We pride ourselves on our mental acuity and wisdom. We flaunt it, for example, and we judge others on our perception of their intelligence. Take Congresswoman AOC as an example of one who haughtily judges another’s brain power. She declared Elon Musk to be a dumb billionaire, the dumbest she knows…er…the dumbest “I know about.” That stuff about electric cars and rockets that return to be captured by gantry arms aside, sure, wouldn’t we all agree that he is dumber than a woman who conned an entire party into voting for a Green New Deal that could cost a trillion bucks with no guarantee of its changing world temperatures by a fraction of a degree while burdening the US economy? Yes, we can certainly judge one another on our supposed intelligence, on our “brain power.” AOC off-the-charts-wise; Elon Musk not-even-on-the-chart of intelligence according to AOC.
If you are just a fraction as smart as AOC, then you might be concerned about humans having reached the peak of brain power. What we’ve become is in decline apparently. You’re doomed to sit on that stool in the corner, wearing a dunce cap and staring at a wall.
Is It a Plateau or a Slippery Slope?
Thus the question posed in Financial Times by John Burn-Murdoch: “Have humans passed peak brain power?” Whatever that means to you, Burn-Murdoch writes that we are looking at a decline “in human capacity for mental focus and application.” * Seems those 250,000 years of human evolution we shared with other human species have come to a halt. Never mind that you can drive, turn on the turn signal, look for oncoming traffic, and listen to the radio while at the same time glancing at our coffee cup in the cup holder. We’ve peaked; you’ve peaked. The reserves are gone. We ain’t goin’ no further. Our days of rising mental abilities are over, so we might as well just give in to AI and to the AOCs to call us out for our mental decline. It’s apparently all down hill from here for the rest of us if the genius behind SpaceX is “dumb.”
Evidence
Is there any evidence that we are a species in mental decline? Well, take the story of Michael Garcia, the recipient of a $50 million lawsuit against Starbucks. * Poor guy—or maybe world’s smartest guy. Michael picked up an order of hot coffee from Starbucks and spilled it into his lap. Shades of 1994! Reminiscent of the coffee burns suffered by Stella Liebeck at MacDonald’s and her subsequent award of $3 million. What’s a bit of scalding if the payoff is so good?
So, how stupid are we? Depends on how we judge, or rather on what we base our judgments. Obviously, from the perspective of history, we haven’t learned the lesson that hot coffee is…hot. That lesson could have been learned by anyone who knew of Lieback’s incident and the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer suffers a similar hot coffee scalding after hiding the coffee in his pants to sneak it into a theater. Dumb or smart? Dumb, I suppose, if there’s no multimillion dollar restitution awarded by some jury with a mind to punish a corporation for the action of a kid in an apron standing at a drive-thru window. But what of the jury’s smarts? $50 million!?!?!? How do 12 people come to that conclusion?
In 1994 Liebeck’s $3 million award was over the top, but a jury’s collective brain just awarded $50 million for an action that was just as much the fault of the plaintiff as it was of the barista who failed to put the lid on tightly. The size of the award begs the question asked by Burn-Murdoch. Tell me now, do you hold hot coffee over your lap while driving? Do you even care how you handle hot coffee handed to you at the drive-thru? How do you not handle hot coffee with care? Humpf. There! Point proven. Brain capacity in decline. Humans incapable of understanding and focusing. Decline in application of intellect for sure. (If you do hold hot coffee over your lap, by the way, sit in on that stool in the corner and stare at the wall)
“No joke,” as former President Biden is wont to say before drifting off into…zzzzz or to some totally unrelated topic. Speaking of mental decline…
I suppose the annual Darwin Awards are further evidence of a downward trend in application. If not in focus. We all do dumb things, but some actions are dumber than others, resulting in serious injury or death. The number of annual Darwin awards seems to be proportional to or indicative of the decline in brain power.
But Is It Failure to Think or Failure to Learn?
