“Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.”
Human beings born in 2000 are as stupid/intelligent as the ones born in 1942 or 1980.
The idea that in a few generations, the human brain would be SO much better at cognitive tasks, is a bit laughable if you understand evolution (hint: it takes thousands of years for things to actually change in flesh and then abilities).
Human beings don’t multitask. We serialize at high speed, giving the impression that we are multitasking. But we all know that we’re not. We’re quickly rotating tasks and the faster we do it, the worst we do said tasks.
The pervasiveness of tech and the cyberpunk “culture” always makes it like since broadband internet and apps, we are so much smarter. But we’re not. We still have the same number of synapses and same brain weight as people in the 1600s.
We just play more now.