Addled

Have you ever walked into a room to get something and then, by the time you got there, forgotten what it was you wanted to get? Does that seem to be happening more often than it used to?

It seems like something strange has happened over the last few years: Human intelligence has started to decline. Results from large-scale international tests show the average person in high-income countries now has lower levels of literacy, numeracy, and critical reasoning than in the early 2010s. While the trend is similar in most countries, it’s especially dramatic in some. In the United States, for example, the share of adults with low scores in literacy increased from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023, while the share with low scores in numeracy climbed from 29 percent to 34 percent.

This can’t be good. What exactly is going on?

Gloria Mark is a professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Attention Span. Mark says it’s not just that people can’t read or count as well as they used to; these days, they can’t even keep focus on what they’re supposed to be reading or counting. Our attention spans, she says, have become remarkably short—and it’s causing us to feel more stressed, make more mistakes, and burn ourselves out trying to keep up with the increasingly hectic tempo of our digital lives.

What’s worse, there’s now growing evidence that generative artificial intelligence—particularly consumer AI software like ChatGPT—is accelerating the decline in our cognitive skills. Instead of using tech to think smarter, we’re essentially being used by it to outsource our own thinking. Still, Mark says, there’s a lot people can do to create resiliency and better navigate a world of growing distraction …

Gustav Jönsson: What cognitive skills have declined?