The Sequel Civilization
When a Species Stops Imagining New Things
TL;DR (The Quick Version)
Every movie at the top of the box office is a sequel, a remake, or a franchise installment. You’ve noticed this. Everyone has noticed this. The standard explanation is studio risk aversion and corporate consolidation: known IP is a safer bet than original ideas.
That explanation is true. It is also insufficient.
Before the studios decided to stop taking creative risks, the audiences stopped demanding new things. Before the culture became derivative dominant, the people consuming it became measurably less capable of generating original thought.
In 1990, something changed in the creativity scores of American children.
Educational psychologist Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William and Mary analyzed nearly 300,000 Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking - the most widely used and validated creativity assessment in the world, with data running from the 1950s forward. The finding: creativity scores rose steadily for decades, tracking alongside IQ scores. Then, beginning between 1984 and 1990, they diverged. IQ continued rising. Creativity began falling. The decline has continued through every subsequent measurement - 1998, 2008, 2018. Continuously decreasing.
“Children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
That is not a description of a screen-addicted generation. It is a description of a population with degraded cognitive function in specific domains.
The brain systems that generate creative thought - the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, the default mode network and its interaction with executive control - are the same brain systems that MNP research documents as primary targets of neurotoxic disruption.
The decline in creative capacity predates smartphones. It predates social media. It begins at the same period when plastic production and environmental MNP accumulation began their exponential climb.
The sequel civilization is not a Hollywood problem. It may be a neurotoxicology problem.
THE DATA: WHAT THE TESTS SHOW
THE TORRANCE MEASUREMENT:
The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking were developed in 1966 by E. Paul Torrance, who spent his career studying creativity. The tests measure divergent thinking - the ability to generate multiple original solutions, make unexpected connections, and produce novel ideas in response to open-ended prompts. They have been renormed five times:
1974, 1984, 1990, 1998, 2008. Total sample across all normative periods: 272,599 individuals, kindergarten through adult.
The Torrance tests have been found to predict creative achievement in life three times better than IQ tests. They measure something real, distinct from intelligence, and longitudinally consistent.
THE FINDING:
Scores rose steadily from the 1950s through approximately 1984-1990. Then they turned.
Since 1990, even as IQ scores continued rising, Torrance creative thinking scores have significantly decreased across all grade levels.
The decrease is most severe for the youngest children - kindergarten through third grade. It has continued through every subsequent renorming period. Kim’s 2018 data shows the same downward trajectory, uninterrupted.
What decreased is specific:
Originality: generating ideas that are novel and unusual
Elaboration: developing and enriching ideas with detail
Emotional expressiveness: conveying feeling through creative work
Storytelling articulateness: constructing coherent narratives
Movement and action: animating ideas dynamically
Synthesis: combining disparate elements into new wholes
Unusual visualization: seeing familiar things in unexpected ways
Internal visualization: imagining things not present
Breaking boundaries: extending ideas beyond conventional limits
Humor: finding and expressing comic incongruity
This is not a decline in knowledge or in processing speed. IQ - which measures those things - kept rising. (Though it is now declining too.) This is a decline in the specific cognitive functions that constitute creative thought.
THE CULTURAL MIRROR:
The data from entertainment industries reflects the same trajectory at a slight lag - which is what you’d expect if creative producers were drawing on a population whose creative capacity was eroding.
Hollywood box office: For the first time in 2023, every single one of the top ten US box office films was a sequel, remake, franchise entry, or adaptation. Not a near-miss. Every one.
Of the top 20 grossing films of all time globally, all but a small handful are franchise properties. Original films - films not derived from existing IP - now struggle to get greenlit at major studios regardless of critical quality.
The pattern extends beyond film:
Music: Genre cycles have compressed. Decades that once produced multiple distinct movements (bebop to cool jazz, rock to punk to new wave - each in a few years) now produce micro-variations on established templates, recycled across streaming algorithms.
Literature: Genre fiction has consolidated around proven formulas. Series dominate. Standalone novels with genuinely new premises are a shrinking fraction of commercial publishing.
