During most of the twentieth century, humanity became manifestly smarter. In a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, the average CI scores (intellectual quotient) increased three to five points per decade in dozens of countriesthanks to a progress promoted by better nutrition, medical care and education.
Then, with the change of millennium, he stopped. In many countries, the scores began to be reversed. A study confirmed this decrease since the end of the 1990s. Similar reversions are documented throughout Europe, From a four -point drop in France to sustained descents in Norway.
This descent has nothing to do with a change in food, as happened in the past, or with a decline educational system, but with technology, according to Eva Keiffenheim. For this expert in neurosciences, the key is in a question that, so simple, has become a mantra: Why remember what I can simply search on Google or ask Chatgpt? And a second question: why learn what I can know thanks to the Internet? The answer is memory.
Both questions are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of memory. Its lack of use is what would be causing descents in intellectual quotient indices in the population.
The usual conception is that memory is an information filler to turn to when we need: we open a drawer, take out the data and close it again. But for Keiffenheim it is rather a library with interconnected references.
Memory is exercised not only archiving, but repeating a pattern hundreds of times that allows us to automate tasks, How to drive in football, touch the piano or perform dance movements. We integrate all the steps of these skills and then we can combine them in another order and turn it into an acquired capacity … with memory.
“This is the objective of any effective learning: create a vast mental library of these fragments that you can access instantly -says Keiffenheim -. The constant cognitive discharge, through Google, a second digital brain and now chatgpt, short circuit this process. We stuck in knowing about a subject, never reaching the automaticity of knowing how. In a nutshell: if you can’t remember it without a device, you have not really learned. You have rented the information. ”
For Keiffenheim, This custom of “outsourcing” our thinking at devices undergoes the three fundamental learning processes. The first of these is automaticity or the ability to perform a skill without conscious thought, such as boneing a chicken: it is only obtained by repetition.
The second process has to do with the construction of schemes, the mental frameworks that organize knowledge. It is what distinguishes an expert from a rookie, the ability to combine different information files.
And finally we have the prediction error. “The brain learns better when it is surprised, when it detects a discrepancy between an expectation and a result -adds Keiffenheim -. This only works if there is an initial internal prediction. If a calculator is trusted to multiply 5 x 10 and a typographic error gives 500, the brain does not detect any error because it never made a prediction. A fundamental mechanism of learning is ignored. The goal is not to memorize instead of thinking, but memorize to think “.
This expert proposes two first steps to fight this trend. The first is follow a gradual progression and try to incorporate knowledge as an apprentice And the second, use technology as a complement, as one more means, not as if it were the only one.