Is mine the first generation thicker than our parents?

Irish Times

27-04-2025

It may seem like a truism to suggest humanity is getting stupider. We achieved the incredible goal of making smoking almost extinct in the developed world, only to replace it with vaping. We pay €400 for tickets to a gig that were originally advertised at €86.50 and justify it to ourselves on the basis that the hours spent in the ticket seller's 'waiting room' would otherwise be wasted.
Americans – or the 77,302,580 who voted for Donald Trump
– elected a man who promised to bring down prices by imposing tariffs, which every sensible economist said would do the opposite. Now that he has actually gone ahead and done what he promised, with entirely predictable results, six in 10 are unhappy with both him and his tariffs.
In Rome, pilgrims queue patiently for a fleeting glimpse of the body of
the dead pope
– and when the moment arrives, they lift their phones over their heads and crane their necks to experience it through a screen – which could have been achieved more easily by staying at home.
But while this kind of self-defeating irrationality is hard-wired into humanity, the kind of stupidity I'm referring to is more intrinsic.
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Teachers regularly sound warning bells about grade inflation and dumbing-down in education standards, but recent evidence suggests we've got much bigger problems than that. As
John Burn-Murdoch, the Financial Times' chief data cruncher, puts it
: 'Across a range of tests, the average person's ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining ever since.' Since it's not possible for our brains to have degraded in such a short space of time, attention has focused on Covid and school closures as the reason. But the trend is not just affecting schoolchildren.
It's tempting to immediately blame the smartphone but the great mental slowdown was under way even before its arrival
To be clear, this is precisely the opposite of what is supposed to happen. Just as every generation is slightly taller than the last, each is mentally sharper than their predecessors. James Flynn, the late American-born New Zealand-dwelling political scientist, found that from 1932 to 1978, average IQs rose by three points per decade. The 'Flynn effect' was never satisfactorily explained – it might have been better nutrition, access to education or the decline in childhood disease. But it's irrelevant now: the golden age of ever-increasing mental acuity seems to be over.
Research from around the world – including from Norway, based on the
results of IQ tests given to military conscripts
; and from
US studies of 'composite ability scores'
in adults – indicates a 'reverse Flynn effect'. My generation may be the first to be more stupid than my parents – and my children's generation may be thicker than mine.
The Norwegian research found that the IQ of male conscripts rose six points between 1959 and 1979; two points the following decade; 1.3 points the one after, before declining by 1.3 points. In 2009, Flynn discovered tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that
the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points
. And Burn-Murdoch drew his
conclusions
partly from latest round of analysis from PISA, the OECD's international benchmarking test for academic performance by 15-year-olds.
It's tempting to immediately blame the smartphone – I'm loath to rule out blaming it for pretty much anything – but the great mental slowdown was under way even before its arrival. One theory suggests that because we are living longer and working memory declines with age, it might simply be a side effect of an ageing society.
A more plausible explanation focuses on the way we process information generally. In the early years of the internet, we spent less time online overall, and more of that time engrossed in single topics or communicating directly with people we know. These days, we have morphed into dumb, passive consumers of 'the feed', an endless scroll of snatches of information and images unrelated to each other: someone's Penney's haul; puppies in need of rescuing; a haunted-looking child carrying the body of another child tightly wrapped in a white sheet in Gaza; Holly Willoughby flogging hair dye. Our brains are not designed to cope with information fired randomly in our direction like peas from a toddler's high chair.
This is where the research – much of it collated in Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus (which was
both feted and criticised when it was published
but offers interesting food for thought) – gets pretty convincing, at least to anyone who has spent time in an office.
Consider the following: if you're interrupted while in the middle of a complex task, it takes
23 minutes
to get back to the task. We get less than one hour a day of uninterrupted time at work and
can expect to be distracted on average every three to 11 minutes
. The phrase 'multitasking' is meaningless for humans, but we convince ourselves we're doing it.
The answer seems to be that we either accept that humanity has reached the point of obsolescence and hand over to AI – a suggestion some in Silicon Valley take quite literally, as Mark O'Connell writes this weekend. Or we finally take seriously all the research on the negative impacts of technology and resolve to meaningfully regulate big tech's influence over our lives. We need systemic solutions, but we can't wait for them either – the answer is in your own hands (for an average of 4.5 hours a day anyway, according to
Comreg's 2022 data
on smartphone usage).
Technology's relentless assault on our ability to focus is just one of eight causes Hari highlights – the others include stress, exhaustion and the collapse in sustained reading. But it is hard to argue with the impact of technology on our ability to think, because we have all experienced it. If you're reading this on a phone, it's a minor miracle you're still here.