The Cognitive Crossroads: Gen Z and the Reversal of the Flynn Effect

For over a century, each new generation scored higher on IQ and cognitive tests than the one before it. This is a reliable, reassuring climb known as the Flynn Effect, named after researcher James Flynn, who documented steady gains of roughly three IQ points per decade across the developed world. This trend has now stalled, and in many countries, reversed. Recent analyses from multiple countries indicate that this long-standing upward trend in IQ scores has plateaued and, in some cases, shifted downward among younger populations, especially those born after the late 1990s (known as Generation Z). This moment not merely statistically interesting, but urgently important.

What the Research Actually Shows

Compulsory military IQ tests from Finland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Australia all show a decline beginning in the mid-1990s. This is not a quirk of one nation's education system, rather, it is a pattern. Researchers highlight declines particularly in reading comprehension, sustained attention, mathematical reasoning and memory performance. Critically, a 2018 study by Norwegian researchers Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg revealed that even siblings from the same families showed significant score differences, challenging the assumption that the decline is genetic in origin. In other words, the cause, is environmental. However, this also means that it is potentially reversible.

Why is this Happening?

Several converging forces are likely responsible.

The screen ecosystem. Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath and other researchers argue that educational environments increasingly centred on screens, condensed information and short video formats may influence cognitive development. Chronic exposure to algorithmically curated, fast-moving content trains the brain for speed and novelty-seeking. This is the very opposite of the sustained, effortful reasoning that IQ tests and real-world problem-solving demand.

Cognitive outsourcing. AI tools and search engines now handle tasks that previously exercised and strengthened the brain. Such tasks include mental arithmetic, spelling, navigating unfamiliar places and recalling facts. While convenient, this outsourcing may quietly atrophy core cognitive skills through disuse.

Shifts in what we reward cognitively. A 2024 cohort study at the University of Vienna found that while scores have continued to rise in some cases, the overall coherence between different cognitive abilities has weakened. This suggests that while people may still improve in specific domains, those improvements are less likely to overlap with gains in other areas of intelligence. Modern environments increasingly reward specialisation over broad cognitive flexibility, and our children's brains are adapting accordingly.

Declining engagement with cognitively demanding activities. Long-form reading, essay writing, complex manual tasks and face-to-face debate have all declined among young people. These are precisely the activities that build and sustain higher-order thinking.

Is this Necessarily a Bad Thing?

Some researchers urge caution before sounding the alarm. IQ tests, after all, are imperfect instruments as they measure a particular kind of abstract, formalised reasoning that was itself shaped by 20th-century industrial and academic priorities. When IQ tests were first administered in the early 20th century, test-takers used a broader range of cognitive skills, but as IQ testing evolved to emphasise abstract categorisation and formal reasoning, children adapted to that narrower cognitive framework. Perhaps what we are witnessing is not a broad decline in human intelligence, but a reorientation of it.

There is also evidence that certain cognitive skills, particularly visual-spatial reasoning and digital literacy, have continued to improve among younger generations. Gen Z navigates complexity, processes enormous volumes of information and demonstrates sophisticated social and emotional awareness in ways that older metrics fail to capture.

However, the specific capacities that are declining are not peripheral ones. This is of great concern. Reading comprehension, sustained attention and mathematical reasoning are foundational to democratic participation, economic productivity, scientific progress and personal autonomy. A society that struggles with these is more vulnerable to misinformation, more dependent on technological intermediaries and less equipped to solve the civilisational challenges ahead. This trend is not neutral. It matters.

Can We Reverse it, and Should We Try?

Yes, and emphatically yes. The decline's environmental cause offers hope: what environments destroy, they can also repair.  Here is what the suggested evidence works:

Protect deep reading. Schools and families must champion long-form books, not just articles or summaries. The act of sustaining attention across a 300-page narrative is one of the most powerful cognitive workouts available to a developing mind.

Reintroduce productive struggle. Children who are never permitted to be confused, bored or cognitively challenged are robbed of the experiences that build mental resilience and fluid intelligence. Delay gratification in the classroom.

Redesign screen time intentionally. Not all screen time is equal. Interactive, creative and problem-solving uses of technology are very different from passive consumption. Parents and policymakers must draw these distinctions and act on them. This includes supporting legislation that limits manipulative and attention-hijacking design in apps directed at minors.

Restore physical play and nature exposure. Unstructured play, i.e. building, exploring and negotiating, develops executive function and spatial reasoning in ways no app has yet replicated.

Invest in early childhood nutrition and sleep. The biological substrate of intelligence is the brain, and the brain is built in the first years of life. Nutritional deficiencies and chronic sleep deprivation during development have measurable and lasting negative impacts on cognitive capacity.

Conclusion

The reversal of the Flynn Effect is not a verdict on Generation Z, but rather a verdict on the environments we have built for them. These are young people navigating an unprecedented informational landscape, often without adult guidance sufficient to that complexity. They did not choose the attention economy; we handed it to them.

The cognitive decline we are observing is real. It is consequential, and it is also reversible. However, reversing it requires honesty by acknowledging what screens are doing to developing minds, about what we have sacrificed at the altar of convenience and about our collective responsibility to the next generation's inner life. The Flynn Effect rose because we made deliberate investments in nutrition, education and human flourishing. We can make these investments again. The question is whether we will choose to.

How Mentalmatics Can Help

Reversing cognitive decline starts with early, intentional training, and this is precisely what we offer. Through abacus-based mental arithmetic, children learn to visualise the movement of beads in their minds, building number sense, sustained attention and higher mathematical reasoning, which are the very skills research show have been declining. By engaging the brain's right hemisphere during its most plastic years, Mentalmatics equips children with strong arithmetic foundations that prepare them for the rigours of formal education and beyond. Starting early is the key.

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