Evidence suggests a decline in human cognitive abilities, particularly reasoning and problem-solving, since the early 2010s, largely attributed to the pervasive influence of smartphones and the attention economy they foster.
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Is over stimulation ruining your life?
Last spring on my podcast, I looked at
some data that implied this might be
happening. So, today I want to show you
a clip from that popular episode where I
I make the argument that over
stimulation is a problem, that it's
making humans dumber, but that there's a
way that you as an individual can avoid
this fate, that you can stop over
stimulation from making your own life
worse. I think you're going to enjoy
this clip. Check it out. So, several
people recently sent me the same
article. It was from the Financial
Times. It was written by John Burn
Murdoch and it had a provocative
headline. Have humans passed peak brain
power? So, I'm going to take a closer
look at this claim. I have two goals in
mind. First, I want to develop a better
understanding of why the data seems to
show that we are getting dumber. But
two, I want to use that understanding is
my second goal. use that understanding
to help find practical ways that you as
an individual can push back on that
trend and not only not get dumber but
make sure that you continue to get smarter.
smarter.
So this article that I was just citing
was inspired by some recent analysis
that was released by the organization
for economic cooperation development.
They do this regular test called the PISA
PISA
which benchmarks teenagers around the
world and their knowledge of math,
reading and science. So we have sort of
trends over time. It's a useful test to
kind of understand what's going on. Um
so they looked at there's a recent
analysis of this. The article looked at
that recent analysis plus some other
tests that have been given worldwide
recently. And the the author of the
article made the following conclusion.
I'm quoting here. 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
have been declining ever since. So I I
have a graph to show here. Uh Jesse,
bring up this graph for those who are
watching instead of just listening. So
here's one of the key graphs that
indicates this point. Uh it shows
performance and reasoning and problem
solving test over time. On the left hand
graph, what you see is a line for
science, reading, and maths. And you can
attest, Jesse, that right around 2012,
all those lines go downward. Uh that's
from the Pisa test. We have a test from
an adult on the right. literacy uh takes
a big spill right around 2012 and goes
down dramatically ever since. All right,
so we can bring that graph down. So that
indicates the thesis of the article that
hey starting the early 2010s at least
according to test we're doing worse
worse us being humans.
So why
why are we doing worse? Well, the
article points to an obvious culprit
based just on the forensic evidence of
the timing. These trends seem to occur
right around that 2012 to 2014 period is
where we see these downward shifts. That
date should sound familiar. There have
been other things that worry us that got
more prominently worrisome starting
around that time. For example, teenage
mental health deterioration is another
one. What happened around that 2012
period? Smartphones became ubiquitous.
This is when we got worldwide ubiquity
of smartphones became a reality.
So the article points out correctly we
seem to be seeing a negative turn on
these tests of various reasoning and
intelligence abilities around the time
smartphones come and it's been getting
worse ever since.
But I don't think it's useful to just
leave it there. So if we just say yes,
smartphones seem to have led to us
getting dumber, it's unclear how we
should respond.
We're probably not going to get rid of
phones. Most people need various aspects
of the phone and app ecosystem to
operate. So, it sort of leaves us
without much to do except for to shrug
our shoulders and say, "Well, I guess
phones made us dumber, but what are we
going to do?" It's sort of like cars
came along and traffic deaths, you know,
got higher. Here's another here's a
source of 20,000 new deaths a year that
didn't exist before cars, but you know,
we kind of need cars and it was like
this just something we're going to have
to live with. It feels that way
sometimes when we're dealing with these
cognitive impacts of smartphones,
but I think we can do better and I want
to do better today. So, I'm going to
look closer and I'm going to try to
develop a hypothesis that explains at
least partially specifically why what
mechanisms of smartphones are making us
perform worse on these tests, making us
dumber. Because if we know more specifically
specifically
what about these things is making us
dumber, then maybe we have a chance
reversing that even without having to
get rid of our phones.
