In his recent column, John Burn-Murdoch examines the troubling trend of declining cognitive capabilities as evidenced by international testing data. Since the mid-2010s, average scores in information processing, reasoning, and problem-solving have dropped notably among adults and teenagers in OECD countries. Although the biological capacity of the brain remains unchanged, there is growing concern that the practical application of this capacity is declining, linked to shifts in reading habits and attention spans, as indicated by the Monitoring The Future survey.
Is human intelligence starting to decline? Recent results from major international tests show that the average person's capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.
There is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing, indicating a troubling trend for our cognitive abilities.
One source that has consistently tracked this is the Monitoring The Future survey, which finds a steep rise in the % of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things.
As people's information diet shifts from longer and more complex texts to short snippets, and from text to video, people's effective literacy levels decline.
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