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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 somethi
Published on 1 year, 3 months ago