Britain’s brightest children are being dumbed down by social media, according to a world-renowned expert on brain power.
The most dramatic falls in intelligence are among teenagers who would normally be expected to perform well.
A new analysis of intelligence test results spanning 30 years by Professor James Flynn shows an ‘alarming’ fall in scores by groups who once boasted the highest ‘critical thinking’ ability.
Britain’s brightest children are being dumbed down by social media, according to a world-renowned expert on brain power
The trend marks a surprise reversal of the so-called ‘Flynn effect’, named after the professor, which has seen IQ scores rise year on year among all age groups and in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.
This rise was put down to significant improvements in education and living conditions, and has been seized on by teachers as evidence that they are raising standards.
But new analysis by Prof Flynn has now found declines in the IQ of children not only in the UK but also in European and Scandinavian countries.
The only exception is the United States, where youngsters are still improving their IQ. But this is because schools had been inadequate and were improving.
Prof Flynn, Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Otago University in New Zealand, said he could not be certain about what was behind the decline in the brain power of Britain’s cleverest children. But he believed that internet-obsessed teenagers could be losing the ability to think because they were no longer prepared to tackle challenging texts.
Rather than burying themselves in a novel by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, they were so fixated on platforms such as Twitter or their smartphones that their attention spans were shrinking.
Rather than burying themselves in a novel by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, teenagers are now fixated on platforms such as Twitter
He added: ‘Maybe they are just not willing to work on the mental exercises you need to do top-level thinking.’
Prof Flynn said schools and universities were having to adapt to their pupils by dumbing down their courses, with even teachers and lecturers losing the habit of reading difficult texts or confronting difficult problems.
His research, published in the latest issue of the highly respected journal Intelligence, was based on the results of robust ‘Piaget’ tests. These measured the formal reasoning skills of thousands of British pupils in state and independent schools in 1980 and again in 2008.
Prof Flynn said that the kind of difficult question that bright teenagers could no longer deal with needed logical analysis – for example, how scientists draw conclusions from their data.
Commenting on Prof Flynn’s findings, Timothy Bates, Professor of Differential Psychology at Edinburgh University, said the results were ‘huge, if true’.
He said IQ scores were linked to a nation’s economic power and reflected ‘the effectiveness of society at every level’.