I don’t find the diet argument convincing unless the culprit is down to corn-based sweeteners (and I doubt that it is). I’m not convinced that are enough Big Gulp fans to account for such a precipitous drop. Mid-century staple dishes weren’t exactly famous for fresh ingredients (gelatin ring, anybody?), and we certainly suffered no lack of processed foods.
That’s also when rivers could catch fire, so the environment wasn’t exactly terrific.
In fact, in general it seems that IQs were higher when saturated nurturing was limited to small children and frail adults.
I vote for overprotective and overly structured childhood.
Money quote:
“Marbles and Machiavelli: The Role of Game Play in Children’s Social Development” by David F. Lancy, Professor of Anthropology at Utah State University, and M. Annette Grove: The authors review several case studies of children engaged in rule-governed play and conclude that the process of learning rules—and of breaking them and making new ones—promotes gamesmanship, which is theoretically linked to the evolution of human intelligence.
I’m going to go with social conditioning. My school district wants 3 years old in pre-pre-K, so they can sit them in cute little chairs and teach them that they can’t color for sh8t.
I also read recently about the lack of free play, and constant monitoring of kids to the point that they can’t tell they’re being antisocial and adjust their behavior. They get separated and punished. They don’t learn empathy.
But that and sugar, and mindless technology, lack of literacy and critical thinking skills, and music. The loud music, and that soft whispery sht8 Billie Eilish does. It’s all the devil’s work!
And many processed foods are healthy for you. Prosciutto is processed food, cheese is processed food, we’ve been eating processed food for ages as humans. The issue is how they’re being processed now. Packed with sugar and refined carbs. People were eating bread and rice, but now we’re are eating refined white bread and rice.
Not enough animal fat either. Eating so much chicken might not be the best for you even though it’s lean meat like we are told. Animal fat is a good source of fuel and good for the brain. High cholesterol levels for old people prevents dementia.
True, but when I were a wee lad the only cheeses in our small town were American, Velveeta, or Cheese Wiz, all processed and none of them natural. Maybe the odd cheddar at Christmas time. I never had prosciutto as a kid; I never even knew anybody who’d ever heard of prosciutto.
There was nothing but soft white bread, and with added white sugar. The only brown breads were the foil loafs of thin-sliced German breads that lasted for months on the shelf. And all kinds of processed carbs: graham crackers by the carton, potato chips (some made from real potatoes, some not), cookies, kool-aid. There was no such thing as USDA Organic, no such standard existed. By today’s standards the only “natural” foods I ate as a kid were milk, meat, and garden vegetables. Plenty of wheat farmers where I grew up but no farmer’s markets (hah), and they didn’t grow anything but wheat.
We did eat plenty of animal fat, that’s true. Always a thick white rim on any cut of beef.
I could be wrong about it not being diet, but I’m pretty sure most people’s diets are a lot better now than they were in 1965-75, in middle America anyway.
I don’t know. Maybe. I think there are thousands more choices now, for sure. You have eight million choices of crap food today while we only had a handful back then (it seems). I also think portion sizes are much larger now, too.
you can blame education, food or pollution all you want. but the reality is humankind overall has better access to food and education nowadays than ever.
if you think of the brain as a muscle, we just don’t use it that much as we used to, we have calculators and apps for everything. no mental math or learning by heart because you have the solution to everything via google.
i don’t know if it’s havoc. definitely it’s changing our minds. before smartphones i memorized maybe 10 phone numbers, now it’s down to 3.
but it also gives us more resources to do other things. memorizing things isn’t just that important anymore but knowing how to access certain information, prioritizing, processing and put them to use is a much more valuable skill which i’m not sure traditional iq tests can fully depict.
Age may make you wiser but probably dumber. I am not speaking of myself here. I strongly believe I am at the same degree of dumb as 30 years ago when i stopped counting age
but speaking somewhat seriously here. Yes tech makes you dumb if you don’t have to think. LIke modern pilots have trouble if they need to manually control the airplane because they have so many regulations set by airlines that don’t allow them to manually fly anymore , when they have to, they are not up to it.
If we don’t exercise our brain cells, they go bad.
I’ve wondered for a while about how much immediate and constant access to information has changed how we think/work/do stuff, and the implications of that on teaching/learning. I remember that widespread use of the internet to find information seemed to happen during the final couple of years of my undergraduate degree (about 2003/2004), at least in my case.
Prior to that, finding information was a pain. in. the. ass. I studied chemistry, and searching the literature about a particular topic involved going to the chemistry library and looking up keywords/chemical formulas/author names one by one in this massive collection of books called Chemical Abstracts, which took up pretty much all of the shelves in one room of the library at my university and part of a second room as well.
First you had to go to the relevant set of cumulative index books for keywords, chemical formulas, etc. (these were published every year or few years or something) and look up your particular keyword/formula/name, which was just followed by a bunch of alphanumeric codes. You made a note (on paper!) of all those codes for each keyword/formula/name you were interested in, then had to go over to a much larger set of books containing abbreviated abstracts for every paper indexed by the Chemical Abstracts Service and look up each code individually to determine whether the abstract was sufficiently interesting to track down the full paper. If it was, you’d need to write down the bibliographic information for the article then go read or photocopy the full paper from a different set of books containing the print edition of the particular journal (if your university was subscribed to that journal, although you’d sometimes need to go to a different library at the university or get an interlibrary loan, for a photocopy of the article to be mailed to you a few days later). You’d then have to repeat this process for the next keyword/formula/author, and also go through the partial indexes for anything published since the last cumulative index.
There were also some other collections of books for looking up specific things, like a synthetic procedure (say, how to prepare a particular compound or all the reported uses of scandium triflate) or the properties of a particular compound (this one was written in abbreviated German, so all of us were encouraged to have a working knowledge of that, like the older professors, who were encyclopedias in themselves).
In about my final year, a piece of software called Scifinder Scholar came out, which allowed you to do some of this on a computer. It was literally amazing at the time - you could just type in the keyword (or even multiple keywords!) etc. and go through the list of abstracts without moving from your seat or opening a book. Some of the articles even contained links to a PDF version for you to save. I remember that our university had something like 3 licences, which were apparently obscenely expensive.
Nowadays you can just type the same stuff into Google and immediately get hundreds of results to check out.
I’ve particularly thought about it with respect to teaching sciences, as curricula don’t seem to have evolved much since the time when it might potentially be useful to remember things like how physical properties vary along the periodic table or classes/genera of organisms. If I need to know any of this stuff nowadays, I can Google it in a few seconds - it seems far less important now to force students to commit these things to memory, as opposed to teaching them how to use this freely available information to solve problems etc.
Ah…undergrad and grad schools in the 1990s. Books and reference books, side by side. 3x5 cards at the ready. Alone in a corner table three days in a row in late May. Writing papers by hand to be put through the clickety clack word processor overnight. Saving ten pages of Whitman/Columbus paper on one tiny line of visible text.
I guess I was about a decade behind you, but I do remember having a Sharp word processor in the 90s for schoolwork (LCD display that could fit perhaps a dozen lines of text, and a floppy disk, and quite advanced at the time!).
I also remember looking up old newspaper articles on microfiche at university (but I think that might have been just for fun, as the library had a section full of them and I was curious what they were - I think they might have seemed antiquated to me, even at the time).