So to look closer, what I'm going to do
is pull up another graph. Jesse, bring
this up on the screen here. Here's
another graph from this article that
gets at what specifically is changing in
the smartphone era. So we see here on
the left a graph over time measuring
percentage of respondents that are
saying they have difficulty thinking or
concentrating. This comes from another
survey called monitoring the future
which John Burn Murdoch sort of pulled
up. What you notice here is it's
relatively stable, difficulty thinking
or concentrating until that same
inflection point of around 2012 and then
it shoots up and we see a a aggressive
upward trend. On the right we have
another graph percentage of people
saying they have trouble learning new
things. It's relatively flat starting in
1990 again right around 2012 shoots up
same time that difficulty thinking or
concentrating shoots up. So, of course,
right at the smartphone inflection
point, we see mechanistically that
people suddenly reported at much higher
rates having difficulty thinking or
concentrating and having trouble
learning new things. All right, we can
bring this down, Jesse.
That is where I think we're seeing the
effect of smartphones. And if we look at
a little bit closer, why is smartphones
now causing us to have difficulty
thinking or concentrating or trouble
learning new things? Keep zooming in. I
believe we can identify what I think of
as a cognitive death spiral here. And
here's how I think this works.
So you now have a smartphone. The phone
itself is not the problem. Of course,
it's the the ecosystem of attention
economy that arose around the
smartphone. Pre smartphone, if you were
building a sort of information platform,
your Facebook pre smartphone, you were
building a product that was trying to be
maximally useful to users. I want to
make Facebook so useful that people will
think to log in and want to be a member
of it. So like all your friends are on
here. That's a marker of this being
useful. You can find out what your
friends are up to. That is a really
useful thing. Post smartphone we had a
shift towards an attention paradigm
where the idea now is not being useful
but capturing as much attention as
possible. They realized users were you
wanted a large user count if you were
trying to raise money but once you had a
company running you wanted to monetize
those users and that's a different uh
game and this is when the goal of
platforms change to not being as useful
as possible but being as addictive as
possible. So we get ubiquitous
smartphone use pick up around this time.
Why does that cause a cognitive death
spiral? Well, think about what happens.
You have this rhythm in your life of
constantly being distracted because the
apps on your phone are designed to grab
your attention. It has faster, more
desirable stimuli than other things in
your life. So now you're rewiring these
circuits in your brain so that the
reward circuits are very much tuned
towards if a phone is nearby, let's
focus on that. Let's have our dopamine
cascade focus on the action of looking
at that phone because that we have
learned these circuits have ingrained.
that's going to give us a quicker hit to
whatever else we are doing. And because
the phone is ubiquitous, we constantly
have those reward circuits firing
because the phone is always there. The
reward is always there. Look, if you put
a donut in front of me, I'm going to
build up a reward, you know, every day
at 4. You put out donuts at the office,
I will build up a reward circuit where
like I'm really looking forward to that
donut. If you now follow me everywhere I
go with a card of donuts, there's going
to be a problem, right? So that's what
started happening with the phone. So now
our mind gets rewired to craving this
more faster pace of stimuli
that can directly impact our ability to
concentrate because that's distracting
us. We're trying to take a PIA test.
We're going to do worse on it. It's
harder to sort of apply our existing
intelligence. But the reason why I think
it creates a cognitive death spiral is
that it also means we spend less time on
the type of activities that could make
us smarter.
So we have two things going on at the
same time as our mind gets rewired for
faster stimuli. We have a harder time
applying our existing intelligence
but we also have a harder time engaging
in activities that would make us
smarter. Now this is also captured in
this article. Jesse bring up one more
chart here. What we have on the screen
here is a chart showing the decline of
reading. There's two plots on here. So
this is a percentage of US teenagers who
uh read in their leisure time. One one
of these plots on here shows who says
they hardly ever read and the other plot
shows uh who reads almost every day. So
we see the almost every day. It's like
moving mildly down
through the 80s and 90s right around
2012. That goes down real sharply and
the people reporting that they hardly
ever read goes up real sharply. All
right. All right, so we can bring that
graph down. Um, so what's this is
saying? This is an example of an
activity. Reading is an example of an
activity that makes you smarter. The
brain circuits involved in reading makes
you smarter. You can better understand
other people. You can better sustain
your attention on abstract targets. You
can better manipulate information and
build and construct worlds in your mind.