Maybe, however, in wishful thinking, I might say that it isn’t reaching a plateau or starting a decline in brain power that characterizes us. Instead, our failure to learn lessons already taught makes us seem less focused. Is there a universal ADHD or universal ignorance? A crowd of college students imbibing on a narrow and insufficiently supported college house balcony is a crowd destined to learn something about architecture and gravity the hard way. Teens train- or car-surfing exhibit the same folly. The tragedies associated with spring breakers who go off to dangerous lands or take foolish risks with alcohol, precipices, or oceans are examples that never seem to get passed on to the next freshman class. “Here, Pledge, guzzle this entire bottle of cheap whiskey if you want to belong to this fraternity.” Glug, glug, glug. Alas, I preach to the choir because you made it through life’s perils self-imposed or placed into your path by accident or design.
Consider those self-imposed tragedies associated with taking Selfies that seem numerous: Marianka Swain of The Telegraph reports that up to 480 people lost their lives while they took pictures of themselves on precipices or next to dangerous animals. * Here’s a story someone told me. (Anecdote alert, dive, dive, dive). At a beautiful resort in Orlando where I recently visited friends, alligators inhabit two small lakes on the property. A fellow I chanced upon said that last year a woman went down to the water’s edge to take a series of Selfies with the alligators. Walking up the bank, she greeted her husband by saying, “They look so real.” She thought they were some type of Disney animatronic devices. How does one reach adulthood without knowing that real alligators live in Florida?
Maybe a Decline in Critical Thinking Characterizes Modern Americans: Case in Point
Not much research is necessary to discover that many reporters are so steeped in fashionable narratives that they write articles simply to validate their confirmations. Cases in point: In no reporting is this more evident than in reports on weather events and natural disasters like those recent tragic California fires. Inevitably, the news stories turn to a single topic. Tornado outbreak? Climate change. Snowstorm? Climate change. Heat wave? Climate change. Floods? Climate change. Drought? Climate change. Earthquakes? Climate change. Asteroids? Climate change. Migration? Climate change. War? You guessed it, climate change. Trump? Climate change. Sunrise?…
Reporters rarely question the premises behind their slanted stories because of bias, ignorance, or pressure to conform. And over the past nine years the premise that Trump is evil, an assumption generated by widespread liberal TDS, has governed the brains of political reporters.
Take the serious matter of the tragic destruction and deaths by wind storms and tornadoes on March 15, 2025. US News poses this: “DOGE sackings at NOAA spark new warning over tornado response as 34 killed in twisters.” It is, of course, possible that some people died because even with preparation they could not protect themselves from the violence of those storms. It is possible that the messages on TV, the Web, and radio of impending storms didn’t reach the ears of those in the zones of jeopardy. It is possible that travelers with car windows up couldn’t hear the sirens that blast warnings in the South or possible that many rural areas have no sirens to sound a tornado alarm. Sure, all that is possible. But the DOGE firings would have had no effect on the Weather Channel, on YouTube meteorologists, or on local weather forecasters. Reporters seem to fall in lock step with all those opposed to DOGE.
Are politicians the least thoughtful? Those Los Angeles fires prompted uncontested comments to the Press like the following: "And what has happened is that climate change has dried out our foliage, our flora. And coupled with these massive winds, these 50 to 100 miles an hour winds that happen every year around this time, a little ember can turn into a massive fire," Rep. Dave Min, D-Calif told NewsNations “The Hill.” And Bernie Sanders said, “"The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not 'a hoax.' Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is.” *** Reporters seemed to ask no followup questions, such as, “Representative Min, “Didn’t you just say ‘that happen every year’?” Or, “Are you aware that circulation around seasonal High and Low pressure systems and downslope winds are common on every planet with an atmosphere?” “Do poor forest management and emplacement of a dense population in wooded areas have anything to do with the destruction?”
Do we even need reporters? People could just make whatever comments they like to an old fashioned tape recorder that cannot question the input. Reporters are like computers; bad information in, bad information out, no filter, no questions asked. Let the prevailing assumptions and past reporting dictate the news.
Die Emotionen über Alles
In taking pride in our intellect we exhibit our penchant for anti-intellectualism. Seemingly more driven by emotions than by reason, we allow politics to restrict our brains. And this is most evident in liberal news media that cannot tolerate those whom they once favored, Trump and Musk—or any former Democrat turned Republican. “A pox on them!” Hatred clouds reason because all emotions cloud reason. And so does political power supported by unending funding.
