Fast Food for the Mind

The Dumbing Down of our Content Diet

I’m going to write today about the content we consume, and what that content consumption is doing to us. But before I start talking about content, let’s talk about something else we consume. Let’s talk about food.

When we consume food, we experience its taste and we benefit from its nutritional value. Taste determines whether we enjoy the experience of eating the food. Nutritional value determines what benefit we gain from eating the food. Taste is subjective and varies from person to person, but nutrition is universal and objective. Those of us who don’t like eat our broccoli might argue that there is an negative correlation between taste and nutrition – others like the taste of healthy food. At a minimum, we can agree that food can be tasty without being nutritious, and vice versa.

Now, at one time, the American diet consisted primarily of nutritious food. But as food production became market-driven, food companies found that making food tastier was cheaper than making food nutritious, and that consumers preferred to eat food that tasted good, rather than food that did their bodies good. Over time nutritious food was supplanted by inexpensive tasty food that lacked nutritional value. Today, in contemporary America, tasty junk food is cheap and widely available to everybody, while healthy, nutritious food is expensive and consumed only by the dietary elite. The gradual erosion of the nutritional value of our food was ignored by almost everybody until the obesity epidemic transformed our love handles into passion banisters. Now we’re the fattest country in the developed world.

I believe that when we consume content, it’s a lot like eating food.

Like food, content has a taste to it. For example, when you experience The Avengers, it tastes differently than the Dark Knight. You could say one is sweet and savory; the other is more bitter and salty. Which you prefer is precisely a matter of taste.

Never before has our content menu offered so many varied, excellent tastes. If you enjoy consuming content, our world is an amazing place.

But content also has a nutritional value. Just as food feeds our bodies, content feeds our minds. And as with food, the nutritional effect of content is objective and universal. Here I’ve summarized the findings from over 40 different studies on how content consumption affects us. 

Nutritious content increases our knowledge, expands our vocabularies, improves reflection, critical thinking and problem solving skills, sharpens our visual acuity, and strengthens our imagination. Unhealthy content shortens our attention span, damages our concentration and memory, weakens our problem solving abilities, increases our impulsivity, and limits our imagination. And, like simple sugars, it can leave our minds addicted and wanting more.

We already know that the American diet of food rapidly changed in the 20th century in a way that made it more tasty but less nutritious. Nowadays its filled with junk that makes us fat and unhealthy.

The American diet of the mind has also changed rapidly, with the introduction of radio, television, video games, and websites, with consequent changes to our books, newspapers, and magazines. Did these changes leave our mental diet a healthy, balanced one?

Or have we begun to feed our minds as badly as we feed our bodies, consuming nothing but junk all day long? If our mental menu is nutritious, we should expect to see everybody getting smarter and sharper. If our mental menu is unwholesome, we should expect to see a spreading epidemic of stupidity that parallels our epidemic of obesity.

Let’s start by examining our reading habits. Reading, it turns out, is the most nutritious way to consume content. The better you are at reading, the better you are at thinking. And how do you get better at reading? By reading. Educators call this principle the Matthew Effect.

In a series of studies, researchers Cunningham and Stantovich have demonstrated repeatedly that a high volume of reading increases general knowledge, broadens vocabulary, and reduces the cognitive decline of aging. It’s important to note that these studies are all controlled for general intelligence and verbal abilities. In other words, it’s not that smarter people read. It’s that reading makes you smarter.

No other type of content consumption has been shown to provide these benefits. When you want to strengthen your muscles, the best way to do it is to lift heavier weights… or so I’ve been told.

When you want to strengthen your mind, the best way to do it is to read challenging literature.

So how challenging is our literature today, compared to the past? To explore this, I analyzed a corpus of 65 best-selling books for the three-hundred year period 1710 to 2010. The corpus includes books such as Robinson Crusoe, Pride and Prejudice, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Fellowship of the Ring, and Cormack McCarthy’s The Road. I examined these works to assess sentence length, paragraph length, and overall reading grade.

We’ll start with sentence length. Sentence length has steadily declined for centuries, from an average of almost 40 words per sentence down to an average of 14 words per sentence. It’s now reached the point where our written speech is as abrupt and broken as our spoken speech. It can’t decrease much further unless we start speaking in tweets. 

Paragraph length held steady from the beginning of the 18th century until the middle of the 20th century, when it suddenly began to plummet at an accelerating rate. This is when the era of television broadcasting began.

