February 2026

For some time I have wondered why some of the very talented people I grew up with never went anywhere. I saw a file on the internet that addressed the problem. Some children who are “gifted” find mastering certain skills quite easy, while their classmates struggle and work very hard to master the material. But as they progress in the field, there finally (usually in college) comes a time when they must work to move along in the area. Then, when faced with having to work in the area, for the first time, they simply stop and drop out. In the book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell argued that ten-thousand hours of practice is required to become truly world-class. (The original research was done by K. Anders Ericsson, just to give credit for all of his hours of work.)

SAN FRANCISCO, 16 February – Move over chimpanzees and humans, there’s a new brainiac in the fold. An astonishing discovery has revealed the brainpower of cows.

A nature-loving family in the mountains of Southern Austria has a pet brown cow named Veronica. At the age of three, Veronica began to pick up sticks. Soon after, the family noticed Veronica using sticks to scratch herself.

Researchers studying tool-using animals visited Veronica. They were curious to test her cognitive ability. So, they gave her a broom and were gobsmacked by the outcome.

SAN FRANCISCO, 6 February – The mesmerising addiction of staring into screens has “rewired” the brains of young people. And, those screens have stoked a mental health crisis, globally.

Children are less cognitively capable than parents were at their age. Since standardising and measuring cognitive development, which began in the late 1880s, every generation has outperformed their parents.

Higher intelligence, until this present moment, has been attributed to spending more time at school. Learning at school helps develop cognition.

Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform the previous generation, the millennials, on every cognitive measure, from attention to memory, to literacy, to numeracy, to executive functioning, to IQ, even though they spend more time at school than previous generations.

So, what occurred around 2010 that decoupled schooling from cognitive development?