A decline in brain power is not responsible for our hypocritical behavior. Political agendas, power, and greed make us hypocrites. Every bureaucracy favors its inertia over reasoned analysis because, once established, it wields power and garners cash. Thus the head of the teachers’ union can decry cuts to the Department of Education while forgetting that her union shut down schools for a year for a virus that did not pose an existential threat any more serious than the yearly flu to the young. After DOGE cuts, the AFT head Randi Weingarten voiced outrage over “depriving” children of their education, education, I might add, that has not translated into achievement. The government employees who abandoned offices for home in 2020 say the call-back to the office is unfair and unreasonable. The agencies that spend money on empty buildings cry “foul” when DOGE says the rent money is wasted.
The premise of Burn-Murdoch is that the plateau in brain power is new. A perusal of ancient, medieval, and modern literature indicates it isn’t. We’ve been on the plateau almost from the time we separated from other human species. Take technological advances out of the discussion; few of us can say we’ve invented the cars we drive or airplanes we fly. I know I might never have discovered that the black rock we call coal burns or that petroleum could be divided into different hydrocarbon substances. I merely turn on the propane fireplaces, the car, or the lawnmower. A difference between modern and ancient brain peaks and plateaus lies in the intensity of sameness infused by modern communications and education manipulated by those with an agenda and social homogenization. Put out some word on FaceBook or X and reach millions of inner brains critical of that which differs and uncritical of that which conforms.
Maybe what Burn-Murdoch should have written was an article not on focus and application, but rather on sloth, on humans too lazy to exert the little brain power they have left. And I’m as guilty as the next. Some 100 billion humans have left a complex legacy; today’s eight billion of us mostly mimic that legacy. There really isn’t much new under the sun. Sameness is easier than invention, analysis, and inquiry.
As usual, I apologize for any rambling and add that if any thought in the above stimulates an insight on your part, then I’ve done what I set out to do, to inspire your thinking. And maybe in the context of this topic, to keep you on that mental peak Burn-Murdoch says we’ve reached.
*Feb 3, 2025. The ‘ultimate selfie’ has claimed up to 480 lives – yet the craze shows no signs of ending
** Ramishah Maruf, CNN Starbucks ordered to pay $50 million to delivery driver burned by hot beverage. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/14/business/starbucks-hot-coffee-driver-verdict/index.html
***https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dems-blame-fire-climate-change-despite-cutting-fire-department-budget
If you are just a fraction as smart as AOC, then you might be concerned about humans having reached the peak of brain power. What we’ve become is in decline apparently. You’re doomed to sit on that stool in the corner, wearing a dunce cap and staring at a wall.
Is It a Plateau or a Slippery Slope?
Thus the question posed in Financial Times by John Burn-Murdoch: “Have humans passed peak brain power?” Whatever that means to you, Burn-Murdoch writes that we are looking at a decline “in human capacity for mental focus and application.” * Seems those 250,000 years of human evolution we shared with other human species have come to a halt. Never mind that you can drive, turn on the turn signal, look for oncoming traffic, and listen to the radio while at the same time glancing at our coffee cup in the cup holder. We’ve peaked; you’ve peaked. The reserves are gone. We ain’t goin’ no further. Our days of rising mental abilities are over, so we might as well just give in to AI and to the AOCs to call us out for our mental decline. It’s apparently all down hill from here for the rest of us if the genius behind SpaceX is “dumb.”
Evidence
Is there any evidence that we are a species in mental decline? Well, take the story of Michael Garcia, the recipient of a $50 million lawsuit against Starbucks. * Poor guy—or maybe world’s smartest guy. Michael picked up an order of hot coffee from Starbucks and spilled it into his lap. Shades of 1994! Reminiscent of the coffee burns suffered by Stella Liebeck at MacDonald’s and her subsequent award of $3 million. What’s a bit of scalding if the payoff is so good?