Books written before 1950 have an average paragraph length of 103 words, while books written after 1950 have an average paragraph length of 71 words. And if you look just at works written after 2000, when internet access became mainstream, the average paragraph length drops to 58 words. Today’s paragraphs may taste great, but they’re less filling.

Likewise, the reading grade of best-selling books has also dramatically decreased over time. The reading grade started at about 14.5 in the early 1700s and then declined inexorably. It was down to 10 by 1850, to 8 in 1900, to 6 in 1960, and to 4.5 in 2010. 

Now, remember that this has nothing to do with taste. This data says nothing about the aesthetic taste of consuming books. There are enjoyable books written at every reading grade in every genre. When we consider reading grade, we are considering only the nutritional value of the book. And from that point of view, we see that best sellers were once books that challenged the college-educated mind and are now books that are easy for Fifth Graders.

You might also note that the reading grade of the works starts to cluster more tightly around the mean once we reach the 1940s. That’s not coincidental. The 1940s is when researchers began to develop and promote what they termed "readability scores." A readability score measures the degree to which written material can be understood by readers. The “Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade” in this chart is an example of a readability score.

Once publishers were able to measure readability, they could target the works they published at whatever reading level that would reach the greatest number of people. At the time, the average American could read at just under 8th grade level, but enjoyed reading at the 6th grade level. That is, for recreation people like to read texts that are two grades below their actual reading level.

Unfortunately, research by Professors Lev Vygotsky has found that reading is most nutritious when slightly above your current level of development. Reading books that are at your present level or below doesn’t improve comprehension. You only increase your vocabulary and knowledge by encountering words and facts you don’t already know. This is unfortunate, because it means there is a negative correlation between taste and nutrition. The books you enjoy most aren’t going to be the books that offer you the most nutrition.

So as publishers started using readability scores to guide their publishing, it was inevitable that they’d start making their material tastier but less nutritious. That’s what consumers want! This is similar to what happened when farmers substituted corn for grass in the livestock feed: the beef tastes better, but became less healthy.

The publishers of newspapers and magazines actually hired readability consultants to help them simplify their written content. As a result, in the past sixty years, the reading level of newspapers and magazines has declined by two to four grades. The average length of feature articles in mainstream magazines has dropped from 3,000 words to 1,000 words. So if you’ve ever read a newspaper article or Time magazine piece from the 1940s and thought to yourself, "wow, this article is so intelligently written. The writing in modern magazines and papers seems dumbed down in comparison," you were right. Decreasing the reading grade of their works allowed newspaper and magazine publishers to greatly increase the audience of consumers, but it also reduced the nutritional value of reading it.

It’s not surprising that market forces would cater towards taste rather than nutrition. What’s especially troubling is that our textbooks have also been dumbed down. The average 8th grader is now reading from text books at the 5th grade reading level. The literature text required in 12th grade English classes is nowadays simpler than the average 8th grade reader published before World War II.

Despite the fact that books are easier to read than ever, the average American today reads less than ever. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 60% of 18-24 year olds read literature in 1982. By 2002, this had dropped to 43%.

The percentage of adults who read books outside of work or school is decreasing by 7% per year. And the average annual spending on books has dropped from $33 to $28 in the last twenty years.

It’s largely accepted that the declining popularity of written media has been caused by the rise of screen media. It’s a dietary shift.  

It means that not only are Americans reading simpler books, flipping through simpler magazines, and learning from simpler textbooks, they’re doing LESS of all of the above.

These changes have occurred simultaneously with a measurable decrease in our nation’s verbal skills.

Here is what Mean Verbal SAT scores look like after you correct for the fact that the College Board has been adjusting the numbers to keep the scores centered at 500. There was a 50 point drop between 1962 and 1979. In 1962, TV had finally begun to reach 90% of households, and textbooks got simplified. There has been another 10 point drop since 2000, when internet access went mainstream.

Here is a comparison of the reading ability of US adults in 1949 and 2003. This is a particularly powerful comparison of the world before TV and after it.

The number of US adults capable of reading at the 10th grade level or above dropped from 54% in 1949 to 20% in 2003. The number capable of reading at even the 6th grade level dropped from 83% in 1949 to 52% in 2003. In other words, more Americans could read at the 10th grade level in 1949 than can read at the 6th grade level today.

This is despite the fact that in 1949 the average adult had only 8.5 years of education, while in 2003 the average adult had 12.5 years of education. Four and a half years of additional education have not been enough to compensate. American adults read two grades level worse than they did before TV came onto the scene.

So far I’ve focused on books and other printed material because they are the leafy green vegetables of the content diet. What about screen media, such as film, television, and video games?

