Is your smart phone making you dumb?

REMEMBER the olden days when you had to use maps to get around, and finding out information might involve trips to the library?

It was pretty tedious, but I can’t help feeling that when we ditched that world we also lost something: we stopped using critical parts of our brains — and that matters.

Next month, A-level, GCSE and degree results will be published, and it’s highly likely they will be very good.

And yet average IQs have been falling since the 1970s. That’s the conclusion of several studies, including one in Norway that looked at the IQ tests taken by 730,000 men between 1970 and 2009 — those born in 1991 scored nearly five points lower than those born in 1975.

Researchers call this ‘the reverse Flynn effect’ — the Flynn effect refers to the way people worldwide had done

better on IQ tests, by an average of around three points per decade, from the 1940s.

Possible explanations for this include the fact that in the decades immediately after World War II, children’s diets became more nutritious, they spent more time in school, and thanks to vaccines, they were less vulnerable to infectious diseases such as measles that can affect brain development. Now, however, average IQ scores, in some western countries at least, are falling almost as fast as they once rose. The researchers in Norway think this is down to children’s diets getting worse (with increasing amounts of junk food) and the rise of the internet and smart phones and other technology, which means they don’t have to use their brains in the same way previous generations did. If true, it’s obviously very worrying. Smart phones are brilliant bits of technology, but do put them aside when you can and ensure your kids do, too.