The Human Mind Was Lobotomised Long Before AI

How Media, Politics, and Commerce Broke Our Cognitive Abilities

Dr. Mathew Maavak

As generative artificial intelligence permeates every facet of modern life, a pervasive cultural anxiety has taken root, driven by the fear that AI is dumbing down the human mind. As a regular user of these tools, I find them profoundly helpful and largely disagree with this popular assertion. In fact, I have been pondering this phenomenon for years, and when I finally articulated it, AI speedily generated the peer-reviewed data which confirmed my suspicions.

It must be stated right from the onset that there is indeed one undeniable downside to mass digitisation and AI usage, and it lies in the realm of mnemonic retention. When we continuously outsource our memory and recall to machines, our internal cognitive archives inevitably atrophy. Today, there are adults who have difficulty remembering their own car licence plates, much less the telephone numbers of close friends and associates. Again, this trend began long before the advent of AI in the public domain.

This cognitive surrender is merely the latest chapter in a much longer story. The uncomfortable truth is that the human mind has been systematically dulled, lobotomised, and stripped of its expressive abstraction long before the first neural network was trained. The cognitive decline we now blame on AI is actually the culmination of a decades-long process of cultural, economic, and technological homogenisation that began in the post-WW2 era.

To understand this decline, we must first observe the erosion of lexical depth, specifically in the arenas of popular music and the media.

Dulling of Popular Music

Multiple peer-reviewed computational studies document measurable declines in lexical diversity (i.e. richness of vocabulary), readability, and structural complexity, alongside increases in repetitiveness in popular English-language song lyrics across pop, rock, rap, R&B, and country in the immediate post-WW2 period.

A 2021 PLOS study of 14,661 popular songs in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 list (1958–2016) showed that simpler lyrics also tended to chart higher, especially amid more novelty. Related work finds parallel shifts toward darker moral and vice themes, greater negativity and narcissism, and melodic simplification over decades from the 1950s and 1960s onward.

Digitisation merely accelerated the trend. The study concluded that as the number of song choices proliferated with the advent of digital streaming, audiences increasingly preferred simpler, less cognitively demanding products. Simpler lyrics require less mental effort to process, making them more successful in a saturated market.

Likewise, a 2024 Scientific Reports analysis of approximately 353,000 songs (1970–2020) found lyrics becoming simpler and easier to comprehend, in tandem with declining vocabulary richness and readability in several genres, rising repeated-line ratios, more choruses and hooks, more personal pronouns, and more negative or angry emotional tones.

Complementary research, such as a widely cited study by the University of Vienna, which analyzed 464,411 recordings from 1955 to 2010, confirmed that apart from a drop in lyrical depth, there was a measurable decline in musical complexity. Recent popular music exhibited less timbral variety and more homogeneous, “quantised” chord progressions compared to the organic diversity of the 1960s and 1970s.

This is why contemporary music often feels aesthetically bankrupt, prompting popular radio stations to routinely replay vignettes of “Golden Oldies” to retain an audience.

But do these studies explain the historical dominance of English-language hits, and the relative rarity of non-English songs breaking into the global Top 100? After all, Hisashi “Kyu” Sakamoto became an international sensation, particularly in the United States, with his 1963 hit Ue o Muite Arukō, which was better known as “Sukiyaki” in the English-speaking world. Many simply preferred the Japanese version.

During the technopop wave of the 80s, the French singer Desireless came up with a trademark hit of the era titled Voyage, Voyage. An English translation was neither required nor requested. I say trademark because this was the era when the androgynous, cross-dressing pop star became normalised. Think of Boy George for starters, or British techno-pop stalwarts of that era.

In Sakamoto’s case, the indelible lilt arguably overcame any lack of lyrical comprehension — at least, that was my experience when I first stumbled upon the song. With Desireless, however, the Western embrace of the incomprehensible could be viewed through the lens of a broader social engineering strategy, one that manifests in far cruder forms today.

Nonetheless, it was harder for non-English songs to break into the Top 100 charts worldwide. There is a reason for this: when researchers directly compare modern pop lyrics across languages, English consistently ranks as the least lexically diverse.

A recent cross-linguistic computational analysis of popular song lyrics compared English, Spanish, and German corpora, and found that English lyrics exhibited greater “lexical concentration“ i.e. the text relied much more heavily on a small set of high-frequency, repetitive words. In other words, English-language pop music is more superficial than its Spanish or German counterparts.

Is this why English-language songs generally top the charts in a world given to runaway mimicry and reductionism? Now let’s see if this assertion can be backed up by trends in a parallel field.

Dulling of Speech and Media

One notable study analyzed 381,609 political speeches across multiple Western democracies, and found a steep, consistent decline in linguistic complexity from 1945 to 2015. For example, party congress speeches in the Netherlands dropped from college sophomore to middle school levels over this period, with Denmark showing a similar drop. (While this particular study stirred up some controversy, its findings are robustly backed by parallel research elsewhere).

Computational linguistic studies tracking major American media outlets (like the New York Times and Associated Press) throughout the 20th century show a non-linear but decisive shift in syntactic complexity. While the mid-century push for “plain language” did reduce unnecessary verbosity, later decades (particularly the 1980s and 1990s onward) saw a rise in “choppier” sentence structures.

