Training the human mind must be the priority in a tech-driven world

Cognitive offloading is coming into sharper focus as AI adoption ramps up.

- Robin Harding

In the German school system, fate reaches out for children around the age of 10.

Children start their secondary education at institutions ranging from an academic Gymnasium, with a high probability of ultimate university entry, to a more vocationally focused Realschule, where the education is famously excellent but unlikely to provide access to the most sought-after and high-paying careers.

Many German parents would like the Gymnasium for their children. They try hard to get them in.

IMPROVING WORKING MEMORY That makes a set of results published earlier in 2025 in the Journal of Political Economy all the more remarkable. They report on a study in which a group of seven-year-olds were given 12 hours of "working memory" training in place of their normal school lessons.

Working memory is the capacity to hold in mind and manipulate multiple pieces of information: the lengths of the sides of a rectangle, for example, while calculating its area. It is a basic cognitive skill thought to be valuable for many areas of academic success, particularly in solving maths problems but also reading and paying attention in general.

The study was carefully conducted, randomising both schools and classes within schools to create a treatment group and a control group, with years of follow-up afterwards to examine how this fairly modest intervention affected the children.