Alright, so I’ll preface this article by saying that this may all be old news, but perhaps not news that many of you were aware of. I will also say that I am not a sociologist, a psychologist or any kind of “ist” for that matter. All I wish to accomplish with this is to take a subject that I’ve taken a recent interest in and present you with the findings and theories. Without further ado, I give to you, the Flynn Effect.

I, like some of you, have been subject to hearing people say that society is in a crisis of being dumbed-down; our schools are failing, there’s nothing but garbage on television, kids aren’t reading as much literature, teenagers have become antisocial and only play on their smartphones, etc. But in 1980’s there was a man, James Flynn, who decided to start studying IQ tests over time. What he found is that in the last 100+ years there has been a dramatic increase in the average global IQ, stating that the overall gain is roughly 3 points every 10 years. During a Ted Talk that Flynn gave in 2013, he claimed that his studies showed that if you scored people a century ago against today’s norms, they’d have an IQ of 70, while if you score us against their norms, we’d have an average IQ of 130. Flynn says that we should be experiencing a “cultural renaissance too great to be overlooked” when explaining that the number of people who score high enough to be classified as “genius” has grown 20+ times in the last 100 years.

So, what’s the cause of all this? Are we just monumentally smarter than our great-grandparents? Were they all idiots? The answer is no to both of those.

Essentially, the theory goes that there are three types of thinking that current generations have developed more of an aptitude for that our ancestors had not; classification, using logic on abstractions, and taking the hypothetical seriously.

In 1910, schoolchildren, who generally did not go further than an elementary education, were widely tested on their knowledge of the capitals of the 46 states that were part of the U.S. at the time. Compare that to 1990 when kids were tested with questions such as “Why is the largest city in the state rarely the capital?” Over time there is a focus on abstract thought and problem solving as opposed to recitation of facts.

This same thing carries over into employment. In 1900 only about 3 percent of the population had careers that were “cognitively demanding.” This includes, lawyers, teachers, doctors, or any profession that requires deep thought into the hypothetical and abstract. Today, the number of people in professions that require such demands is over 35 percent. Its not just that more people are becoming professionals in those fields, but also that more professions are being created and upgraded as the generations go on.

In the past, people had what Flynn calls “utilitarian spectacles,” meaning that they looked that the world around them and saw how it could benefit them practically, with as little use of abstract thought as possible.

“What do dogs and rabbits have in common,” asked Russian phycologist Alexander Luria in 1920.

“Well dogs are used to catch rabbits,” one of his subjects would respond.

Ask the same question to someone in 2000 and the response was most likely “they are both mammals,” the answer that an IQ test would certainly be looking for. They would be using what Flynn calls “scientific spectacles.” The person in 1920 seemed resistant to classification or abstraction or deduction of hypotheticals, based on Luria’s findings, things that we take for granted every day.

Even though our culture may look stupider (get it? It's not a word), it's actually way more complex than the environment that our parents and grandparents were brought up in. To bring this into a less wordy and statistical dimension, and more of a practical dimension, think about McDonald's. In 1987, the menus used to say Burger and then the price. Today you have nutritional information and advertisements for the new Pixar or Marvel movie coming out. We may not realize the rise in complexity. In this ever-expanding, more-difficult-to-navigate culture, it’s easy for those brought up in it not to recognize the work that goes into our brains processing and decoding the information when we walk down the street or in a grocery store. Walking around “back in the day” there weren’t as many “things” that you had to decode. I’ll give an example that I heard from a podcast I frequently listen to. There was an Old Spice commercial that goes, “This is a commercial for soap, no I was wrong, this is a commercial for fruit, nope never mind this is a commercial for soap.” It plays on you understanding how fruit commercials and soap commercials are advertised, and the various clichés and tropes that go into branding those products, all while hoping that the viewer is able to recognize the humor. Or when you watch the Super Bowl and see the Hulk and Ant-Man in a race to get to the can of Coca Cola first, the advertisers are making that under the assumption that the audience knows who the Hulk and Ant-Man even are. Next time you watch a commercial, think about the intertextuality of it, the number of references to other brands, to movies, the things they assume you are to understand and then ask yourself, why do I understand that?

So I may not have adequately answered the question as to why IQ scores are going up because frankly, to do so would take a greater mind than the one I’ve got. Also, I have a deadline that I’m currently 2 and a half hours over so I’ll wrap this up. Why are we getting more intelligent, if that even is the case? The consensus seems to be, simply put, our environment. We’re surrounded by so much more “stuff” than those in the past. We were born into a culture that is governed by “categories, hypotheticals, nonverbal symbols and visual images that paint alternative realities,” as one article puts it. Yeah, sure, there is trash on TV, but that trash is more stuff to be known. I can watch South Park and laugh at a Paris Hilton Joke because I also know who Paris Hilton is.

Flynn predicts that the developing countries will industrialize and experience the same IQ gains as the already developed nations have experienced in the last 100 years. Time will only tell.

Now I don't really see this as a time for celebration or high-fives, there still is a lot wrong a lot of progress that should be made. Science fiction tells us that one day we’ll all be just energy in space, with an infinite intelligence of the universe. I’d like to think we can make it that far and who knows, maybe understanding the fine-tuned intertextuality of a Super Bowl commercial is a first step to getting there.