Modern political psychologists have documented that the abstract reasoning of post-WWII US presidents has plummeted, with contemporary leaders operating at the lowest levels of cognitive complexity in modern history. The “bully pulpit” no longer rewards philosophical depth. It rewards punchy, emotionally resonant soundbites tailored for a polarised and turbo-vulgarised electorate.

The fatal decline in lexical wealth among the US political class is best exemplified when the speeches and extemporaneous public remarks of the late President John F. Kennedy are juxtaposed alongside the erratic, insanity-adjacent outbursts of the current White House incumbent.

Causes and Correlations

The decline in the quality of music, speech, and op-eds was the result of a profound demographic shift and a deliberate economic pivot. Following World War II, the reading public was massified. As high school and college graduation rates exploded, the “median” reader was no longer part of a classically educated elite. Rather, they constituted a mass-market commodity as well as a readily accessible electoral quarry. To capture this new audience, the baseline complexity of the press was systematically flattened.

This demographic shift was also weaponised. Following the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 by the Ronald Reagan regime, the US media discovered that high-minded, institutional debate was far less profitable than deliberate polarisation. The op-ed page was duly eviscerated to serve the “outrage industry.” Reductionist, polemic framing which triggered high-arousal emotions and greater engagement became the bottom line.

Consequently, the op-ed morphed from a space for philosophical depth into a highly curated vehicle for hyper-partisan signalling. The public mind was not just dulled by a simpler vocabulary; it was actively trained to reject nuance in favour of binary, emotionally resonant diatribes, alongside the copious use of public profanities. Public debate was now a crass spectator sport arena, nothing more.

To see this collapse of gravitas in stark relief, one need only compare the intellectual titans of the 1960s civil rights movement to the political class that claims to represent minority communities today. I am using the African-American example here as a control group of sorts because they were historically suppressed from accessing quality education.

Whatever one thinks of the politics and personal flaws of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, they were undeniably highly eloquent, formidable intellectuals who commanded the English language with devastating precision. Consider Malcolm X. He was a high school dropout who, upon recognising his educational deficits in prison, immersed himself in the dictionary, copying it page by page and memorising its vast lexicon to forge his own intellectual armour. This is a rigorous practice of memorisation and verbalisation that I had independently adopted in my late teens and early twenties. In fact, I would literally lug my dictionary during outdoor treks and in the quiet margins of daily life to learn new words and mentally conjure up their potential usage. This came in handy when I had to learn transdisciplinary complex systems.

Contrast this self-directed intellectual rigour with the contemporary African-American political establishment. Can anyone name a single modern Black political leader who possesses even a fraction of the rhetorical mastery of King or Malcolm X?

Part of this malaise lies in the crass apparatus of modern DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), which militates against intellectual depth. It merely catapults credentialed rubber-stampers into positions of authority within the African-American community. Or any other community for that matter. Black or white, it does not matter. The self-made intellectual titan has been replaced by the institutional functionary, selected not for the power of their mind, but for their compliance with a superficial metric.

Lexical Swansong

This brings us back to music. The mass retreat from abstraction is perhaps most viscerally felt in the cultural soundtrack of our lives. It is a popular fallacy to attribute the initial dip in musical complexity in the 1980s to “digital media” or “algorithms,” as the internet and streaming did not yet exist. The soundtracks of the 1980s were driven by the advent of affordable analogue electronic instruments, such as synthesisers, sequencers, and drum machines, coupled with the rise of music television. These analogue tools favoured rigid, quantised, repetitive loops and visual spectacle over the organic, complex songwriting of bygone eras. Lyrical profundity was sacrificed to the danceable, mathematically perfect groove. Yet, the songs of the 80s still carried the memetic afterglow of the 60s and 70s — enough to render them memorable, even if they were juvenile and formulaic.

It was only decades later, with the rise of the digital streaming economy, that this decline accelerated into outright structural mutilation. Because modern digital algorithms penalise songs that fail to hook a listener within the first five seconds, the traditional musical intro has been eradicated. Songs now launch straight into a jarring crescendo, sacrificing structural variety, narrative pacing, and lyrical depth for instant, algorithmic gratification. Contemporary music is a cacophonous din that perfectly mirrors the growing confusion and insipidity of the human mind today.

Commodification of Attention

The dulling of the human mind was not caused by a singular technological scapegoat, but by the structural shifts of the late 20th century. These shifts included the homogenisation of the reading public, the repeal of broadcast regulations, the deliberate monetisation of political outrage, and the transition from organic artistry to analogue and eventually digital optimisation. We optimised our culture for baser instincts and facile delivery, stripping away the necessary friction that builds cognitive muscle.

Ultimately, AI is not the architect of our cognitive decline. It is merely an accelerant to a process already well underway. While we must remain vigilant about how AI impacts our mnemonic retention, we must recognise that the erosion of our vocabulary, our abstract reasoning, and our cultural complexity began decades ago. If we wish to reclaim the depth of the human mind, we cannot simply regulate the algorithms of tomorrow. We must reckon with the cultural compromises we made yesterday.

Source: The Eye Opener