Screen Time Is Tanking Gen Z's Brain Power, Neuroscientist Warns Congress

For over a century, every generation has gotten smarter than the last. More school meant better test scores. Better test scores meant measurable gains in attention, memory, reading, math, and overall IQ. It was the education success story we told ourselves without question—until now.

Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath brought that streak to an end during a Senate hearing, laying out a stark reality: Gen Z is the first modern generation to score lower than their parents on core cognitive skills, even though they’re spending more years in classrooms. The culprit? Screens. Around 2010, when one-to-one device programs became standard in schools across the globe, something shifted. Performance plateaued. Then it dropped.

Horvath’s analysis pulled data from roughly 80 countries and found a consistent pattern: once schools adopt digital learning tools widely, average performance“goes down significantly.”Students logging five hours a day on computers for learning scored notably lower than peers who rarely or never used tech at school. State-level National Assessment of Educational Progress scores tell the same story—they tend to climb right up until devices roll out, then they start sliding.

The reasoning is biological, not ideological. Humans, Horvath argues, evolved to learn from other people, not screens. That face-to-face interaction—the struggle, the real-time feedback, the human presence—does something digital tools simply can’t replicate. When we circumvent that process with technology, we lose something essential. Educational psychologist Dylan Wiliam, as Horvath noted, has essentially said that educational technology has been“coming for 60 years”but“ain’t doing anything.”Six decades of promise, and the data isn’t backing it up.

What makes this particularly jarring is the scope of the shift. This isn’t one study or one country. Horvath’s claims are grounded in international assessment data and came with enough credibility to warrant a Senate platform. He also disclosed that he doesn’t receive funding from major tech companies—a detail that matters when the conclusion is this inconvenient for Silicon Valley.

The implications ripple outward fast. Parents are already raising concerns about kindergarteners wielding tablets. Teachers are grappling with how to push back without sounding like Luddites. And somewhere in this mess is a question nobody really wants to answer: if we’ve built an entire education system around digital integration, and it’s not working, what do we do now?