Visual art: The contemporary art market has fragmented into retrospective valuations of 20th century originals and ironic commentary on existing culture - a mode that requires the original to exist but generates nothing new.
Games: The most commercially dominant games are either franchise sequels (Call of Duty, FIFA/EA Sports FC, Madden) or procedurally-generated variations on established mechanics. Original game design exists in the independent sector but struggles to scale commercially.
The standard explanation - corporate risk aversion - is real. Studios, labels, publishers, and developers do prefer known IP.
But this doesn’t explain why audiences consistently prefer it too.
In a creative culture with strong demand for novelty, original work finds its audience. The audience for genuine novelty has shrunk.
THE STANDARD EXPLANATIONS: WHAT THEY GET RIGHT AND MISS
EXPLANATION 1: STANDARDIZED EDUCATION
The decline in creativity scores coincides with the educational reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which emphasized standardized testing, reduced unstructured time, and narrowed curricula toward measurable academic outcomes. Art, music, and free play - documented contributors to divergent thinking - were progressively reduced.
Assessment: Real, well-documented, partial. Educational standardization plausibly explains some portion of the Torrance score decline. It does not explain why the decline continued and deepened after 2010, when critiques of standardized education became mainstream and many districts restored creative programs. It does not explain the parallel decline in adult creativity measures, where education is less relevant.
EXPLANATION 2: SCREEN TIME AND PASSIVE MEDIA CONSUMPTION
Smartphones, social media, streaming services, and algorithmically curated content have replaced the unstructured time and boredom that historically generated creative development. Children who spend their free time consuming rather than making have fewer opportunities to develop creative capacity.
Assessment: Real, partial, wrong on timing. Screen time cannot explain the decline that begins in 1990 - before smartphones, before social media, before streaming. The 1990-2008 Torrance decline predates the smartphone era. Screen time may have accelerated a pre-existing trend, but it did not initiate it.
EXPLANATION 3: CORPORATE CULTURAL CONSOLIDATION
Fewer companies control more of the cultural production apparatus. Risk aversion drives derivative output. Studios, publishers, and labels choose sequels and franchises over originals because it is financially safer.
Assessment: True for supply. Not sufficient as a complete explanation. Corporate consolidation in media accelerated in the 1990s and 2000s, which is consistent with the timeline. But this explains why the supply of original work decreased - not why audience demand for original work decreased. Both sides of the market shifted.
WHAT’S MISSING:
None of these explanations addresses the neurological substrate.
Creativity is not a behavior that declines because of poor incentives. It is a cognitive capacity that depends on specific brain architecture functioning in specific ways. When that architecture degrades, the capacity degrades - regardless of incentives, education policy, or available time.
The question the standard explanations avoid: is there a mechanism that would degrade the specific brain systems that generate creative thought, operating at population scale, beginning around 1990?
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF CREATIVITY: WHAT’S BEING LOST
Creative cognition is not a mystery. Its neural basis has been mapped by decades of neuroimaging research. It consistently involves three interacting systems:
THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX (PFC):
Specifically the dorsolateral PFC (working memory, cognitive control, evaluation of novel ideas) and the ventrolateral PFC (semantic retrieval, making unusual associations). The PFC is essential for both generating and evaluating creative ideas - it supports the sustained, goal-directed mental work of building novel combinations.
THE HIPPOCAMPUS:
The hippocampus - primary architecture of episodic memory - is a documented creative organ. Hippocampal amnesic patients perform significantly worse on divergent thinking tasks. Hippocampal volume predicts creative performance in children. The hippocampus provides the raw material of creativity: the stored experiences, associations, and patterns that recombination into novel ideas requires.
Critically: hippocampal damage impairs creative thinking directly.
This is not metaphor. This is the documented clinical finding.
THE DEFAULT MODE NETWORK (DMN):
The DMN - active when the brain is at rest, “mind-wandering,” or engaged in internally-directed thought - is the network most strongly associated with the generation of creative ideas. Its interaction with the executive control network (coordinated by the PFC) is the neural signature of creative thought: the DMN generates associations and possibilities, the PFC evaluates and develops them.
