Are we Offloading the Very Essence of Our Minds and Getting Dumber?
I grew up in India in a time when there were no online navigation tools or even effective road signs and mile markers. I used to remember the spatial coordinates in my head to a hundred different places, navigating constrained streets, alternate routes, and no highways as a backbone to the city. I remembered how to travel across cities and states purely through memorization.
I could recite the Vedas (an ancient Indian book of knowledge), recite multiple poems in their entirety, and I used to know 20–25 phone numbers by heart, including my bank account details and the names of over a thousand relatives, perhaps exaggerating a little. Still, I knew the web of family relationships without needing external aids. Back then, mental storage wasn’t a choice; it was a necessity.
Cut to 2024, almost everything has been offloaded to my devices. Phone numbers? My smartphone knows them. Navigation? A few taps, and a voice directs me. Even mundane calculations? Delegated to an app. This “cognitive offload” has opened up space for other pursuits, perhaps more abstract and theoretical things, like advanced mathematics or philosophy. But I wonder, is this kind of offloading actually altering human intelligence in a fundamental way?
The concept of the “Flynn effect” describes a steady increase in average IQ scores over the 20th century. It suggests that each generation is getting smarter, that somehow, our environment has been nudging us towards more abstract, complex thinking. Factors such as better nutrition, formal education, healthcare, and even media have been suggested as contributors to this phenomenon. People today have a better grasp of abstract reasoning, even if they aren’t explicitly aware of it. The rise in scores seemed to indicate that humanity, as a collective, was becoming more adept at navigating the complexities of modern life.
But the narrative has been changing. The “reverse Flynn effect” is a term gaining traction as researchers notice stagnation, and even a decline, in average IQ scores in some countries, such as Norway, Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom, and France over recent decades. This reversal brings into question whether the cognitive gains of the past century have been fleeting. What could be leading to this shift? Some speculate that it’s an indication of our dependency on digital aids, a cognitive offloading that is changing how we process and store information. With devices to remember phone numbers, direct us to destinations, and even remind us of daily tasks, is the cognitive machinery we used to cultivate gradually fading away?
Cognitive offloading isn’t inherently negative. The human brain has always evolved by adapting to tools; from the invention of writing, which allowed us to externalize memory, to calculators that freed us from complex arithmetic. Offloading can indeed create space. It can allow us to focus on more specialized forms of thinking like complex problems that we wouldn’t otherwise have the bandwidth to tackle. But it raises an important philosophical question: if a significant portion of mental tasks are externalized, does the average cognitive capacity expand, or does it narrow into specialized lanes, leaving other areas to diminish?
The modern world presents an irony: we have more information at our fingertips than any previous generation, but the ability to critically process, synthesize, and engage with that information seems to be faltering. Think of the cognitive rigor required to remember pages of dense text like an epic poetry compared to scrolling through fragmented digital feeds. The breadth of knowledge is accessible, but the depth might be thinning out? (or, are we developing a different faculty of intelligence to assimilate and disambiguate the firehose?) Are we trading wisdom for mere data processing capabilities?
Cultural shifts also play a part. In an era of instant gratification, attention spans are dwindling. The expectation of immediate answers has made the idea of patient intellectual pursuit, of wrestling with a challenging problem for hours, an almost forgotten art. For the average person, what does this mean for the cultivation of deep intelligence, the kind that arises from prolonged engagement and immersion in complex challenges that stretch the boundaries of the human mind? Are we at risk of losing not just our skills, but also the ability to truly understand the depths of what it means to think deeply, to explore with curiosity, and to push the very limits of our cognitive existence?
The reverse Flynn effect also points towards another nuance: maybe we were never truly getting smarter in the way we imagined. Perhaps rising IQ scores simply meant we were getting better at specific types of abstract thinking required in the context of 20th-century industrialized societies. Now, in a digital and post-industrial landscape, perhaps the form of intelligence that’s needed is different, and our metrics haven’t yet caught up. Intelligence is not one-dimensional; it evolves with context, shifting as the environment and challenges we face change.
I think about our children, who may never need to memorize the layout of a city or dial a phone number from memory. Their environment is profoundly different. They are exposed to more data, more stimuli, more abstractions, but at the cost of deep mental engagement with any one of these things. As someone who grew up needing to remember and navigate, I wonder: does the convenience of technology risk stunting the basic scaffolding of intelligence that previous generations built upon?
But there’s another side to this. Today’s tools are also allowing us to engage with complexity in unprecedented ways. Take artificial intelligence for example. Machine learning models are increasingly becoming extensions of human cognition. They allow us to make sense of enormous data sets, to understand genomic intricacies, or even simulate biological pathways that were impossible to comprehend in the past. In a way, technology augments human intelligence. The question, though, remains: Is this augmentation broadening our collective intelligence, or are we sacrificing cognitive depth for technological dependence?
I don’t know if we can definitively say whether humans are getting smarter or dumber. Intelligence has become a multifaceted concept, a balance between what we internalize and what we offload. Perhaps what we are witnessing is a shift rather than a simple increase or decrease. The Flynn effect and its reversal remind us that intelligence isn’t static. It is shaped, cultivated, and sometimes diminished by the environment we create for ourselves.
Perhaps the more profound, disquieting question is not whether we are getting smarter or dumber, but rather: What kind of intelligence do we truly value, and do we still have the capacity to consciously preserve it, or have we already ceded that power to the very tools we have created? If our creations begin to dictate the boundaries of our intelligence, what does that imply about our role in this evolving landscape? Are we truly the designers of an enlightened future, or are we becoming passive observers to our own cognitive transformation, led by convenience and distracted by immediacy, drifting without a clear destination?
And if we are drifting, do we even understand the cost of what we are losing?