Reading is calisthenics for your mind.
It is just straight up exercise for your
mind. It's why it's been at the core of
sort of every academic curriculum since
the invention of the codeex.
So, it's one among other activities that
we do less of because it requires
sustained attention. And when we rewire
our mind for faster stimuli, we're less
likely to actually, as we see in that
graph, we're less likely to actually
spend time doing that. So, we get this
double whammy. We have a hard time
applying whatever intelligence we have
and we slow down or completely stop the
increase of our intelligence that should
be happening over time as we do
activities that would naturally get us
there. The result, we're dumber and we
see it. Our performance on those tests
plummet. We're not getting smarter.
We're having a hard time applying the
intelligence we have.
Okay. So really now what we're talking
about the our our issue
is not with smartphones so much as it is
with the specific effect of having our
brain rewired for faster stimuli and
because of this spending less time with
activities that foster intelligence.
So, if we're looking for a response here,
here,
we can actually come up with actions
that don't involve us having to go back
in time. Now, before I talk about what
that could particularly be, here's the
analogy that came to my mind from 60
years ago, right? We we had this issue
60 70 years ago where in the US for
example, the economy shifted from being
primarily industrial agricultural to
having this very strong sort of office
centric knowledge work sector. And we
noticed in the 1950s and in particular
the 1960s this issue of we are having
health problems at a higher rate than
they existed before because before you
were probably working on a farm and you
were exercising all day long. You were
on your feet. You were moving. You were
lifting things. It's very physical. And
now suddenly you're sedentary because
you're in an office. You're not getting
that exercise. This caught us off guard
like oh that was important and we're not
getting that anymore. You know, in the
era before bypass surgery, people just
drop dead in their 60s. That's just how
it worked. You just have a heart attack
and die in your 60s. Like, whoa, what's
going on here? How do we respond to
that? Well, we didn't say we need to
shut down the offices and go back to the
farms. We said, what was the thing we're
missing now from the farms now that we
have this new knowledge sector? Oh, it's
the exercise. Okay, I guess people need
to exercise. You didn't have to think
about that before. In 1920, you didn't
have to think about exercising. You just
got it. But in 1975, I got to go
jogging. You know, I gotta go move some
weights around because that is out of my
life now. And it is actually pretty
important. That is a good analogy for
thinking about this smartphone induced
dumbness issue. We don't necessarily
have to go back to uh pre20 technology
era. But we do now have to think explicitly
explicitly
about increasing our intelligence and
maintaining our ability to hold
attention in a way that we didn't have
to in 2009. We just did this naturally.
Now we have to think about it. That's
the mindset shift. We have to exercise
our minds in the same way we learned we
have to exercise our bodies. So what
might that mean? Well, we talk about
this a lot on this show, but just to
give you four ideas, you know, that that
gets your mind going about how one might
have a cognitive exercise routine and to
push back on this dumbness trend. You
could one force yourself to read.
Reading is pull-ups and push-ups for
your brain. Read every week. Read a
book. Uh start with things you love,
easy to read, you're excited to read,
but force yourself to sit there and
read. The best way to do this is to be
outside of arms reach of a phone. In
fact, be in a completely different room
from a phone. Even better, go for a walk
and read on a bench without your phone
so that you don't have to fight against
a reward circuit that sees the phone and
says, "It is right there. We could pick
that up. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine."
So, make your life easier. But reading
is calisthenics for your brain.
more generally in the constant companion
model of your phone. When you're at
home, plug it in in the kitchen. Go
there if you need to look something up.
Go there if you need to check your text
messages. Go there if you need to make a
call, but don't have it with you when
you're doing other things. Again, you
want to sort of break out of this
pattern of I can at any moment get
faster stimuli.
You certainly want to avoid, and I just
learned this term. I don't know if you
know this term, Jesse, but I just
learned this term stimuli stacking.
>> Have you heard?