When this interaction is disrupted - when DMN activity is suppressed, or when the PFC-hippocampus-DMN communication degrades - creative capacity diminishes.
THE MNP CONNECTION:
MNP neurotoxicity research has specifically documented damage to all three of these systems.
Prefrontal cortex: Disrupted dopamine signaling (dopamine is the neurotransmitter most critical for PFC function), reduced acetylcholinesterase activity, neuroinflammation, oxidative stress in frontal regions. These are the documented mechanisms of MNP neurotoxicity. They are also the mechanisms by which PFC function - including the creative cognition the PFC supports - would degrade.
Hippocampus: The hippocampus is among the brain regions most sensitive to environmental toxins. MNP research in animal models has found direct hippocampal damage: disrupted monoamine neurotransmitter levels in the hippocampus, impaired spatial memory (the hippocampal function most reliably measured in animals), and structural changes from gestational MNP exposure producing anxiety-like behaviors and spatial memory deficits in adolescence. MNP particles have been found in human brain tissue - including in the regions corresponding to hippocampal structures.
Default Mode Network: The DMN is heavily dependent on the PFC-hippocampal communication it coordinates. When either node is degraded, DMN function suffers. Additionally, the oxytocin signaling disruption documented in MNP-exposed animals directly affects the social and emotional processing that DMN activity supports. The gut-brain axis disruption from MNP exposure also affects DMN function through the vagus nerve pathways that link gut microbiome health to default mode activity.
The IQ/creativity divergence in the Torrance data is consistent with this neurological picture. IQ tests measure processing speed, working memory capacity, and pattern recognition - functions distributed across multiple brain systems, including many that are less specifically targeted by MNP neurotoxicity.
Creativity specifically requires the hippocampus (for associative memory retrieval), the DMN (for generative associative processing), and their interaction with a well-functioning PFC. These are, by the evidence, more specifically vulnerable.
If MNPs preferentially damage the hippocampus and disrupt the PFC-hippocampus-DMN axis, we would expect exactly what the Torrance data shows: a decline in creativity that does not track with general intelligence.
That is the finding.
THE TIMING PROBLEM FOR ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS
The 1990 inflection deserves specific attention.
1990 is not the year smartphones arrived. It is not the year social media launched. It is not the year of any obvious educational policy shift that would have reached kindergartners.
1990 is approximately the year when cumulative MNP environmental load - rising since the 1950s with global plastic production - would have reached concentrations sufficient to produce neurological effects in the most sensitive population: developing children experiencing MNP exposure during critical windows of brain formation.
Plastic production grew from roughly 2 million tons per year in 1950 to approximately 100 million tons per year by 1990. Environmental accumulation is not linear - fragmentation and persistence mean the load compounds over time. By 1990, humans had been producing plastic at industrial scale for four decades.
The children whose Torrance scores began declining in 1990 were born in the mid-to-late 1980s, into an environment with substantially higher MNP loads than any previous human generation.
This does not prove causation. But the alternative explanations that require the cause to originate in the 1990s face a timing problem: most of them don’t start until later, or aren’t specific to the pre-smartphone era.
The MNP hypothesis has the right timeline.
WHY THIS SIGNAL IS DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS
Every other signal in this series documents something gone wrong. Species loss, cognitive disability, violence, disease. This signal documents something not coming into existence.
The ideas that aren’t being generated. The connections that aren’t being made. The novel solutions that don’t emerge because the brains that would have produced them are operating with degraded creative architecture.
This is the hardest signal to measure and the most consequential. Human civilization is the accumulated product of creative thought.
Agriculture, architecture, medicine, science, art, music, literature, law - all of it began as someone’s novel idea, the output of a brain making a connection that had not been made before.
The rate at which novel ideas emerge is not constant. It depends on the creative capacity of the population generating them. A population with measurably declining creativity is a population producing fewer of the ideas that would constitute its future.
The sequel civilization is the visible surface of this.
But the consequences run deeper.
When medical researchers generate fewer novel hypotheses, diseases take longer to understand. When engineers imagine fewer new approaches, problems persist that could have been solved. When policymakers cannot conceive of genuinely new frameworks, they recycle old responses to new crises.
