[ CYPHER CODE #1002 ]
IQ scores rose for a century. Then they stopped.

[ CYPHER CODE #1003 ]
Search replaced memory. Scrolling replaced reading.

[ CYPHER CODE #1004]
When depth is no longer required, depth declines.

BRIEFING

Grant here. We've been seeing for more than a hundred years that IQ scores have climbed steadily across the world. Then, right as smartphones, social media feeds, and the "always-on digital" life became the norm, that upward trend flatlined with Gen Z. Let’s break it down.

There's a new study claiming that Gen Z is the first generation to score lower on IQ tests than the millennials before them. For decades, rising IQ scores have become the norm, and they've been linked to formal education, complex problem solving, literacy, and abstract reasoning. Across many generations, those skills were trained consistently, but for some reason today, the education looks entirely different. Suddenly attention is fragmented, information can't be absorbed, memory is treated like cloud storage, and reading is practically nonexistent.

Neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath points to the increasing use of educational technology, screen exposure, and digital learning environments as potential contributors to this decline amongst Gen Z.

What's more, other international assessments have echoed similar information, noting drops in reading and math proficiency in recent years. While the causes are debated left and right, you can't ignore the timing and how it aligns with the rapid shift toward digital immersion in both education and daily life.

SOURCE

According to Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, a former teacher-turned-neuroscientist, he told the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that although Gen Z had greater exposure to formal education than earlier generations, their intelligence levels declined sharply. He said education systems dependent on technology caused the generation to fall behind. He also shared data that showed that cognitive abilities began to decline around 2010.

'More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,' Horvath told the New York Post.

Addressing Congress, he and other experts said human evolution shaped people to learn through face-to-face interaction. They said screen-based learning has interfered with this process and hindered cognitive growth.

Horvath added that upgrading education technology would not help, since technology itself is the problem and does not align with how the brain solves problems, develops and retains information.

'Humans are biologically programmed to learn from other humans and from deep study, not flipping through screens for bullet point summaries,' Horvath added.

...

The problem was observed not only in the United States but also in at least 80 other countries. "If you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly," he said.

Horvath presented a six-decade study linking the growing presence of classroom technology with failing learning outcomes.

DEBRIEFING

For well over a century, intelligence scores have steadily climbed as education systems expanded. That's long been the formula and the trend, until Gen Z.

This generation grew up inside a culture built on immediacy, where information is constant, searchable, and compressed. Attention is pulled in multiple directions at once, and the skill most rewarded today is basically speed.

So when you take all of that into account, the skills measured by traditional IQ tests, which lean toward sustained focus, memory retention, and abstract problem solving, all the puzzle pieces basically fall into place, and you can see exactly why Gen Z is sliding behind.

Now, the bigger question here is, how do we move forward? Because clearly, technology isn't going anywhere. Either we accept that IQ is sliding backwards and may continue to do so, or we redefine our standards for IQ.

Then that brings up a whole separate argument and leaves people to question older measurements of intelligence and if they're still viable in this day and age.

Either way, education- and intelligence-wise, we're at a crossroads, and which direction we take will define generation after generation.

NOW YOU KNOW

The curve didn’t break on its own. The culture bent it.