How The Internet Prematurely Ages Our Brains

In this thought-provoking episode, we delve into the concept of "brain rot" - a specific type of cognitive decline that affects people across all age groups and social strata. We explore how modern lifestyles, social media, and changing social norms contribute to this phenomenon, and discuss strategies to combat it. Key topics include:

Speaker: It could be that the reason they're on these simple narrative loops is because they are unable to think or ask themselves, does this person care? Like, does this person, what, why is this person interacting with me from their perspective?

Speaker 2: what's interesting is his wife isn't like that. She's very sensitive to what people are saying.

Speaker: I think

Speaker 2: the key is I, I, she maintains a relationship with her old sorority friends. And I'm pretty sure they're pretty catty and mean to each other and very competitive. So it's funny because you can look at it from one perspective and be like, gosh, your in all these toxic relationships. But then from the other perspective, you'd be like, wow, thank goodness. Your in all these toxic relationships. Cause it keeps her sharp and entertaining.

Speaker: Because the internet allows for new forms of brain rot, i. e. you don't necessarily need to interact with other people in your daily life. You're not getting that

Speaker 2: feedback. The training.

Well, and we're so used to being through all these different scrolling consumption pathways , just passive information and entertainment being served to [00:01:00] us with no requirement that we serve anything back.

There's no reciprocity. It is unidirectional.

Speaker: Do you think people with deep brain rot are really sentient or do you think that it's like not a big problem for them to die?

Speaker 2: Yeah, not a big problem for them today.

Would you like to know more?

Speaker: Hello, Simone! It is wonderful to be here with you today. Today we are going to talk about a concept. That we internally call brain rot and it is something that I like proposed as a mechanism of action For a way that people, as they get older, begin to fall into a particular type of thought that makes it impossible for them to hold complex ideas.

And originally it was sort of a theory, like, it seems like this might be what's happening in their brains.

Speaker 3: Mm hmm.

Speaker: And since I have had that theory and interacted with older people again and again and again and see it play out exactly like this over and over again, I have now moved it from theory to fact, and it is weird to [00:02:00] me that other people don't seem to have noticed this.

What people will say is Well, as people become older, they become stuck in their way, or as people become older, there's some degree of cognitive decline. But what I am noticing in here is not a general cognitive decline, but a very specific type of cognitive decline that is very noticeable. Specifically, what brain rot is, is when an individual reaches a stage of brain rot and you talk to them, all they will be able to do, or what they will default into, is repeating.

Simple narrative loops that are about painting a picture for themselves, about who they are and painting a picture to you about who they are. And so what these will look like is if, for example, being infirmed is particularly important to their self identity, they will go into a narrative loop of something that happened to them around that [00:03:00] particular topic with Attempts to model the target of this loop.

So they will not be thinking, how will this modify your perception of them? They will not be thinking, how does this telling them this further my goals? They're all not be thinking, is this something individual wants to hear? It is and so the question is, is why does this act behavior pattern seem to happen so, so, so frequently?

Speaker 3: Mm hmm.

Speaker: So Simone, what are your thoughts and I can give my thoughts on this as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I have a very strong belief that this is a use it or lose it dynamic. That basically, and this is regardless of age too this shows up across so much of the research I see. Basically, if you use something it will maintain fairly good condition.

Be it your muscles, be it your eyes, be it whatever. And if you do not use it, it will atrophy. This seems to be backed up pretty well in [00:04:00] research. For example, there's, there's one study called television viewing and cognitive decline in older age. findings from the English longitudinal study of aging that found that watching over three and a half hours of TV correlated with greater cognitive decline because you're just sitting there passively watching.

Whereas actually a different study found that playing a video game did not correlate, like sort of inversely correlated with cognitive decline in older people. So like more engagement. It specifically also like another study called cultural engagement and incidents of cognitive impairment a six year longitudinal follow up of the Japan gerontological evaluation study, a.

K. A. J. A. G. E. S. J. G. J. G. S. Found that engagement and intellectual and creative activities may be associated with reduced risk of dementia. Again, like, use it. or lose it. There's also another study called Cognitive Leisure Activities and Future Risk of Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Synthetic Review and Meta Analysis.

That also found once again [00:05:00] that there is increasing evidence that participation in cognitively stimulating leisure activities may contribute to a reduction of risk of dementia and cognitive impairment later in life. And when we're talking about brain rot, we are really talking about Forms of, of cognitive impairment.

You know, this, this is, it's, it's bad. So I think that's a really huge thing. And that's one thing that makes me so against the concept of retirement. This idea that like, Oh, I'll stop. You're

Speaker: consigning someone to death by allowing them to retire.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, unless their idea of retirement is like, okay, well now I'm going to go, you know, volunteer and build houses and support my community, which is what retirement used to be, I think at a time of more engaged communities.

Speaker: What I would push back on is you're like, okay, use it or lose it, but use what or use your mind, challenge yourself, learn new things. This type of cognitive decline that they experience is not general cognitive decline. It is very, very [00:06:00] focused and leads to a very narrow set of behavioral patterns to me.

It does not seem downstream. So I can give you a hypothesis here to give you an example of what I mean by this. But what it could be is specifically what leads to brain rot is the part of their brain that mentally, that does theory of mind of other people. Exactly. That is mentally emulating the people around them.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker: Stops working. So. Because that's the specific thing that they're not using. It could be that the reason they're on these simple narrative loops is because they are unable to think or ask themselves, does this person care? Like, does this person, what, why is this person interacting with me from their perspective?

Well, you see

Speaker 2: this a lot from more senior, and I'm saying senior in a hierarchical perspective, people, where they just, Go on and have this problem where they're saying a bunch of s**t that you care nothing about because no one is pushi