Whereas printed content has declined in popularity, screen media is on top. Watching television is now the developed world’s favorite activity, taking up more of our free time than any other activity. The only thing we do more than watch TV is work and sleep. By age six, the average child has watched one year of television – 1/6th of their life! According to the National Endowment of the Arts, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading. If books are the leafy green vegetables in our diet, TV and computers have become the meat and potatoes.

The good news is that screen media has been shown to increase visual-spatial intelligence. Video games have also been shown to improve hand-eye coordination and divided attention, which makes us better at tracking multiple objects at once. The internet has been shown to increase transactive memory, which is a sort of meta-memory of where to find information.

In particular, the increase in visual-spatial intelligence has been profound. Here you can see the increase in scores on the Raven Progressive Matrices in 1942 and 1992. Raven Progressive Matrices, like other nonverbal IQ tests, provide a measure of visual intelligence. Screen media are like vitamins for visual ability. Tasty, tasty vitamins.

The bad news is that all types of screen media come at a substantial cognitive cost. Researcher Patricia M. Greenfield summarizes the findings:

A study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that for every hour a child spent watching television, there was a 9% increase in their attention problems. And children between the ages of 11 and 15 now spend 55% of their waking time, 53 hours a week in front of the screen.

The effects aren’t just limited to children, either. A 2005 study published in Brain and Cognition has found that the more we watch television during our middle years, age 20 to 60, the greater our risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. A 2006 study in Southern Medical Journal found that watching soap operas and talk shows was associated with clinically significant impairment of attention, memory, and psychomotor speed in older women, like your professors.

A large part of television’s effect on our mind is caused by what Pavlov calls the orienting response, the instinctive sensitivity to change in vision and sound. Our brains get turned on by stimuli, triggering a dopamine release –

Sorry, had to take a call. Back now.

In the last two decades, researchers have begun to examine how the shots, cuts, edits, and effects of television activate the orienting response. A study of EEG Activity in the processing of television published in Communications Research found that by increasing the rate of edits, one increases the effect of television on our nervous system. 

The average length of shots used in our screen media is therefore a useful benchmark for how healthy it is to watch. Using shorter shots makes the content more arousing, more addictive, and more damaging to our attention span.

And, unfortunately, that’s the direction our screen media has moved in. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in movies. In 1972, the average shot length of US films was 8.6 seconds. In 1994, it had declined to 6.8 seconds. In 2000, it was 4.7 seconds. By 2008, the average shot length was down to 2.5 seconds. Film makers call this “MTV Editing” since more and more movies and TV shows have begun to have the hyper-kinetic editing style of music videos. Children’s shows are being edited with particularly fast cuts. A longitudinal study of Sesame Street found that the average shot length had halved over the last 26 years.

It’s not just shot length that is getting shorter. Shows as a whole are getting shorter. Sitcoms during the 1960s ran 26 minutes long. Today, sitcoms run 21 minutes. Dramas during the 1960s ran 48 minutes long. Today dramas run around 40 minutes. That’s a 20% reduction in the time available to establish character and tell a story. But such considerations matter less, and hyperkinetic stimulation matters more.

These trends are a function of the decreased attention span of the modern mind, as well as contributing factors to its further reduction. Attention deficient viewers seek out shorter, more hyperkinetic content, which in turn leads to their minds becoming even more attention deficient. This is a vicious cycle that’s become a cliché. Today’s teenagers find blockbusters from the 1980s to be slow-paced and boring. Star Wars put my 16 year old cousin to sleep half way through.

What about music? When we listen to music, it triggers a complex neural process. Music activates areas of the brain associated with attention, semantic processing, memory and motor functions. A controversial 1993 study published in Nature found that listening to Mozart increases spatial task performance – the so-called Mozart Effect. Follow-on studies have found a similar effect from other music with similarly complex structures, harmonies, and melodies, such as Bach and Yanni. A 2011 study at Winona University found that cognitive recall was increased when listening to unfamiliar classical music. A 2012 study at Wofford College found that listening to classic music could improve performance of difficult or stressful tasks by calming the sympathetic nervous system. Loud, fast pop induced stress on the sympathetic nervous system.

If these are findings are correct – and it’s still unclear if they are - then the most nutritious music would be sedating, complex, and unfamiliar to our ears, while the least nutritious music would be loud, simplistic, and sound familiar to us.

So let’s consider what direction pop music in the last fifty years has been trending. Analysts at the Spanish National Research Council evaluated 465,000 pop music recordings from  1955-2010 to evaluate three metrics: Loudness, harmonic complexity, and timbral diversity.

