The world is ever-changing, and politics are along with it. These things are given; however, am I the only one who thinks that people are just getting dumber? It was a general feeling I had, and I wondered after it and chased it down.

Gathered first from the New England Journal of Medicine’s editorial, “Long Covid and Impaired Cognition — More Evidence and More Work to Do,” by Ziyad Al-Aly and Clifford J. Rosen:

Apparently, COVID-19 did more than just take away some people's sense of smell. The U.S. Current Population Survey reported that over a million working-age U.S. citizens reported they had, “serious difficulty remembering, making decisions, or concentrating,” more than any other time in the previous fifteen years.

In one such a study, Imperial College London found people suffered a permanent three point IQ loss for mild and resolved Covid, and if symptoms persisted longer than twelve weeks a person with COVID lost six points of IQ, but if Covid brought you to the Intensive Care Unit, then nine points of IQ loss was detected.

Now, IQ, or “Intelligence Quotient,” does not register how well your imagination works, or your personality. It is however a test of “General Intelligence,” graded in part on how fast a person can take in and use information, how much information can be taken in and manipulated, solving new and complex problems without any prior teaching or reasoning, solving visual and spatial problems, and reasoning in and with language.

Published in the Journal ‘Neuroscience,’ the article: “The Relationship Between General Intelligence and Cortical Structure in Healthy Individuals,” (by researchers Sahil Bajaj, Adam Raikes, and five others), this study showed a strong prediction between the thickness of the Cortical Structures of the brain and IQ.

The scientificamerican.com reports that each additional IQ point adds somewhere between $234 and $616 a year to someone's income. There are many other studies that also speak to the higher your IQ, the more likely you are to stay healthy. That may just be because a person was more successful at getting a raise, and thus can afford more and better doctor visits.

Those IQ losses happened from direct damage to the brains of people infected by COVID, and because of that damage, neurons have been found fused together; the damage is likely permanent.

A MIT study, published under the title: “Your brain on ChatGPT,” consisted of researchers like Nataliya Kosmyna and several others who found that people who use ChatGPT to help them write or form sentences or construct wordage — at all — showed lower neural engagement, lower memory recall, more metacognitive laziness, and reduced creativity.

“Doomscrolling and the Student Brain," a 2024 study which showed that college students who scrolled down Reddit, or Facebook, and/or any other such site showed reduced academic engagement, performance, engagement, and even working memory. Harvard Health showed that doomscrolling led to cognitive fatigue and attention disruption.

Tulsi Gabbard revealed at a news conference that she input the classified JFK files into an AI machine program to aid her in choosing what to declassify… except that she publicly revealed over 400 social security numbers of living (previous or current) government employees, as well as their birthdays and full names.

In rebuke of her choice, in a 1979 IBM training manual, it read:

“A computer can never be held accountable; therefore, it must never make a management decision.”

So was it Tulsi Gabbard who made the decision to reveal people's most protected and personal information? Or the computer she chose?

And — was that choice due to general negligence, that which seems to be rising in the government (Signal Gate, etc)? Or is it due to people having gotten sick in the head? First, from the lack of exercise, the lifestyles of the West have been promoted for years (see: the historic rates of morbid obesity). Exercise is needed for a healthy cardiovascular system, and a healthy mind first, before all else.

Then, after the lack of exercise the West had been “generating" for decades, social media like Facebook or Twitter came along, and drew people to doomscroll. Next, COVID came and hit generally everyone with a little (three points) to a massive nine points of IQ damage. It’s not like it ended there, of course. The advent of the A.I. is upon us, and it has been trained on all the great works and writings and songs of the past made by the brightest minds humanity has ever generated, and with a click of the button, those ancient or recent and noble works which were stolen can be yours, formatted in any way that you like. 

Are people dumber? Maybe. Just take a look at the choices made by others around you. I hope we can turn the proverbial ship around: to encourage exercise, to disparage social media, and doomscrolling. To use A.I. for research and scientific purposes only – not art, not thinking or decision making in any capacity, and, hopefully, for some miracle drug to undo the damage that COVID did to society.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

Opinions expressed by columnists in The Daily Record are not necessarily those of its management or staff, and do not constitute an endorsement or recommendation. Any errors or omissions should be called to our attention so that they may be corrected. Contact us at news@omahadailyrecord.com.