(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists have confirmed what many who watch television have long suspected: the human brain is getting smaller.
J.M. Stibel, a brain scientist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and author of a study published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Evolution, argues that the size of the human brain has shrunk dramatically over the past 50,000 years . In fact, the study found that the brain size of modern homosapiens has decreased by more than five percent.
Stibel also found evidence that the size of the brain relative to our body – known as encephalization – has also decreased, mainly due to obesity.
It should be noted that Stibel used IQ as a measure of intelligence. This indicator has a long and dirty history as a tool used to disenfranchise marginalized communities, and is also widely criticized for bringing together different types of intelligence into one oversimplified metric. However, it is still considered the standard benchmark for assessing cognitive performance .
Significantly, Stibel points out that ” over the past 30 years, many regions of the world have experienced significant declines in IQ, with the largest declines occurring in industrialized countries .”
This means that environmental factors may not help improve or maintain our intelligence in the long term.
Thus, the world from “Idiocracy” can become a reality in the future – that is, if it has not already become so.
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