In this context, the term “digital dementia” has become a familiar feature in media discussion. It has the potential to evoke shock value, somewhat alarmist in tone, although it cannot be forgotten that it is not used as a diagnosis. In fact, it is a metaphor, which has developed as a product of scientific analysis of the social world or of psychology. Science, in fact, has identified that researchers in South Korea are reporting rising levels of digital dependency among their adolescent populations, in tandem with problems of concentration. However, in point of fact, it cannot and should not be seen as an example of cognitive decline. What is occurring is the nervous system functioning in tandem with an environment that is simply full of stimuli.

What I find particularly interesting is that the image of the classroom looks the same all over the world. Children have difficulties dealing with long texts or the chains of thought and completing tasks without instant feedback. But at the same time, the kids show extraordinary precision when it comes to recollecting information on the game’s mechanics, interface, algorithms, and rules. That is not to say that there’s a contradiction, but rather that different cognitive abilities are under exercise each day. The brain isn’t getting weaker, it’s getting more fine-tuned to the reward loops that it’s been given.

Such figures, popularly trotted out in comparison with goldfish, which again are the substance of click-worthy headlines, fail the test of scrutiny. They are the result of careless interpretations of marketing research literature and add nothing to our knowledge of cognition. We are not dealing with the empirical phenomenon that attention has “shrunk,” but that attention is more and more conducted in a way that is not measurable by the traditional standard of prolonged continuous focus. This standard has evaporated beneath our notice.

What is most susceptible to change here is not memory, not intelligence, but depth of thinking: the ability to hold a question in mind, to reason through it at multiple levels of abstraction, to maintain any kind of thinking without external prompting or guidance. Such thinking is developed through practice, but in the digital environment it is increasingly delegated to external devices: search engines, autocomplete, algorithmic suggestion. Thinking is not absent, but it is conditional upon auxiliary devices and immediately loses its confidence without them.

One may see such a change clearly outside the period of childhood. Among young adults, one may meet an unusual combination of adult-like external circumstances and adolescent-like cognitive characteristics, such as short attention span, constant hunger for stimulation, and avoidance of complex and too-long processes. In Japan and South Korea, the most severe cases of social withdrawal are called hikikomori. However, the issue of hikikomori should be noted because it is not associated with smartphone usage, and it results from various external and internal pressures, which digital technologies extend. A similar trend in the UK is called bed rotting.

The real risk, therefore, is not in the screens, not in the technology — in and of themselves, there is no risk, and there never has been — but in the assumption that such deep and independent capacities will, as in the past, develop more or less as a matter of course, as a by-product of growing up, rather than as an object, as it were, of conscious cultivation, even a kind of discipline in its own right. To summarize, the question we now face is not “where are we heading?” but rather whether we now recognize that the cognitive environment has shifted and whether our educational, working, and adulthood models have to change as a result.