A new study shows that people are struggling more than ever to read, concentrate, and solve problems. The research comes just a few months after Oxford’s indicative decision to make “Brain Rot” its 2024 “Word of the Year.” Common experience itself lends itself to the conclusion that we are struggling to focus, that our attention is fragmented, and that simply thinking about one issue for more than a few seconds is difficult.

The Financial Times reported that intelligence and reasoning capacities have declined since the early 2010s. While the COVID-19 pandemic is commonly blamed for the plummet and is indeed responsible for much of the cognitive decline, the downward trend preceded the crisis according to the study. John Burn-Murdoch reports:

Given its importance, there has been remarkably little consistent long-running research on human attention or mental capacity. But there is a rare exception: every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

The rise in cognitive difficulties involves having trouble with numerical and mathematical reasoning. Students no longer seem to be mastering basic math and reading skills, and they arrive on college campuses underprepared for four years of academic rigor. Professors must now contend with students who lack the reading, writing, and reasoning skills necessary to succeed.

My own experience with attention and concentration is certainly in keeping with the new data. I have been reading and writing since elementary school, and still do, but I’d be amiss not to mention how dramatically my smartphone and laptop have eroded my ability to sit still and focus deeply on one thing at a time. If you have read much of my writing, you will find that much of it, particularly here at Mind Matters, is concerned with rehabilitating our ability to pay attention in such a distractible, digital media ecology. Computer scientist and author Cal Newport calls this lost skillset “deep work.” The constant notifications, phone pick-ups, and lingering pull of the screen (even when the phone is turned off) divides the brain, making it nigh impossible to achieve singlemindedness, let alone produce excellence.

Reading is Resistance

Phone-free schools can resist the incursion of distractions plaguing young people. So can a renewed emphasis on reading physical books. While more books are published annually than ever before in history, Gen Z struggles to pick up and read. Maryanne Wolf commented on the problem back in 2019 for Pacific Standard, writing,

I am less concerned with students’ cognitive impatience than with their potential inability to read with the sophistication necessary to grasp the complexity of thought and argument found in denser, longer, more demanding texts, whether in literature and science classes or, later, in wills, contracts, and public referenda.

Apps like TikTok offer bite-sized nuggets of entertainment, no real attentiveness needed. Going from Tiktok to a tome like Anna Karenina may feel like facing Half Dome in Yosemite National Park without a rope or a harness: virtually impossible. The authors of the Substack channel School of the Unconformed, however, note the brain’s remarkable ability to plastically reform through alternative habits. We can change. We can recover the virtue of paying attention despite the digital deluge. They write,

No matter how well-read we are, our inherently malleable brain circuitry will adapt to the mode of reading we most use. So, if we spend most of our days skimming text and jumping between tabs, our eyes will also begin to speed over the well-crafted sentences of our favorite authors.

The same bears true if we switch to spending more intentional time with words on a page. Learning to read offline can heal the brain’s frenetic, scattered condition. Learning how to sit with complex material, preferably away from a flitting screen, is the way to resist a culture so heavily mediated by digital technology. St. Augustine once heard a voice call over a garden wall: “Take up and read!” Maybe we should heed the voice, too.