Do you ever have one of those days where you just feel, well, really stupid?

It might be that your normal routines somehow feel clunkier, you’re having an off day at work, or everything you say just isn’t coming out right.

Or how about those days where everyone around you – on the bus, in the grocery store, at work – just seems to be acting particularly dumb?

It could be that you’re just having a particularly bad day, or that actually you’re the cranky one.

Alternatively though, as the Financial Times reported recently, it could actually be the case that human intelligence really is on the decline.

It doesn’t take a day of binge watching America’s Funniest Home Videos to know that sometimes even the brightest of people can act really stupid sometimes.

Which means that the rest of humankind really don’t stand a chance.

But according to the report, our cognitive abilities – including concentration, problem solving, reasoning, and information processing – are, on a collective sense at least, declining.

That is, at least among young adults growing up in the US.

Sometimes referred to as ‘stupidification’, the report derives from the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future study data.

With analysis of the data proving that more and more teens across the US are struggling with concentration and learning, there could be reason to believe that the population are, in general, becoming less intelligent.

Of course, intelligence is tricky to define, but generally it is thought to encompass things like knowledge and memory retention, attention span and critical thinking skills.

All these things seem to have been considerably impacted since the pandemic, thanks to the struggles that many young people faced with their education during this time.

However, this worldwide crisis only enhanced a pattern that was already being measured. As cognitive skills seemed to have been in decline across the general population since the 2010s, scientists and psychologists suggest that something else entirely might be at play here.

It would be easy to blame Covid-19 entirely for any kind of stupidification (whether national or global) that is emerging.

But there is further evidence to suggest that in fact, it is the way in which we absorb information throughout our day-to-day lives that is at fault.

Before technology exploded, entertainment had to be sought out. Kids had fun out in the real world, whilst we learned thorough books – or, in the internet’s earlier stages, some real in-depth research.

However, so much information is available to us now at the swipe of a screen or the click of a button, that our brains are almost constantly overloaded.

Think about it? When you’re bored, or waiting in line, do you spend the time thinking or taking in the world around you? Or do you reach for your phone?

As the report explains, the way in which we consume media – in 20-second videos, 140 character messages – is harming concentration and the retention of information: both key facets of intelligence.

That’s because our brain only has capacity to remember a small number of things in detail per day, whilst the information we are bombarded with is overwhelming – whilst being delivered in bite-sized chunks that lack complexity. Not at all suited for human cognitive development.

It’s not that we’re no longer clever, it’s that our brains are adapting outside of the parameters that usually define ‘intelligence’.

And if our intelligence and societal needs and expectations don’t align? Well that could spell disaster.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.