George Orwell once wrote that every generation “imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it”.
Today, the second part of that observation feels more astute than ever, as we face constant concerns about the ways is supposedly destroying the abilities of children and young people.
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For decades, scientists have noted the occurrence of the , which essentially describes how, in terms of performance on various tests, each generation is more intelligent than the previous one. In recent years, this effect has seemingly , leading some to interpret this as evidence of the damage that today’s tech, via smartphones and screen time, is doing to young people.
But we shouldn’t despair just yet, because there are other explanations for what we are seeing – and a lot of them are actually rather encouraging.
The Flynn effect is diminishing because there is no longer a substantial difference in intelligence scores between young people and those from older generations. Many would interpret this as meaning young people are becoming less intelligent. However, it could just as easily mean older people are retaining more of their cognitive abilities as they age. If anything, this is more likely to be correct. Outside of conditions like Alzheimer’s, we have typically seen reduce as people get older, simply due to age. But recent reveals this is no longer the case for many.
This is presumably a downstream result of the greater access to early-life education, healthcare and information that those born in the 20th century increasingly enjoyed, allowing recent generations to not only become smarter, but stay that way.
Basically, the diminishing intelligence gap between older and younger people is more likely to be a sign of things getting better, rather than worse.
There are still concerns about the impact of technology on young people’s intelligence and cognition. But even here, there is less cause for alarm than many headlines would have you assume.
True, there is evidence that excessive screen time can be (and also that argues otherwise), but this can be seen as more the result of unhelpful habits that by adjusting behaviour, rather than lasting disruptions to key neurological systems.
It also helps to consider how we are assessing intelligence or cognitive abilities in this context. Standardised tests that have been used for decades are all well and good, but how to precisely measure or even define intelligence has long been a .
It could be that applying long-established frameworks of intellectual performance to young people who developed intellectually in a radically different environment to that of their parents does them a serious disservice.
For example, constantly flicking through multiple videos may strike older people as a sign of a lack of focus and attention, but being able to manage multiple information streams at once some considerable brain power. have also been shown to improve multitasking abilities. Used properly, can actually enhance learning and education. And so on.
The idea that young people are intellectually inferior is bleakly common, but the evidence doesn’t back it up. It is more that the world around us is constantly becoming more complex, and both younger and older people are adapting to deal with this admirably, albeit in different ways.
Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist and author of
