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How brain rot may cripple us very soon

There was a time when one of life's little pleasures was to sit down in a quiet corner with a book and spend an hour or two just letting the story embrace you.

A well-written book can create images, sounds, tastes and emotions that even the best movie fails to match.

Those book writers who use words like clay to sculpt an experience out of pure imagination are truly experts at their job and their works often far outlive those of more contemporary media such as film and video.

However, we now have a problem.

The problem is that people just aren't reading like they used to.

Being able to truly enjoy a good book requires that the reader is able to maintain their engagement with the writing for more than just a few seconds at a time. That is not a good fit for a generation that has grown up with TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts and instant-messaging as their primary interface with the world

To truly enojoy a book requires significantly more commitment, focus and concentration than one normally associates with doomscrolling or flicking through an endless stream of 30 second video clips.

This is not just a perception, it's a reality and this piece from ScienceAlert gives some insight. It references a survey that "charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults".

That's pretty significant!

It's also pretty worrying.

Like everything, reading is a skill best honed and preserved by regular use. If you stop reading for meaning and enjoyment then your ability to do so when needed will almost certainly have decreased.

I guess there's those who will argue that "reading is so old-school, if you want entertainment or information just watch a video" and there's probably some degree of truth to that in today's hi-tech, "connected" world.

However, when you watch a movie or entertainment video your imagination doesn't really get much of a work-out does it? When something is described in words, as on the pages of a book, it is your own mind that does all the "special effects" and conjures up the images. This likely exercises parts of the brain that would sit idle if you were watching the same story on a screen.

The brain is like a muscle -- if you don't exercise it then its abilities will wane and atrophy.

Now that we also have AI doing much of our thinking for us, perhaps it's time to worry about where this may be leading.

There are already plenty of studies coming out that indicate the rather significant "dumbing down" effect on the brains of those who rely heavily on AI for research and problem-solving. Combine this with the switching off of the "imagination" and "visualisation" centres of our brains and we might be headed to a very dark place indeed.

Instead of having to worry about a modern sedentary lifestyle weakening our bodies, perhaps it's time to worry about an intellectually sedentary lifestyle weakening our brains.

I think I'll go ask Gemini and watch a few YouTube Shorts to see if I can figure out the best way to address this issue. Nah, I'm bored with this, I'll do something different... or maybe I won't. What's for dinner?

Carpe Diem folks!

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