The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain

https://www.wired.com/story/aging-brain-volume/

by jamesgill • 3 years ago

99 64 3 years ago

nehal3m2• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230509160741/https://www.wired...

because occulted technology is sucking the life-force out of you and selling back to you some part of it as electricity. the trick is the fractional way they do this, only taking a 'negligible' fraction of each of the millions of humans...

but it adds up, and what is worse, is that it's greedy... so the fraction keeps going up and up and up, sucking more and more down faster and faster

but most will surely prefer the academic explanation, a lot less magic in that one than in this comment

nehal3m2• 3 years ago

And yet more mystery.

hn_throawlles3• 3 years ago

the "mystery" is part of it

it creates a curiosity, which has a softkind of drawing gravitational pull. I know I'm vulnerable to this.

The mystery drives motivation, hence the connection to energy (the capacity to do work). the curiosity propels my own motivation (willingness to spend my energy) to investigate these things, and others like it.

edit: I am sorry that what I have had to think to make my own sense of this complex reality upsets some people.

sdwr• 3 years ago

As an occasionally crazy person myself, I agree. Tried living without electricity for a few weeks in 2020, everything felt much more sharp and visceral.

Feels like modern tech has a numbing, coddling effect. You can explain it however you want, but I experienced the same thing as this guy, that electricity "middlemans" my life force, trading the high and lows for predictability, BNW Soma-style.

hattmall2• 3 years ago

I mean duh, how is that surprising? It's entirely about convience, entertainment and comfort.

voisin• 3 years ago

I would be very interested to hear more about your weeks of living without electricity. I assume this wasn’t just going camping but rather you had the remaining components of modern life (running water, toilet) but by no electricity did you also not have a fridge?

mise_en_place• 3 years ago

Advertising did the same too, as did TV and radio. Attention is a finite and scarce resource, that’s why companies have always targeted it.

wyldberry3• 3 years ago

It's been interesting to watch the health and fitness space around brain health and correlations with diet and exercise. People seem to finally be converging around some common truths that have been known for thousands of years. I All roads seem to be pointing towards finding a balance between what we are evolved for as a species and modern life.

ben_w• 3 years ago

We didn't know anything about diet thousands of years ago beyond "this tastes nice" and "I'm hungry", we merely endured starvation, prions, and scurvy… or died because we couldn't endure it. Sometimes we just got lucky with good fishing or fertile farmland, but we were never in control.

I'm not confident enough about the history of exercise to make an equivalent claim for that.

JohnFen8• 3 years ago

We didn't know anything about diet thousands of years ago beyond "this tastes nice" and "I'm hungry"

I'm not so sure. Some ancient societies had a pretty advanced idea of what makes a good diet. And people in any time period can tell that "if I eat this way, I feel better and if I eat that way, I feel worse".

xeromal• 3 years ago

Yup, national height increasing rapidly after the advent of easy food is a clear indication humans have been malnourished for a long time

wyldberry3• 3 years ago

Yet we clearly prioritized certain foods and the human body adapted around those foods. Over time tribes converged on what plants were safe to eat (and which had defense chemicals that didn't make them suitable to eat), and prioritized certain animals for hunting.

One thing I find interesting with that is how tightly coupled mongol armies were to an animal based diet, and how they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies.

You'll often find many people not willing to wade into discussing food and exercise anymore because peiple treat it almost religiously. It makes discussion hard in the space because now food is so tightly coupled with society and culture.

We know the ancient greeks and romans exercised. Warriors of successful societies prioritized being fit of body. To have a discussion we'd have to get to common definitions of what exercise is.

tayo42• 3 years ago

how many thousands? eating kosher goes back thousands of years already. you would have to go back a long time like pre agriculture. that is about 10k years. that is a lot of generations of people to adapt.

bashmelek• 3 years ago

From my own readings, fowl meat was known to be healthy to the Greeks, and Cabbage was a stereotypical prescription to sick Romans.

akprasad• 3 years ago

As an aside, ancient cultural knowledge for finding and preparing food is surprisingly sophisticated and non-obvious [1], even if it does not lend itself to an explicit rational model:

A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

shane_b• 3 years ago

the history of exercise is just living. not that long ago, just living required constant movement. in my own childhood i had to do a ton of labor that was just living, not a job.

uoaei• 3 years ago

People thousands of years ago were not dumb. They had probably roughly the same pattern recognition skills as you or I. Just because they didn't have "physics" (mechanistic explanations of the effects they observed) doesn't mean they didn't have some understanding of good vs bad stuff.

Take the entirety of Chinese medicine, for example: there is a reason it's still popular, in that it works. It may not work how we think it "should" per Western standards in terms of direct methods of action of known compounds in the substances being ingested, but it still works: probably some combination of actual "healthy" compounds as well as a good dose of placebo.

Diets were likely similar for those of old: that guy over there only eats berries and rabbits and somehow he's been fine this whole time! He is strong like a bear, because he eats the things bears eat. This guy over here eats only foraged greens and is suffering from something we can't discern so we just say the forest spirits are mad at him.

Observational learning is present in many animals of much lower intelligence than humans even tens of thousands of years ago. Patronizing speculations of historical people only serves to obscure the notion of civilization's progress over these long time spans so what, we can pretend time began when writing started?

throw747742• 3 years ago

If this were true, people would have died of scurvy at random as opposed to only when forced into a restricted diet at sea.

Aaronstotle• 3 years ago

I'm hopeful that with a lot of these realizations, we change our habitats to be more in tune with our nature. Something like walking meetings or setting time aside to move.

Humans are incredibly intelligent, however intelligence doesn't mean we should forget our ancestral roots. We are meant to move; sitting in offices and eating junk food while getting information blasted into our brains from glowing rectangles is a recipe for disaster.

I'm optimistic that we will transition to a more human-centric way of living/working.

wyldberry3• 3 years ago

Sounds better than the 40k future.

WalterBright2• 3 years ago

I've seen a similar article about the Australian natives who walked 5-9 miles per day.

mkehrt• 3 years ago

That it's good for them? Or bad?

I walk about that much, and if I don't I start to get pretty antsy.

JohnFen8• 3 years ago

10 miles a day doesn't sound like a remarkable amount to me at all.

namaria6• 3 years ago

What portion of humanity do you think actually move that much?

WalterBright2• 3 years ago

I've been trying to do 5 miles a day, and only seem to average about 3.5.

mrwnmonm4• 3 years ago

Modernity... LOL

anthk• 3 years ago

Move you a?? and so some exercise.

mrwnmonm4• 3 years ago

So ya so

julianeon• 3 years ago

tl;dr:

It's exercise, or physical activity. That's why these tribe members' brains are aging more slowly.

v8xi• 3 years ago

Reminds me of this article which talks about how the introduction of the 'western' diet corresponded with a systemic deterioration of societal health: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/04/the-modern-diet-is-a...

CatWChainsaw• 3 years ago

Maybe we'll finally come around to the idea that intelligence is not the be-all, end-all... wisdom deserves respect too. Of course first we'll nearly annihilate ourselves, but whatever, you people want that to happen so get on with it. (rage-downvote harder while you're at it, truth hurts don't it.)

The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain

Related Stories