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Modern Life Is Making Us Dumber
Humanity Is Getting Dumber
Scientists say that we have much smaller brains than our ancestors had 20,000 years ago … and we might have gotten stupider since agriculture became widespread.
Indeed, Huffington Post reports that we’ve probably gotten dumber than even our Victorian ancestors:
A provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.
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As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004, including one by Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Each study gauged participants’ so-called visual reaction times — how long it took them to press a button in response to seeing a stimulus. Reaction time reflects a person’s mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.
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In the late 19th Century, visual reaction times averaged around 194 milliseconds, the analysis showed. In 2004 that time had grown to 275 milliseconds. Even though the machine gauging reaction time in the late 19th Century was less sophisticated than that used in recent years, Dr. te Nijenhuis told The Huffington Post that the old data is directly comparable to modern data.
Other research has suggested an apparent rise in I.Q. scores since the 1940s, a phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect. But Dr. te Nijenhuis suggested the Flynn Effect reflects the influence of environmental factors — such as better education, hygiene and nutrition — and may mask the true decline in genetically inherited intelligence in the Western world.
This new research was published in the April 13 issue of Intelligence.
There are several theories for why we are getting dumber, including the following (the first 2 come from the HuffPost article):
(1) Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.
(2) “The reduction in human intelligence … would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed,” Dr. Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University, told The Huffington Post in an email. “I projected this occurred as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies (cities) and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture, which occurred about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago.”
(3) Humans evolved to eat a lot of Omega 3s:
Wild game animals have much higher levels of essential Omega 3 fatty acids than domesticated animals. Indeed, leading nutritionists say that humans evolved to consume a lot of Omega 3 fatty acids in the wild game and fish which they ate (more), and that a low Omega 3 diet is a very new trend within the last 100 years or so.
In other words, while omega 3s have just now been discovered by modern science, we evolved to get a lot of omega 3s … and if we just eat a modern, fast food diet without getting enough omega 3s, it can cause all sorts of health problems.
So something just discovered by science can be a central fuel which our bodies evolved to use.
Omega 3s – in turn – boosts intelligence and help prevent cognitive decline.
(4) Exercise boosts intelligence … and our ancestors got a lot more exercise than we do!
In addition, high levels of cortisol – the chemical released by the body when one is under continuous, unrelenting stress – and poverty can physically impair the brain and people’s ability to learn.
On the other hand, relaxing activities like meditation and prayer have been shown to increase brain mass and connectivity in certain areas of the brain.
Hunter-gatherers had more leisure time – and a more playful attitude – than we do today.
(5) Toxic chemicals in the environment can reduce intelligence. Examples include flame retardant, lead (found in many lipsticks), certain pesticides (and see this and this), and fluoride.
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IQ tests only became discredited by the Politically Correct crowd who could not stand them disproving their holy mantra of everybody(as in every culture, nation, race and individual) are equal
If you think so..
masters in originality and doctors in common sense...
that is who darwin has selected...
LOL Whatever your own religion makes you believe... but mostly because they're simply no intelligence tests at all, they're compliance tests - suffice to say they're standardized, not free form, which means you wouldn't be able to prove your intelligence by debunking them, for instance...
FORWARD!!
?
This article is proof of that..........
From hoofington post, no less ...
And I don't think exercise boosts intelligence... maybe they mean recover it as cleaner blood and blood flow may help your brain be as best as it can but not better.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
Necessity is the mother of invention - or in other words, need begats exercising the gray muscle above your neck. Today, the social safety net coddles the individual and thus the mind is not encouraged to think. That which gets rewarded gets done. We reward superficialisms rather than celebrating intellectual creativity, initiative and cleverness. So instead of wisdom, we get stupid.
Is modern life making us dumber? Whether that is rhetorical or not, the answer is yes and no. We are making ourselves dumber. Modern life is what we make it. Our stupidity is cultivated through our focus on ease and comfort and the so-called normal curve. The use of the "normal curve" in education to add points to student's grades is based on a completely made-up idiotic myth that if student grades don't form a normal curve then it is only fair to reward the students for doing poorly by adding points until the average is a 70%. This is complete bullshit. Google "history of the normal curve" in google scholar. The impact of this is incalculable but you can surmise that over time the students learn that they can do less and less and rely on the teacher/professor's fear of disapproval to save them by the normal curve. Everybody. Read a hard book once in a while. Just struggle through until you get it. Make yourself smarter. Stop blaming your stupidity on anyone or anything but yourself.
Sorry; I have little time for that (Read a hard book ) . I'm reading all this neat stuff here.
Grapes of Wrath, baby - great stuff!
The fantasies, fictions, and illusions conjured up on TV are a big part of the root cause. Eliminate TV and the rate of acceleration may at least decrease long enough for Western civilization catch its breath. Or not.
All in all - it's probably too late for Western civilization. Once the primitive superstitions of the ideological AIDS virus of socialism take root, it's pretty much over.
The bell tolls for thee.
your fate is in your own hands - c.dis. 101
darwin is our only savior at this juncture.
outside the box or over the cliff...
watch Idiocracy.
I also recommend the short story: "The Marching Morons" by Kornbluth.
wtf are you talking about?
I'm not trying to blame anybody else. But this statistical trend might explain Bernanke ...
Is the native population becoming dumber or is the general population becoming dumber because of immigrants?
The US has long benefited from a brain drain from the rest of the world but recently a less-brainy drain has developed. Given the US's unfriendly attitude towards research, the brainy inflow will probably slow down, while less-brainy inflow will continue.
GW - best comment on the board yet...
Spell check is making everyone stupid....lol wtf bff ect
Spell Check? Is that for like...Whiche's and Wherelock's?
M&M's
Stupid should hurt.
I feel your Pain
There are also pockets of high inteligence and high stupidity, making it so that you can move from one town to another and raise the IQ in both places.
Don't forget that a good explanation of this trend maybe the axiom that: The collective total IQ is a constant, but the population is growing.
I beg to differ. The population is not growing in the higher IQ class. The ones with the higher IQ's advance to the wealthy class.
It is here that their values change in-worth, to self. They don't want to have a lot of kids, and don't. While the lower wealthy class have little time and money, so they make do at home (they have much larger families). The average IQ of the whole is effected, and it's not up. If couples have two offspring, then they move closer to evolutionary dead end. This is because some of all offspring don't make it. We must have three or more to avoid the evolutionary dead ending. I had two kids, and now at 70, it's too late for me (my two had a total of four). We got Birth Control, and went wild. Everything has it's price, and Birth Control is no exception. It's only a matter of time ladys.
I think you missed oracle's point of dilution which requires above average IQ to understand.
I plead OLD fart (70). We get to do that after a certain age.
We love you anyway.
This is a related story: In the Italian movie "Pasqualino Settebellezze" with Giancarlo Giannini who was inprisoned by the Germans in the II war, his cellmate was a philosopher who told him among other things that the world population is growing rapidly and soon there will be so many people that they will kill for an apple as the food will not be enough.
Giannini being an uneducated peasant misread the message and as soon as he was released, he went to his village, got married and told his wife that they should have as many children as possible because soon people will kill for an apple and we need to protect ourselves.
Moral of the story: We can not edumucate the masses. Nature and gravity will take care of everything including BernaQE