Our lives on this planet have improved in so many amazing ways over the last century. On average, we are now healthier, more affluent and literate, less violent and longer living. Despite these unprecedented positive changes, clear signs exist that we are in the midst of an emerging crisis — one that has not yet been recognized in its full breadth, even though it lurks just beneath the surface of our casual conversations and swims in the undercurrents of our news feeds. This is not the well-known crisis that we’ve induced upon the earth’s climate, but one that is just as threatening to our future. This is a crisis of our minds. A cognition crisis.
A cognition crisis is not defined by a lack of information, knowledge or skills. We have done a fine job in accumulating those and passing them along across millennia. Rather, this a crisis at the core of what makes us human: the dynamic interplay between our brain and our environment — the ever-present cycle between how we perceive our surroundings, integrate this information, and act upon it.
This ancient perception-action cycle ensured our earliest survival by allowing our primordial predecessors to seek nutrients and avoid toxins. It is from these humble beginnings that the human brain evolved to pursue more diverse resources and elude more inventive threats. It is from here that human cognition emerged to support our success in an increasingly complex and competitive environment: attention, memory, perception, creativity, imagination, reasoning, decision making, emotion and aggression regulation, empathy, compassion, and wisdom. And it is here that our crisis exists.
Today, hundreds of millions of people around the world seek medical assistance for serious impairments in their cognition: major depressive disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addiction, dementia, and more. In the United States alone, depression affects 16.2 million adults, anxiety 18.7 million, and dementia 5.7 million — a number that is expected to nearly triple in the coming decades.
American teens have experienced a 33% increase in depressive symptoms, with 31% more having died by suicide between 2010 and 2015.
The immense personal, societal and economic impact of cognitive dysfunction warrants heightened consideration because the crisis is growing, not receding. Despite substantial investment in research and treatments by governments, foundations, and companies around the world, the prevalence and impact of these conditions are escalating. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of people worldwide with depression and anxiety increased by 18.4% and 14.9% respectively, while individuals with dementia exhibited a 93% increase over those same years.
To some degree, these trends reflect the overall growth and aging of the world’s population. This will only continue to increase in the future: the global population of seniors is predicted to swell to 1.5 billion by 2050. Although there are clear benefits to living longer, an unfortunate negative consequence is the burden it places on many aspects of cognition.
There are signs something else is going on, too. Over the last several decades, worrying tears have appeared in the cognitive fabric of our youth, notably in terms of emotional regulation and attentional deployment. American teens have experienced a 33% increase in depressive symptoms, with 31% more having died by suicide in 2015 than in 2010. ADHD diagnoses have also increased dramatically. While a growing awareness of these conditions — and with it, more frequent diagnoses — are likely factors, it does not seem this is the whole story; the magnitude of this escalation points to a deeper problem.
This has been better studied in the U.S. than abroad, but it is clear that this crisis is truly global, with the number of people suffering debilitating impairments in cognition exceeding half a billion worldwide, coupled with a financial toll in the trillions of dollars in lost productivity, healthcare costs and more.
[O]ur brains simply have not kept pace with the dramatic and rapid changes in our environment — specifically the introduction and ubiquity of information technology.
Even if an individual’s cognition problems do not result in a medical diagnosis, subclinical deficits in attention, emotional regulation and memory have been found to confer a real risk. Creative thinking and empathic concern also appear to be declining in children and teens. Even the so-called Flynn Effect, which refers to a world-wide increase in intelligence over the last century, now shows signs of stagnation — and sometimes reversal — in developed countries.
While the sources fracturing our cognition are many, we are faced with the realization that our brains simply have not kept pace with the rapid changes in our environment — specifically the introduction and ubiquity of information technology. At our core, we humans are inherently information-seeking creatures. As a result, a profound shift in the flow of information will inevitably have major effects; and as we have come to see, many of these are negative.