Discovery of fire. Development of language. Rise of civilizations. Acceleration of industrialization. Proliferation of the Internet. Invention of memes. The newest genus on our planet, commonly known as Gen Z, embodies the pinnacle of human evolution, according to a new study published in Nature.
“The Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis postulates that Gen Zs’ constantly shrinking attention span is indicative of Gen Zs’ growing multitasking abilities from smartphone use,” said study author Ella Jarvis, Associate Director of the Mammalian Evolutionary Genetics Centre at the University of Chicago.
In the study, 230 high school students were covertly observed in naturalistic cinema environments.
“We hypothesized that the subjects would display either one of the two types of multitasking –– concurrent multitasking, in which a person performs multiple activities at the same time, or serial multitasking, in which a person switches rapidly between tasks.” explained the authors.
The results, however, were groundbreaking: Gen Zs were able to multitask between both types of multitasking simultaneously. The Gen Z subjects were observed to switch rapidly between concurrently texting whilst watching a movie and concurrently eating popcorn whilst talking to friends. This was, truly, a hallmark of human evolution.
“Our follow-up interviews gave us stronger confidence in our findings,” the authors added.
When asked about her generation, an interviewee was reported to say: “I heard the talk that Gen Zs hard clapped the goldfish by achieving an even more fire attention span of 2.3 seconds, and was like ‘you deadass serious? I gotta post this on insta.’ Cause this is a big deal yo …… sorry, what was I saying?”
The study, however, was not without limitations.
“Admittedly, we failed to arrive at an objective interpretation of the interview transcripts,” study author Ella told us, “Although I was impressed by the anti-establishment undertones underlying the monosyllabic ‘yeet’, my co-authors insisted that I have overlooked the more nuanced double entendre.”
“One way for future research to address this is to evaluate the mysteries of the species from a linguistic vantage point. An exciting avenue of research is to explore the evolutionary passage taken by the adjective ‘lit’, dating back to its first recorded appearance last February when it was used in the Old Saxon form ‘litty’,” said Ella.
“One way or another, we are amazed. Or as the Gen Zs say, shooketh.”
Source