This Is Your Faulty Brain, On a Microchip

Take a good look at the downward trend of this graph—it's important. It's the reason why you're only getting worse at first-person shooters and why you never feel as sharp as you were yesterday. It's the human condition.


Your Mind Is Declining

Starting in your 20s—not old age—behavioral evidence suggests that you enter a linear cascade of general cognitive decline. (Yes, it's depressing. No, the claim isn't based upon some quack study.)

This decline is notably seen in tasks that are highly mentally demanding, like speed of processing (how quickly you handle incoming information), attention, working memory (how well you manipulate and keep information active in your mind), and, of course, long term memory.

In real life, these effects are seen in everything from how long it takes to learn a new skill to how quickly you can recall a factoid. They're with us all day, every day.

Humans, of course, are adaptive creatures, and the human mind is the most incredible biological machine in existence. All hope is not lost. We already develop coping mechanisms, and expanded experience often minimizes the impact of our declining cognition. (Experience is represented by "world knowledge" on the graph above.) But in an era during which anything seems possible, could we significantly alter the course of this graph?

Could we make the three green, three blue and four grey lines stay level...or even go up?


What You Can Do About It Now

There's a simple mantra in circles of cognition psychologists: "Use it or lose it."

Before we delve in to research on the matter, consider this (old fogies in the audience). Do you remember a time when you remembered every person's phone number you knew? It was probably around 1995. You were a human telephone book, speed dialing mere acquaintances as easily as loved ones, without a Rolodex in sight.

Now that your cellphone is your main means of communication, how many numbers do you remember? How many close friends are in your address book instead of your mind?

That's use it or lose it, or it would be, should we find ourselves unable to remember phone numbers (if we ever again actually tried).

Our long term memory, the way the brain saves its files when they are not actively in use, is considered in most circles to be of a limitless capacity. But if we don't push our own minds, they will atrophy, not unlike a metaphorical muscle.

Countless studies link general engaging lifestyle habits, like having a challenging job, keeping hobbies, problem solving, social interaction and learning new skills, to one's cognitive health. Such actions are even associated to the delay and predictability of Alzheimer's.

So just as lifestyle can affect positive change in cognition—and potentially alter the course of that graph on its own—we must realize that offloading processes, like letting a computer remember things for us, has its own risks.

But if our quest is to balance that graph of cognitive decline to a flatline, we very well may need to bring in the sci fi. What if we invented, say, a neurally connected hard drive to give us some backup?

Continued at link . . .


http://gizmodo.com/5495086/this-is-your-faulty-brain-on-a-microchip