John Burns-Murdoch, in the Financial Times, is the latest to make this claim (“Have humans passed peak brain power?”, FT, 14 March 2025). “Evidence is mounting that … the average person’s ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 201s and has been declining ever since.”
There are two issues here: checking the measurements, and identifying the cause. Burns-Murdoch quotes two surveys. First, the PISA rankings (OECD benchmark for high-income countries) for verbal and numerical reasoning have declined over the last fifteen years. Secondly, he cites a much more subjective survey, in which 18-year-olds assess themselves for difficulty in thinking, concentrating, or learning new things during the past 30 days. That kind of assessment seems to fall into the category of “how happy are you” surveys; I never trust people’s skills of self-appraisal.
While the PISA report might appear to be more objective, it is not without its critics. The test takes two hours to complete, and has been widely criticized for its implementation in many countries not being taken seriously: the Washington Post, in 2019, mentioned a complaint from over 100 academics about this test.
Still, there are without question many articles on this topic, often quoting different surveys, but with a similar conclusion.
What causes the “decline”?
Let’s be honest: this argument is usually about books. What seems be behind these arguments is the mantra:
- Books are good.
- We read fewer books today.
- Therefore our brain power is diminishing.
This decline, if it is a decline, used to be attributed to the Internet, or, more specifically, to social media: “long-form deep reading traditionally associated with the printed book will be marginalised by prevailing media trends” [Kovac and van der Weel, 2018]. Today, the explanation is digital content. The typical suggested cause is “the superficial skimming for information that seems to characterize reading in the 21st century” [from a 2021 post by Karin Wulf].
For Burns-Murdoch, it appears to be because we don’t read : “in 2022 the share of Americans who reported reading a book in the past year fell below half”. Such a statement begs so many questions: are all books good? What if all those books we did read were romantic and crime fiction?
My own experience of reading
I write as someone whose tertiary education was on the basis of sink or swim. If you knew how to read, how to research a topic, how to write essays, you were fine. If you didn’t know any of these things (and I didn’t), you were ignored. Compare that to the situation today, when there is so much more focused teaching of reasoning, researching, and arguing! I remember at university, where I studied English literature, starting my unit on Old English texts, for example. We were given a reading list, of around 25 titles, with no annotation or description. The very first item was a background history book, Anglo-Saxon England, all 768 pages of it, one of the venerable volumes of the Oxford History of England. Dutifully, I sat down to read it, and of course by the time I had finished it, the course was over. I never got to the remaining items on the reading list, although it wasn’t for want of trying.
A kind of conclusion
I have tried to show that simply reading books is not likely to do wonders for anyone’s brain. However wonderful a skill reading might be, everything depends on what you read and how you read it. If you don’t read critically, the whole exercise is a waste of time. So to try to measure changes in intelligence from the number of books people do or don’t read is not, I’m afraid, going to convince me. I would go so far as to claim that digital content, if approached in the right way, will certainly make us cleverer.
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