Has music been getting quieter or louder? The study confirmed a phenomenon that’s been described as a Loudness War, in which music producers increase the inherent volume of their recordings in order to attract listener attention. Doing this reduces sound quality and dynamic richness, creating a louder, flatter sound.

Has music been getting simpler or more complex? The study discovered that since the 1950s there has been a reduction in the diversity of chords in a given song, and in the number of musical pathways between each song. 1955’s Unchained Melody had an orchestral transition between seven different chords. 2012’s Call Me Maybe has four simple chords repeated endlessly in a block.

Do individual songs today sound more similar or more dissimilar? The study found that the timbers of different instruments used has gotten more homogenous every year. Since 1955, pop music uses fewer and fewer tones from the available “palette” of sounds.

Overall, then, pop music over the last fifty years has become louder, more simplistic, and more similar. It is, like our books, our TV shows, our movies, becoming less nutritious.

This is, again, not a measure of taste. We should probably not even discuss my taste in music. Let’s just say that from an objective review of the cognitive benefits of music, you’re possibly better off with Mozart.

So we’ve answered our starting question. Just as the nutritional value of our food declined from healthy to unhealthy, so too has the nutritional value of our content declined dramatically. Instead of a balanced diet that mixes great tasting content with nutritious fare, we instead feed our minds every waking hour…. with these.

Mmmm, donuts. And we’ve developed an epidemic of illiteracy and attention deficiency to match our new diet.

But why? Why did this happen? Throughout this talk I’ve alluded to several possible reasons.

The most obvious cause for the decline is the replacement of print media with screen media in our diet. While screen media, especially video games, does have certain cognitive benefits, we now know that the gains come at considerable costs. Part of the way using screen media increases our visual-spatial intelligence is by training the mind to think ways best suited towards screen media.  Screen-induced attention deficiency is both a cause and an effect of an ongoing shift in our content consumption habits. Not only does time spent with screen direct impact attention span and other abilities in a negative way, it also represents time lost that could have been spent with more nutritious written media. To continue with our food analogy, eating hamburgers and fries is unhealthy both because of the saturated fats we ingest, but also because of the healthy food we didn’t eat instead.

Neil Postman in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in the 1980s argued that television is the culprit, while Nicolas Carr in “The Shallows” argues that the Internet is to blame.

The second possible reason for the decline in our content IQ are the changes in our educational practices. During the 1960s, educational practices shifted radically in an attempt to make schooling more accessible, inclusive, and progressive. Critics of modern education argue that some of these changes were grave mistakes flat-lined our children’s reading abilities, as shown below.

Unfortunately, they don’t agree which changes were the mistakes! Rudolph Flesch, in “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” cites the lack of phonic instruction. Allan Bloom in “The Closing of the American Mind” blames the rejection of the Western canon. Charles Sykes in “Dumbing Down Our Kids” criticizes the lowering of standards in the curriculum.

The final possible cause for the decline is the rise of media as a business. Early on I explained how market forces led to our food becoming progressively more tasty but less healthy. Market forces have done the same thing to our content.

I also believe that this trend accelerated during the 1950s and 1960s when the widespread use of readability metrics, Nielsen ratings, and Top 40 charts enabled content publishers to fine-tune for their audience more precisely than ever. Market forces are certainly the cause of the homogenization of pop music, for instance.

Simplicity sells.

And pretty soon your mind has turned into … this.

So what caused the decline? In my opinion, it’s all of the above. No one factor in isolation brought about the remarkable decline in our content’s nutritional value. But starting in the 1960s, economic forces, educational mistakes, and technological changes all hit us at once. Nowadays, as media multi-tasking becomes ubiquitous, the situation threatens to get worse. There are no easy answers because this epidemic is a multi-factorial illness. We can be sure that technology isn’t going away, and neither are market forces. That leaves us looking to individual behavior and educational reform to achieve a Renaissance.

If you care about the health of your mind as much as you care about the health of your body, then the need to balance your content diet is as urgent as the need to balance our food diet. We don’t need to give up videogames, or quit watching Netflix, or stop listening to pop music, anymore then you need to entirely stop eating pizza or drinking Coca-Cola. But it wouldn’t hurt you to read something really hard, like Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Or watch something slow and methodical, like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Or listen to something sonorous and melodic, like Mozart.

Just don’t do all three at once, because multitasking is the road to Hell. Thank you, and spread the word!

This essay was based on my TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJtEbvSOd_E&t=161s