Are we getting dumber?

 Do you ever feel like your cellphone or computer are smarter than you?

Well here’s a news flash: It’s true.

Our technology may be getting smarter, but human beings, not so much. So says The Huffington Post, which last week cited a study out of the University of Amsterdam that found Westerners have lost 14 intelligence quotient or IQ points on average since the Victorian Era.

At first glance I found this hard to believe.

My stereotype of Victorian women kicked in, women strapped into corsets and long billowing dresses, dutifully pleasing their husbands without the right to vote or own property. Certainly both men and women of today, who have access to all kinds of educational opportunities, are smarter than their Victorian Era counterparts.

A Dutch professor pointed to the fact that women with high IQs tend to have fewer children than women of lesser intelligence. But this apparently isn’t the only reason we’re losing our intellectual acumen.

A Stanford University professor told The Huffington Post he believes a reduction in human intelligence may have started “at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed.” This may have begun as our ancestors started to live in cities and had access to a steady food supply.

The Dutch study analyzed the results of 14 separate intelligence studies done between 1884 and 2004 to get to the bottom of why we’re getting dumber. Each study looked at participants’ visual reaction times — how long it took them to punch a button once they saw a stimulus.

“Reaction time reflects a person’s mental processing speed and so is considered an indication of general intelligence,” the online article noted.

In the late 1800s, visual reaction times averaged 194 milliseconds, but by 2004 that time had increased to 275 milliseconds. Who knows how much more sluggish our reflexes are almost a decade later?

This finding contradicts the Flynn Effect, other research that suggests people have been getting smarter since about the 1930s. However, the Dutch professor believes the Flynn Effect is influenced by environmental factors such as better nutrition, access to education and so on, and that “may mask the true decline in genetically inherited intelligence in the Western world,” the article notes.

It will be interesting to follow this kind of research in the coming years, as computers do more and more of the heavy lifting for us. Doing arithmetic without the aid of a calculator is a thing of the past; handwriting has given way to texting and research is as easy as the click of a mouse. Even memorization has become archaic in most cases. The “dumbing down” of society is well upon us.

We’ve always looked into the universe and wondered if there’s intelligent life out there somewhere. Perhaps the time has come for us to ask ourselves that very question.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.