3 Brain Habits That Are Damaging Your Intelligence, By A Psychologist

InnovationScience3 Brain Habits That Are Damaging Your Intelligence, By A PsychologistByMark Travers,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about relationships, personality, and everyday psychology.Follow AuthorApr 21, 2026, 08:30am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Most people don’t realize these everyday habits are working against their own capacity for brilliance. Here’s how they might be undermining your intelligence.gettyWe live in what’s possibly the most cognitively stimulating era in human history. More information is available to us in a single afternoon than most people encountered in a lifetime a century ago. And yet, complaints about poor memory, difficulty concentrating and mental fatigue have never been more common. The explanation, it turns out, may be less about what we’re consuming and more about how our brains are being trained by the habits that surround that consumption. A growing body of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that certain everyday mental patterns, ones that feel completely ordinary, even productive, may be eroding the very capacities we depend on most. Here are three of the most well-documented.1. Habitually MultitaskingThere is a persistent and flattering belief that multitasking is a sign of a sharp, efficient mind. The research suggests otherwise, and quite decisively.First, it helps to understand what’s actually happening when we “multitask.” The brain does not process two demanding tasks simultaneously. It switches rapidly between them, and each switch incurs an attention cost. The task you just left lingers in your cognitive background, competing with whatever you’re trying to focus on next. The result is a kind of perpetual mental static.In a landmark 2018 review published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford researchers synthesized more than...