The Simplicity Attractor documented in this series - the pattern by which populations under neurotoxic stress retreat to simple, familiar explanations and resist complexity - is the cognitive expression of the same degradation. Creativity and complexity tolerance share the same neural substrate. When one declines, the other declines with it.
The films are remakes. The songs are samples. The solutions are rehashed.
And quietly, in standardized testing rooms over three decades, the children have been showing us what is happening to the minds that would have made something new.
THE HONEST LIMITS
The causal chain proposed here - MNP/PFAS environmental load → hippocampal and PFC-DMN disruption → measurable decline in creative cognition → cultural derivative dominance - involves multiple steps, each of which carries uncertainty.
WHAT IS ESTABLISHED:
The Torrance score decline since 1990 is real, replicated, and statistically significant. Kim’s analysis of 272,599 tests is robust.
The neuroscience of creativity implicating PFC, hippocampus, and DMN is well-established.
MNP neurotoxicity targeting these specific systems is documented in animal models and increasingly in human data.
MNP environmental accumulation accelerating through this period is documented.
WHAT IS NOT ESTABLISHED:
A direct study linking MNP body burden to Torrance scores or equivalent creativity measures does not exist.
Population-level MNP exposure data with sufficient temporal resolution to correlate with the 1990 inflection is not available.
Educational and cultural factors are real contributors whose precise magnitude has not been separated from any neurotoxicant contribution.
The honest position: the MNP hypothesis is consistent with the data, has the right mechanism, and has the right timeline. It has not been directly tested. Given the magnitude of the Torrance decline and the documented vulnerability of creative cognition’s neural substrate to MNP exposure, it warrants direct investigation.
The fact that this investigation has not occurred - that no research program has systematically examined the relationship between environmental MNP load and creative cognitive development - is its own data point.
THE CONNECTIONS
This signal occupies a unique position in the framework. It is not the most acute signal. Nobody dies from declining creativity scores. But it may be the most structurally important.
The cognitive decline signals document the population losing the ability to process complexity. This signal documents the population losing the ability to generate novelty.
Together, they describe a civilization becoming less capable of solving the problems it faces: less able to think through complex multi-causal situations, and less able to imagine solutions it hasn’t tried before.
The anti-science movement is the behavioral expression of this: when creative and complex thinking both decline, populations retreat to the simple, familiar, and tribal. The anti-science movement is the Simplicity Attractor operating at civilizational scale.
The violence signals show what happens at the inhibitory end of cognition when the PFC degrades. This signal shows what happens at the generative end: the ideas don’t come.
And the ecological collapse signals that opened this series are now framed differently. We are losing species at rates that may not be recoverable. The scientists who would develop conservation strategies, the engineers who would design ecosystem interventions, the policymakers who would imagine new frameworks for environmental protection - they are drawing on a creative reservoir that the Torrance data tells us has been declining for thirty-five years.
The problems have become more complex. The minds available to address them have become less creative. The timing is not a coincidence.
SOURCES
Kyung Hee Kim, “The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking,” Creativity Research Journal, 2011, Vol 23, pp. 285-295 (272,599 subjects, kindergarten through adult, 1966-2008)
Kim interview, Rob Hopkins podcast, 2018: continuous decrease confirmed through 2018 data
William & Mary press coverage, 2010-2011
Newsweek, “The Creativity Crisis,” 2010 (Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman)
ScienceDirect (2022): PFC, hippocampus, dopamine as neural substrate of divergent thinking / creative cognition
ScienceDirect (2024): hippocampal volume predicts divergent thinking in children 8-12 years; hippocampal amnesia disrupts creative thinking
Nature Communications Biology (2024): DT neural patterns span DMN and frontoparietal control networks; dopamine-related neurotransmitters linked to creative cognition
Frontiers in Psychology (2015): meta-analysis confirming PFC involvement in all creative domains
PMC reviews on MNP hippocampal damage, monoamine disruption, prenatal MNP exposure and developmental cognitive effects
Box office data: 2023 top 10 all franchise/sequel/remake (multiple entertainment industry sources)