So, how stupid are we? Depends on how we judge, or rather on what we base our judgments. Obviously, from the perspective of history, we haven’t learned the lesson that hot coffee is…hot. That lesson could have been learned by anyone who knew of Lieback’s incident and the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer suffers a similar hot coffee scalding after hiding the coffee in his pants to sneak it into a theater. Dumb or smart? Dumb, I suppose, if there’s no multimillion dollar restitution awarded by some jury with a mind to punish a corporation for the action of a kid in an apron standing at a drive-thru window. But what of the jury’s smarts? $50 million!?!?!? How do 12 people come to that conclusion?
In 1994 Liebeck’s $3 million award was over the top, but a jury’s collective brain just awarded $50 million for an action that was just as much the fault of the plaintiff as it was of the barista who failed to put the lid on tightly. The size of the award begs the question asked by Burn-Murdoch. Tell me now, do you hold hot coffee over your lap while driving? Do you even care how you handle hot coffee handed to you at the drive-thru? How do you not handle hot coffee with care? Humpf. There! Point proven. Brain capacity in decline. Humans incapable of understanding and focusing. Decline in application of intellect for sure. (If you do hold hot coffee over your lap, by the way, sit in on that stool in the corner and stare at the wall)
“No joke,” as former President Biden is wont to say before drifting off into…zzzzz or to some totally unrelated topic. Speaking of mental decline…
I suppose the annual Darwin Awards are further evidence of a downward trend in application. If not in focus. We all do dumb things, but some actions are dumber than others, resulting in serious injury or death. The number of annual Darwin awards seems to be proportional to or indicative of the decline in brain power.
But Is It Failure to Think or Failure to Learn?
Maybe, however, in wishful thinking, I might say that it isn’t reaching a plateau or starting a decline in brain power that characterizes us. Instead, our failure to learn lessons already taught makes us seem less focused. Is there a universal ADHD or universal ignorance? A crowd of college students imbibing on a narrow and insufficiently supported college house balcony is a crowd destined to learn something about architecture and gravity the hard way. Teens train- or car-surfing exhibit the same folly. The tragedies associated with spring breakers who go off to dangerous lands or take foolish risks with alcohol, precipices, or oceans are examples that never seem to get passed on to the next freshman class. “Here, Pledge, guzzle this entire bottle of cheap whiskey if you want to belong to this fraternity.” Glug, glug, glug. Alas, I preach to the choir because you made it through life’s perils self-imposed or placed into your path by accident or design.
Consider those self-imposed tragedies associated with taking Selfies that seem numerous: Marianka Swain of The Telegraph reports that up to 480 people lost their lives while they took pictures of themselves on precipices or next to dangerous animals. * Here’s a story someone told me. (Anecdote alert, dive, dive, dive). At a beautiful resort in Orlando where I recently visited friends, alligators inhabit two small lakes on the property. A fellow I chanced upon said that last year a woman went down to the water’s edge to take a series of Selfies with the alligators. Walking up the bank, she greeted her husband by saying, “They look so real.” She thought they were some type of Disney animatronic devices. How does one reach adulthood without knowing that real alligators live in Florida?
Maybe a Decline in Critical Thinking Characterizes Modern Americans: Case in Point
Not much research is necessary to discover that many reporters are so steeped in fashionable narratives that they write articles simply to validate their confirmations. Cases in point: In no reporting is this more evident than in reports on weather events and natural disasters like those recent tragic California fires. Inevitably, the news stories turn to a single topic. Tornado outbreak? Climate change. Snowstorm? Climate change. Heat wave? Climate change. Floods? Climate change. Drought? Climate change. Earthquakes? Climate change. Asteroids? Climate change. Migration? Climate change. War? You guessed it, climate change. Trump? Climate change. Sunrise?…
Reporters rarely question the premises behind their slanted stories because of bias, ignorance, or pressure to conform. And over the past nine years the premise that Trump is evil, an assumption generated by widespread liberal TDS, has governed the brains of political reporters.
Take the serious matter of the tragic destruction and deaths by wind storms and tornadoes on March 15, 2025. US News poses this: “DOGE sackings at NOAA spark new warning over tornado response as 34 killed in twisters.” It is, of course, possible that some people died because even with preparation they could not protect themselves from the violence of those storms. It is possible that the messages on TV, the Web, and radio of impending storms didn’t reach the ears of those in the zones of jeopardy. It is possible that travelers with car windows up couldn’t hear the sirens that blast warnings in the South or possible that many rural areas have no sirens to sound a tornado alarm. Sure, all that is possible. But the DOGE firings would have had no effect on the Weather Channel, on YouTube meteorologists, or on local weather forecasters. Reporters seem to fall in lock step with all those opposed to DOGE.
