How Screens Have Been Quietly Rewriting Intelligence

For most of the 20th century, intelligence appeared to be rising. The so called Flynn effect saw IQ scores climb steadily across the Western world, driven not by genetics but by environment, education, nutrition and critically, the spread of literacy and abstract thinking through books.

That trend has now reversed. A large Norwegian study of over 700,000 individuals found that IQ scores have been declining since the mid-1970s, with environmental factors, not biology, driving the change. One of the more striking findings comes from research into the rollout of cable television; increased exposure to commercial TV during childhood measurably reduced cognitive ability, with even a single year of exposure lowering scores.

The mechanism is not mysterious, time is finite, television and now short-form video displaces reading and reading is not merely content consumption it is cognitive training. It builds abstraction, patience, internal visualisation and structured reasoning. When it is replaced with passive visual media, cognition becomes shallower, more reactive, more fragmented, less agile and reliable.

We are now witnessing the industrialisation of that effect. Short-form video compresses narrative into seconds. Social media fragments attention into algorithmic slices. AI-generated visual content further reduces the need to imagine, infer or construct meaning. The result is a shift from deep cognition to continuous stimulus response. Not stupidity but a different, thinner mode of thinking.

How we communicate defines how we think and ultimately, how we govern. The rise of literacy and books enabled citizens to engage with complex arguments, laws and philosophy. It is no coincidence that the expansion of literacy aligned with the decline of absolute monarchy and the rise of democratic systems. A population capable of sustained reasoning demands representation.

Today, the inverse pressure is emerging. Politicians have always mastered the dominant medium of their time; pamphlets, newspapers, television. Now it is memes, clips and algorithmic outrage. Populism thrives not because people are less intelligent per se but because the medium rewards emotional immediacy over reflective judgement.

Consider the very real case for introducing a UK citizen initiated referendum mechanism to strengthen democratic legitimacy. The UK’s representative model has long relied on Members of Parliament (MP) as the primary conduit of public will, but the context has materially changed. Ubiquitous access to information, digital communication, and higher civic awareness have reduced the constraints that once justified exclusive reliance on representative decision-making. The Swiss model demonstrates that a more direct approach can function effectively.

However, this raises a more uncomfortable question. If the quality of public decision-making is shaped by the cognitive health of the population, as emerging evidence on declining IQ suggests, what are the implications of expanding direct democratic tools? This becomes particularly acute when considering proposals such as extending voting rights to 16 year olds, at a time when there are credible concerns about declining cognitive benchmarks in younger cohorts!

AI will likely accelerate this trajectory in a more subtle and potentially more consequential way. As generative systems increasingly do the thinking for us, summarising, drafting, coding, even forming arguments, the cognitive burden shifts from creation to validation. That may sound efficient but it risks atrophying the very faculties that underpin intelligence, those of synthesis, critical reasoning and the ability to wrestle with ambiguity and form hypothesises and arguments. When combined with AI generated visual and short form content, the loop tightens, less reading, less effort, more consumption, faster answers. The danger is not that AI makes us less capable but that it makes it easier not to exercise capability. In that sense, AI could become the ultimate cognitive convenience, one that quietly trades depth for velocity unless deliberately counterbalanced by practices that force the mind to remain an active participant rather than a passive reviewer.

Yet there is a counter current. The rise of podcasts and long-form dialogue suggests a quiet resistance. Millions now choose three hour conversations over thirty second clips. It is not nostalgia, it is cognitive necessity. In a world saturated with shallow inputs, depth becomes a competitive advantage.

The question is not whether intelligence is declining in a crude sense. It is whether society is re-weighting how intelligence is exercised. If we continue to optimise for speed, stimulation and surface level engagement, we should not be surprised if reasoning capacity atrophies. But if we deliberately reintroduce depth, through reading, long form discussion and structured thought, we may yet arrest the drift.

In the end, intelligence is not fixed, it is trained and right now, we are training it, at scale, to skim not to think.