This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
Recently, I switched browsers, which was an annoying process and I’m not sure there’s really much benefit in terms of privacy or whatever, but there WAS one surprising benefit I got from it. On my old browser, I had a plugin that made Reddit more usable in a lot of little ways, but that plugin isn’t supported by my new browser. I’d been using the plugin so long that I forgot what Reddit actually looked like, and so I wasn’t expecting to pull up the site and find that I could no longer scroll infinitely with unseen posts added to the bottom of the page. I thought it was a minor thing, but almost immediately I noticed that I was no longer spending as much time on Reddit. I’d open it up, scroll to the bottom of my home page, and instead of clicking on the next page I just…left.
I don’t run a tracker to see how much time I spend on various sites, but I am absolutely positive that my time on Reddit has absolutely cratered, and I am also absolutely positive that that’s a good thing. I am missing nothing of value and now I have more time.
It’s a small thing, but it was a great reminder of how websites can become time sucks that ultimately make our lives worse, and in my case it was thanks to a plugin that I sought out and installed myself.
And not only was I wasting time, but I also may have been contributing to my own irritability, as I discussed in January, and even my own dumbification, as recently detailed by John Burn-Murdoch in a piece for the Financial Times headlined “Have humans passed peak brain power? Data across countries and ages reveal a growing struggle to concentrate, and declining verbal and numerical reasoning.”
Burn-Murdoch cites a few recent studies to build his thesis. To start, the Programme for International Student Assessment is a study that’s been running since 2000, sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD. Every few years, they administer tests to 15-year olds around the world to measure their cognition. Over time, scores around the world have been dropping. You might be tempted to blame COVID for interrupting school, but the decline actually appears to start as early as 2012, and that year lines up with a similar decline in literacy and numeracy in adults, as also measured by the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies.
2012 is also prominent in data gathered for the Monitoring the Future study, a survey originally created in 1975 and given each year to 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (which is around ages 13 to 18); college students; and young adults. Burn-Murdoch notes that the number of 18-year olds who report difficulty thinking or concentrating, and trouble learning new things, also began to climb around 2012.
So, what happened in 2012? Well, in the leadup to that year, there was a strong belief amongst conspiracy theorists that the world would end that December, based on their reading of the Mayan calendar. Really, that was a big thing. Roland Emmerich made an entire movie about it. There were a lot of competing theories for HOW the world would end, with some people betting on Planet X colliding with Earth, while others were more into the idea of the magnetic poles switching. Emmerich went with the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone, I think.
But what if the end of the world did start in 2012, but it’s taking a little longer than those other possible apocalypses because the ultimate cause is something I’d like to call “The Stupiding”? For a variety of reasons, human intellect drops, we stop being able to pay attention to what’s going on, a few years later there’s a US election and we elect the stupidest person on the planet, yadda yadda yadda, an ex-Fox News weekend host gets drunk and accidentally sits on a button that launches nuclear missiles at Europe.
As I said last year in response to Jonathan Haidt’s latest fearmongering book, there’s no evidence to suggest that social media is rewiring children’s brains to give them all depression. But Burn-Murdoch makes a good point in separating the internet at large from these sites where information is paraded in front of our eyes at lightning speed, with no meaningful user input and with an infinite scroll. We may be training ourselves to stop actively participating in gathering and processing information. To take my Reddit example, I’ve now stopped mindlessly scrolling the infinite feed, which WAS just the subreddits I followed but still gave me that firehose of images, headlines, and videos that I looked at without effort, and before I knew it I had wasted 30 minutes reading a bunch of strangers’ opinions on what the best sandwich is, or whatever. Now, if I visit Reddit it’s for a purpose: I need to see a dachshund, for instance, so I go to r/dachshund and I see one picture and I close that tab and go back to work.
It’s a little harder, but also a little more rewarding.
Burn-Murdoch ends his piece with the good news that our brains aren’t devolving–we still have the same capacity to think that we did in 2011. But that’s where I have to be a bit of a killjoy: no, natural selection isn’t fundamentally changing our brains, but there is something that might be–COVID.
Last year, researchers surveyed 800,000 UK adults and found that people who had contracted mild COVID and recovered were, on average, about three IQ points below people who had never knowingly caught COVID (yes, we still exist somehow). People who reported persistent “long COVID” symptoms were six points behind. People who had to be admitted to the ICU for their COVID were about nine points behind. It’s worth noting that they also found a small advantage for people who had been vaccinated at least two times, which does make me wonder if some part of these cognitive differences existed before the pandemic–meaning, maybe smarter people were more likely to get vaccinated and take protective measures, and of course “intelligence” depending upon how it’s measured is often tied into wealth, and wealthier people had a better chance to avoid COVID by working from home and having groceries delivered and such.
That said, nine IQ points is pretty substantial, and as the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote about this study, there are known mechanisms for how COVID can screw up our brains: “Studies involving humans and mouse organoids showed that SARS-CoV-2 infection induces fusion of neurons, which compromises neuronal activity. Studies involving humans have shown prolonged neuroinflammatory responses, structural abnormalities, and accelerated aging in the brains of persons with mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection.6-8 Virus was present in brain-tissue samples obtained during autopsy from persons who had had severe Covid-19.8 Gut dysbiosis, dysfunctional hypothalamic–pituitary response, and low-serotonin–induced dysfunction in vagal signaling may also play a role in impaired cognition after SARS-CoV-2 infection.”
So yeah, there is evidence to suggest that we, as a society, are getting stupider. I mean, besides the evidence that is the current state of the US. But the good news is that you as an individual can fight it: you can wear a mask in public places during COVID spikes, you can get vaccinated, and you can also start making small changes to your internet habits. You can delete apps that are sucking up all your time, or use tools like Screen Time to force you to put your phone down.
That is, if you WANT to not be stupider. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if the sunshine truly is eternal in the spotless mind.