Are politicians the least thoughtful? Those Los Angeles fires prompted uncontested comments to the Press like the following: "And what has happened is that climate change has dried out our foliage, our flora. And coupled with these massive winds, these 50 to 100 miles an hour winds that happen every year around this time, a little ember can turn into a massive fire," Rep. Dave Min, D-Calif told NewsNations “The Hill.” And Bernie Sanders said, “"The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not 'a hoax.' Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is.” *** Reporters seemed to ask no followup questions, such as, “Representative Min, “Didn’t you just say ‘that happen every year’?” Or, “Are you aware that circulation around seasonal High and Low pressure systems and downslope winds are common on every planet with an atmosphere?” “Do poor forest management and emplacement of a dense population in wooded areas have anything to do with the destruction?”
Do we even need reporters? People could just make whatever comments they like to an old fashioned tape recorder that cannot question the input. Reporters are like computers; bad information in, bad information out, no filter, no questions asked. Let the prevailing assumptions and past reporting dictate the news.
Die Emotionen über Alles
In taking pride in our intellect we exhibit our penchant for anti-intellectualism. Seemingly more driven by emotions than by reason, we allow politics to restrict our brains. And this is most evident in liberal news media that cannot tolerate those whom they once favored, Trump and Musk—or any former Democrat turned Republican. “A pox on them!” Hatred clouds reason because all emotions cloud reason. And so does political power supported by unending funding.
A decline in brain power is not responsible for our hypocritical behavior. Political agendas, power, and greed make us hypocrites. Every bureaucracy favors its inertia over reasoned analysis because, once established, it wields power and garners cash. Thus the head of the teachers’ union can decry cuts to the Department of Education while forgetting that her union shut down schools for a year for a virus that did not pose an existential threat any more serious than the yearly flu to the young. After DOGE cuts, the AFT head Randi Weingarten voiced outrage over “depriving” children of their education, education, I might add, that has not translated into achievement. The government employees who abandoned offices for home in 2020 say the call-back to the office is unfair and unreasonable. The agencies that spend money on empty buildings cry “foul” when DOGE says the rent money is wasted.
The premise of Burn-Murdoch is that the plateau in brain power is new. A perusal of ancient, medieval, and modern literature indicates it isn’t. We’ve been on the plateau almost from the time we separated from other human species. Take technological advances out of the discussion; few of us can say we’ve invented the cars we drive or airplanes we fly. I know I might never have discovered that the black rock we call coal burns or that petroleum could be divided into different hydrocarbon substances. I merely turn on the propane fireplaces, the car, or the lawnmower. A difference between modern and ancient brain peaks and plateaus lies in the intensity of sameness infused by modern communications and education manipulated by those with an agenda and social homogenization. Put out some word on FaceBook or X and reach millions of inner brains critical of that which differs and uncritical of that which conforms.
Maybe what Burn-Murdoch should have written was an article not on focus and application, but rather on sloth, on humans too lazy to exert the little brain power they have left. And I’m as guilty as the next. Some 100 billion humans have left a complex legacy; today’s eight billion of us mostly mimic that legacy. There really isn’t much new under the sun. Sameness is easier than invention, analysis, and inquiry.
As usual, I apologize for any rambling and add that if any thought in the above stimulates an insight on your part, then I’ve done what I set out to do, to inspire your thinking. And maybe in the context of this topic, to keep you on that mental peak Burn-Murdoch says we’ve reached.
*Feb 3, 2025. The ‘ultimate selfie’ has claimed up to 480 lives – yet the craze shows no signs of ending
** Ramishah Maruf, CNN Starbucks ordered to pay $50 million to delivery driver burned by hot beverage. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/14/business/starbucks-hot-coffee-driver-verdict/index.html
***https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dems-blame-fire-climate-change-despite-cutting-fire-department-budget
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