>> I don't. No.
>> I heard this from a younger person.
Shout out to Nate. Uh, stimuli stacking
is where you're consuming multiple
streams of stimulus at the same time.
So, you're watching something while
checking something on your phone. And
maybe you even have like a different
device on which you're like following
something else. And supposedly some of
the streamers like Netflix are actually
redesigning their shows to be more
compatible with stimuli stacking. So if
it requires you to have to if I missed
what was said here, I don't know what's
going on. That's a bad show because you
can't actually look at your phone in the
same time and watch that show. So don't
stimulate stack.
We want your mind to be used to like
doing one thing for a long piece of
time. Reflection walks is another great
one. Go for a walk with a particular
problem you want to solve. It could be
just a problem in your life. I want to
work this through. And your mind is
going to be everywhere. It's going to be
squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. But you
keep pulling it back. Be in the
sunshine. Be in the woods. Get used to
just being alone with your own thoughts
and manipulating your thoughts. You will
get better at this. This also pushes
back on the the negative trends that
smartphones are inducing and have
hobbies that require concentration.
Playing the guitar requires a lot of
concentration to get better. Woodworking
requires a lot of concentration, you
know, to get better. Particular sport
requires a lot of work and focus to
actually get better at it. So have, you
know, things that require sustained
concentration and give you obvious
rewards as you get better. sort of
notable reward. So, you feel that
appreciation. All right. So, anyways, I
thought that was a cool article. That's
what I think is going on.
It's uh not just the phone itself makes
us dumber. It's particularly the way
that it's rewired our brain, which
creates that death spiral if we have a
harder time applying our intelligence
and we don't increase it. So, we just
push back. Look, man, when you're in the
office building madman in the 1960s, you
got to start exercising. You didn't have
to exercise when you're on the farm in
the 1940s. you got to exercise now in
the office bill in the 1960s. Well, same
thing when I was in college in the early
2000s. I didn't have to worry about how
do I keep my brain sharp? How do I keep
getting smarter? Because we were just
doing this all the time. We had to read
books and we didn't have like constant
distractions and we were often bored and
walking long distances in the
interminable snow of Hanover, New
Hampshire. Going through the snow like
trying to find our car but we couldn't
because it was buried in snow and there
was nothing in our ear and there was
nothing to look at. You would just have
to think. You were just thinking
thoughts and mainly just I'm cold and
why didn't I go to school at Pepperdine,
but you were thinking and then you would
go and you would trudge through this to
a library and you're just stuck there
with your book and you would sit there
and have to like read your books for a
while. We didn't have to think about it.
We're like the farmers in the 40s. Now
2025, you got to exercise. So you got to
like force yourself to read books. You
got to go for reflection walks. So cool
article, scary trend, but at least on
the individual level, I think it's reversible.
reversible.
When you read articles on a desktop or
like a laptop, do you what do you do if
you get distracted? Just put stuff in
the working memory.
>> So, put like what are you talking about?
Like if a thought comes up that's
unrelated to the article. Yeah. Just
trying to distract me. >> Um
>> Um
>> so you're not on your phone but you're
on a laptop or a desktop.
>> I guess I would put it in working
memory. I don't know. I'm pretty used to
now when I'm doing something I lock it
on that thing
>> and then when I'm done like now what do
I want to think about? But do you ever
just read articles on a desktop or or laptop?
laptop?
>> Yeah, sometimes. Like so I'm trying to
think. It's a good question. Like this
morning I read articles from both the
New York Times and the New Yorker and in
both cases I use the app.
>> On what type of device?
>> On my phone.
>> On your phone.
>> Yeah. I'll also read articles on the
browser and I'll print articles. It's
like another thing I like to do. Um but
I'm not very distracted by the web, you
know, like I don't really have places to
go to distract me.
>> Yeah. like maybe MLB trade rumors, but
that's only relevant for like a
three-month period each year.
>> So, it's easier for me to just read an
article and then I'm done reading that article,
article, >> right?
>> right?
>> Yeah. Hey, if you like this video, I
think you'll really like this one as
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