Average IQs have been falling steadily for nearly 40 years as humanity is aging, and some forms of memory and intelligence fade away faster with age than others, psychologists say in an article published in the journal Intelligence.
“The fact that the aging of humanity generates this effect is an interesting idea, a good alternative to the controversial hypothesis that smart people are less and less likely to procreate. In contrast, such impairments in the work of a person's memory do exist in reality, and therefore this idea makes sense,”commented Jakob Pietschnig of the University of Vienna (Austria), quoted by New Scientist.
Around the mid-1930s, American scientists noticed that the IQ level of each new generation of people was noticeably higher than that of their parents and grandparents, increasing by an average of 3 points every decade. Called the Flynn Effect after its discoverer, psychologist James Flynn, this trend has remained unchanged for nearly a century, and scientists have linked it to rising levels of education, medicine and economics.
In the middle of the last decade, almost simultaneously with the release of the film "Idiocracy", scientists discovered that about 30-40 years ago, the Flynn effect stopped working. The opposite is now observed - the IQ level began to fall, decreasing at a rate of about 7 points per century.
The discovery of this phenomenon has caused scientists to argue fiercely about what exactly could have caused it. There is still no generally accepted opinion on this matter - many psychologists simply doubt that this is actually so, while others believe that this is due to the fact that people with a high level of education and intelligence, on average, are less likely to reproduce than less educated categories population.
Robin Morris of King's College London, UK, and his colleagues uncovered a potential cause by analyzing how the results of "halves" of IQ tests, measuring two different types of memory, changed.
Having studied a total of about 1.8 thousand different tests that were passed by residents of Britain and a number of other European countries, scientists were able to restore a picture of how short-term memory changed, which helps us solve simple everyday tasks, and working memory, which a person uses to analyze data. and decision making.
This analysis revealed interesting discrepancies. It turned out that short-term memory has continued to improve over the past 40 years, while working memory, on the contrary, has followed the trends that were discovered in 2004.
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Trying to understand what could have caused such discrepancies, scientists drew attention to the fact that the deterioration of this type of memory was accompanied by another, seemingly unrelated phenomenon - an increase in the number of older people taking tests for intelligence.
This coincidence, according to Morris and his colleagues, is not accidental - working memory in older people works much worse than in children and adults. In turn, episodic memory does not deteriorate so much with the onset of old age, and older people in this regard do not differ much from young people.
Accordingly, the decline in the global IQ level may be due to the fact that the population of all countries of the first world, as well as Russia and China, is rapidly aging today. On the other hand, scientists do not exclude the possibility that humanity has simply reached its "ceiling" and a further increase in average IQ levels at a similar pace is simply impossible.