Tags: social-media thinking
Is Social Media Affecting Fluid Thinking?
I'm watching a teenager in a café. His thumb flicks every twenty seconds—Instagram, TikTok, Messages, repeat. His coffee cools untouched. Facebook opened to the public in September 2006. That same year, cognitive researchers began documenting something strange: consistent declines in verbal reasoning, matrix reasoning, and computational skills. After a century of rising test scores, the trend reversed. The coincidence keeps returning to my mind.
Two Types of Thinking
You have two different kinds of intelligence. Crystallized intelligence is what you've accumulated—vocabulary, facts, procedures. It's your library. Fluid intelligence is raw cognitive horsepower: solving novel problems, spotting unfamiliar patterns, reasoning without a template. One is knowledge; the other is the ability to think in genuinely new ways.
How Social Media Damages Fluid Thinking
Fluid intelligence controls executive function—planning, decision-making, impulse control. Twenty minutes of social media reduces prefrontal cortex power by 22%. The constant task-switching trains your attention for fragmentation. Users averaging 3+ hours daily show shorter attention spans and degraded memory. Your brain exhibits delayed recovery, neurological exhaustion.
Why This Matters
The numbers are specific. American scores dropped in logic, vocabulary, and visual problem-solving between 2006 and 2018. German research found fluid reasoning declining 4.68–5.17 IQ points per decade from 2012–2022. This isn't just America.
Fluid intelligence declines naturally with age, but remains crucial for innovation and problem-solving. When environmental factors erode it during developmental years—when adolescents spend 21+ hours weekly online—the consequences ripple through education, careers, and society's capacity to think originally.
We may have traded cognitive depth for connection breadth. The question is whether we understand what we've given up.
references
- https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Facebook
- https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-iq-scores-decline-reverse-flynn-effect/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289623000156
- https://pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
- https://www.simplypsychology.org/fluid-crystallized-intelligence.html
- https://www.verywellmind.com/fluid-intelligence-vs-crystallized-intelligence-2795004
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence
- https://www.hipeople.io/glossary/fluid-reasoning
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10816863/
- https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/12/1/9/pdf?version=1705480513
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6042097/
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12539155/
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3890570/
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12329480/
- https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=143508
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5081064/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278262606000431
- https://bmjpaedsopen.bmj.com/lookup/doi/10.1136/bmjpo-2023-002093
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9838706/