Are we slipping in our intellectual abilities? Have we lost the ability to read, reason, analyze, and more importantly pay attention?

Over the past decade we have seen a deluge of challenges – from Covid and its disruptive effect on education, to the rising use of screens and smart phones to the more recent threat from LLMs and an increasingly proficient set of AI tools that threaten to compete with and ultimately replace humans in almost every dimension. Each of these threats is nuanced and subjective, but we are starting to see patterns emerge in terms of the impact  on our attention span, and ability to think critically and absorb new information.

I’m delighted to welcome Carolina Pacheco-Punceles to the podcast. She is a Behavioral Economist, AI Survival Kit Creator, Executive Function Strategist and her Linked In bio states that she is Equipping Humans with the Skills to Think Clearly, Lead Wisely & Thrive in a Disrupted World.

We connected over linked In when responding to a post by Jonathan Haidt about the erosion of attention spans and the ability to pay attention, and shared experiences about how we could address this slide.

In this special two-part series we first look at some of the data and recent findings around the erosion of our attention spans and ability to reason and process complex data.

Part 2 then will set out various techniques that we have found to try to address this slide.

Here in part one we talk about the problem – and discuss this article from the Financial Times that triggered our discussion Have humans passed peak brain power? https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a13fc  We ask if intelligence is a capacity to understand and question why performance in reasoning and problem solving tests is declining.

We look at another article which reveals that the percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/opinion/education-smart-thinking-reading-tariffs.html?smid=li-share

Our discussion continues into the general slide in literacy in cognitive function and set up for Part 2, when we discuss some of the potential ways to address this.