The Smarter Project

Why Hybrid Intelligence Is the Future of Human-AI Collaboration Hybrid intelligence combines the best of AI and humans, leading to more sustainable, creative, and trustworthy results.

Artificial intelligence and natural intelligence need to work together seamlessly for optimal solutions.

Social Media Attention Span Statistics 2025: By Platform, Age, and Content Type Social Media Attention Span Statistics 2025: By Platform, Age, and Content Type

sqmagazine.co.uk/social-media...

Big Tech Wants Direct Access to Our Brains

Big Tech Wants Direct Access to Our Brains www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/m...

Nothing to worry about here, is there?!?

How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’

How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’ www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/t...

A Surprising (and Easy) Way to Boost Your Attention Span

A Surprising (and Easy) Way to Boost Your Attention Span www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/w...

“America’s leaders [during the Cold War] understood that a superpower rivalry is as much an intellectual contest as a military and economic one. It’s who can out-innovate whom. So they fought the Soviet threat with education, with the goal of maximizing talent on our side.” David Brooks, NYT

AI brain rot's evidence gap We still don't know whether genAI is making us dumb.

Generative AI is simply too new for us to have any sort of useful or trustworthy scientific data on its impact on cognition, learning, memory, problem-solving or creativity.
www.axios.com/2025/07/02/c...

A new ISW report defines cognitive warfare as "a form of warfare that focuses on influencing the opponent's reasoning, decisions, and ultimately, actions to secure strategic objectives without fighting or with less military effort than would otherwise be required." Russia seems to be an expert.

Automation Use and Automation Bias - Kathleen L. Mosier, Linda J. Skitka, 1999 The availability of automation and automated decision aids feeds into a general human tendency to travel the road of least cognitive effort. A series of studies...

As early as 1999, Kathleen Mosier and Linda Skikda were using the term "automation bias" to describe "the tendency to use automation as a heuristic replacement for vigilant information seeking and processing." Today, in a world awash in AI, it may be the fastest growing of all cognitive biases.

AI and the Epistemology of the Synthetic Mind Are we trading the friction of real thought for the fluency of artificial intelligence, mistaking seamless performance for understanding itself?

“To defend thought in this new era is not to reject simulation, but to remember what thought feels like. Not just what it looks like. That means restoring friction, cultivating reflection, and resisting the drift toward answers that are immediate and unexamined.”

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

America’s Coming Brain Drain Trump’s war on universities could kill U.S. innovation.

Note the parallels here with the massive, forced disappearance of technical experts from Government. As American society, academia and policy making are drained of expertise, a more conducive environment is created for misinformation and for policies that serve something other than the common good.

Why Study History? Civic education can help us to see that not all problems have solutions, to live with tentative answers, to accept compromise, to embrace responsibilities as well as rights—to understand that democrac...

(Paywalled) “Civic education can help us to see that not all problems have solutions, to live with tentative answers, to accept compromise, to embrace responsibilities as well as rights—to understand that democracy is a way of living, not a settled destination.” This is the kind of Smarter we need.

“We will need a far better understanding of our planet’s complex systems, and much more sophisticated technologies and institutions...to achieve a relationship with our surrounding natural environment that is economically and socially sustainable. Ever greater amounts of ingenuity will be required."

How well can Americans distinguish real news headlines from fake ones? | YouGov A YouGov survey tested Americans' susceptibility to falsehoods in news, and found that on average, they failed to correctly classify one-third of headlines as either real or fake.

U. of Cambridge psychologists have developed the first “misinformation susceptibility test” (MIST) and validated the test in the journal Behavior Research Methods. Polling conducted using MIST found that younger adults are worse than older adults at identifying false headlines. Democracy beware.

"Mild dissosociation" (sic), eh? Ok.

Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals | Quanta Magazine Complex neural circuits likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

A lot to be learned from evolution of animal intelligence: "A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently."

A new Journal of Political Economy study found a significant, positive impact of embedding working memory training in regular school teaching. Three years later, children who received training were 16% more likely to enter an advanced secondary school track www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Retirement Can Harm Your Brain. Here’s How to Keep It Healthy. It’s challenging to stay mentally sharp and healthy through the major transition. Careful planning is key.

Your brain on retirement.

Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains - Nature Medicine Pyrolysis gas chromatography–mass spectrometry reveals the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics in human kidney, liver and brain tissue samples from 2016 and 2024, with higher proportions found ...

A new study shows microplastics and nanoplastics accumulating in human organs, particularly brains. The study notes a significant increase between 2016 and 2024 and higher levels in people with dementia. Yet another warning sign that environmental degradation is harming our brains and cognition.

The Death of Government Expertise Why Trump and Musk are on a firing spree

When Government, due to “resentful arrogance,” is forced to shed expertise, it becomes less capable of performing the essential functions of a modern society. This process, which may be termed a “Stupider Project”, is the antithesis of a rational, knowledge-based approach to problem solving.

‘Half the Country’s Thinking Magically’: California Fire Victims Grapple with the Political Paralysis Over Climate Change They’re still in shock. But for now, even in a blue city in a blue state, disaster does not bring climate change to residents’ front of mind.

Here is a brilliant encapsulation of a key aspect of the dilemma being highlighted by the Smarter Project: "Half the country's thinking magically". Indeed. #Calfires

YouTube video by Neuroscience News The Speed of Thought Why Humans Process Information So Slowly

A new research paper from Caltech titled “The unbearable slowness of being” (!) estimates that humans think at a rate of 10 bits per second, even though sensory systems process a billion bits per second—100 million times faster. No wonder multitasking doesn’t work!

Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative - The Earthshot Prize One of the world’s largest conservation projects, Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative protects Kazakhstan's Golden Steppe and its endangered wildlife.

This is great. UNDP was also instrumental in getting this initiative off the ground, with a Global Environment Facility grant that began in 2008. Saiga antelope populations have since skyrocketed from 22,000 to some 2.8 million. Ingenious solutions for conservation!

Speaking of environmental impacts on the brain and thinking...

Cognition and Memory after Covid-19 in a Large Community Sample | NEJM Cognitive symptoms after coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), the disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), are well-recognized. Whether objectively measurable...

Adding to the list of environmental factors affecting ingenuity, a 2024 NEJM study of cognition and memory found "objectively measurable cognitive deficits that may persist for a year of more after Covid-19" and that "longer-term persistence of cognitive deficits...warrant ongoing surveillance."

Earth, Brain, Health Commission Earth Brain Health Commission Interested in how we can address mental health challenges resulting from environmental megatrends? Then come to the launch of the Earth Brain Health Commission (mental he...

There is increasing awareness of the negative impacts of climate change on cognition. A broader irony here is that as our environmental challenges increase, human mental capacity to generate and implement solutions declines. A new effort launched in September will assess the scope of this dynamic.

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.

Deep thinking and deep work require knowledge and sustained attention. Reading books is a highly effective means of conveying knowledge and developing the ability to sustain one’s attention. So a society has a big problem when its youth get to college without ever having read an entire book.

A nation exhausted: The neuroscience of why Americans are tuning out politics Political polarization and people not being exposed to other perspectives online are two major factors that contribute to Americans feeling exhausted with politics.

News avoidance can be an effective remedy for a lack of focus. COVID-19, political division, wars, crazy social media, climate change etc., have created "burnout and learned helplessness." Try to "tune out from the noise," and guide your attention to areas where you can make a real difference.

A really good example here of how to view the intersection of AI and human intelligence. Note the icon for “Information that expands the scope of human imagination or creativity”. Let’ identify synergies, where AI can augment, complement and sustain human ingenuity, not replace it wholesale.