scrolling, though not in any formal or organised fashion. A number of other forum members are already making moves towards making their screen time intentional; this article is a validation of them and, I suppose, an invitation for others to join.

Thanks for this ertyu. I recognise that listening to podcasts makes me feel smarter but other time I spend actively engaged in a mental task is really valuable and ultimately more enjoyable.