Neuroscience now shows two distinct populations emerging — deep readers and surface readers — with diverging cognitive architectures whose implications for education, democracy, and publishing are underanalyzed.
A 2026 MIT/Stanford study places the average adult attention span at 7.6 seconds — a 36.7% decline since 2000. The downstream effects of this collapse reach far beyond media into democratic deliberation, educational formation, and the structure of public knowledge.
AI systems have become extraordinarily good at producing outputs that look like thinking. This has led us to confuse the performance of intelligence with intelligence itself — a confusion with real consequences.