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Has the human brain reached its limit?

2025-03-30 17:09:15Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Has the human brain reached its limit?
Has the human brain reached its limit?

What is intelligence? This seems like a straightforward question with a straightforward answer – the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the capacity to understand” – but this definition is losing its meaning in our modern world.

What if the rate at which we can practically apply that capacity is decreasing? Evidence that something like this is happening to human intellect has been growing, at least since the beginning of this decade. No one disputes that the biological foundation of our brains has changed in a short time. According to some tests, the human capacity to reason and solve problems peaked in 2010-2012 and has only declined since then.

When the latest round of PISA analyses was released, the OECD’s international benchmark test of 15-year-olds’ performance in reading, math, and science, it was argued that the decline was related to the pandemic, but was a mask for a deterioration that had begun earlier. Even in this test, performance peaked in 2012 and began to decline by 2018, and was certainly further damaged during the pandemic.

There has been remarkably little long-term, consistent research on human attention or mental capacity, but every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study asks 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating, or learning new things.

Graduates who admitted to struggling were at their lowest between 1990 and 2000, but a strong increase occurred from 2010 onwards. This turning point has historical significance, because it is the period when we faced a new revolution; information and the virtual network.

Part of what we see is likely the result of the ongoing transition away from text and toward visual media – the shift toward a “post-school” society spent obsessively on our screens. The decline in reading is certainly real – in 2022 the share of Americans who reported having read a book in the past year fell by less than half.

A worrying figure is that of adults who are unable to use mathematical reasoning and evaluate narratives, 35% in the US alone.

So, we are facing an erosion of human mental capacity.

Most discussions about the social impacts of digital media focus on the rise of smartphones and social media. But the shift in the human capacity for focused thought coincides with something more fundamental: a shift in our relationship with information. We have moved from finite web pages to endless, constantly refreshed sources 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.

The good news is that human intellectual capacity has not yet died out, but it is fading, due to the digital environment. / Financial Times


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