Our Intelligence’s Glass Ceiling

Clifford McKeon

With the rise of the internet and all its fast paced information that can be accessed in a matter of seconds to hundreds of different devices you must be thinking wow humans are geniuses. But are these great milestones in human engineering truly making us smarter? Looking back at humans of the past, I have always thought of us as growing wiser with each passing generation. After reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, I have learned that I may have been horribly wrong.

                In the 1980’s a New Zealand professor named James Flynn felt the same way as I did. He felt 100% positive that the human race was growing smarter and to back it up he started looking at records of IQ tests and mapping out human progress over the years. The information showed that humans indeed were growing smarter but there was a flaw. Flynn realized that we weren’t smarter than our ancestors, we just changed the way we used our skills to match the standards of the IQ test. For example farmers would be faced with solving practical everyday problems while in our economic world we have to focus on different problems.  He later goes on to talk about other tests like PSAT or SAT that have not changed during 1999-2008 where computers really started influencing the world.

                Even with all this information I still somewhat believe that humans are still becoming smarter. Carr states, “Most of the increase in overall scores can be attributed to strengthening performance in tests involving the mental rotation of geometric forms, identification of similarities between disparate objects, and the arrangement of shapes into logical sequence (145). He then states that the other sections have raised little to none. Seeing this evidence from IQ testing over the past 10 years actually does not sound as bad as Carr makes it out to be. Even though we have not been rising as drastically in other sections we are still becoming smarter based on this. To touch on the lowering scores on the PSAT and SAT, they only focus on three different sections of learning I’m sure if the test included a wider variety of subjects it would confirm that we are growing smarter.

                The problem with Nicholas Carr’s chapter is that there was not definitive answer as to whether we are growing in intelligence or not. This book is all mainly his views and all he added were studies that supported his facts. He brought up studies that lead the readers to think we are not growing smarter and found faults to IQ testing, but is that truly enough to go out and say we have not grown smarter over the past ten years.  Judging whether or not we are smarter than generations before us may never be answered there are studies that support both sides.  Maybe there’s a cap or glass ceiling on how smart the human race can reach, or the internet is to blame for our problems, but I still believe we are growing smarter than ever. Maybe I’m just an optimist who can’t face the truth or maybe… just maybe this chapter was all bull-shit, and Carr tried to change my mind by spoon feeding me it!