Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (4 page)

You walk purposely toward the kitchen, bathroom, or Oval Office, and on arrival bewilderedly wonder, “Why am I here?” Did you come for a paper towel? Lip ointment? Are you supposed to sign the telecommunications bill?

Below are several brief scenarios. In each you wind up in a room, searching for something though you know no longer what. Select the most likely object of desire and provide an explanation to account for your choice. There may be several correct answers, but there is only one I have in mind. There are no incorrect answers, but
one is more correct than the others. Do you know how to use telepathy? It could come in handy.

ANSWERS:

If you answered any of these correctly, you should tell me which horse to bet on at Meadowlands Racetrack.

You’re walking down a noisy street and your cell phone rings. You can hear only snatches of what’s being said by the caller—the reception is lousy. Nevertheless, you try to piece together the meaning of what’s being said and carry on your part of the back-and-forth. You’ve surpassed the quota on the number of times you can say “What?” so you say, “Wow,” and “That’s great!” and “Unh-hunh.” Later, in quieter times, it becomes evident that you’ve grievously misspoken. What was it that you said yes to?

“… my favorite relative… perfect match… nobody needs two… fantastic… seven a.m., Tuesday… Mayo Clinic.”

You agreed to donate a kidney.

“So nice to meet… soul mate… forever… I don’t believe it!… won’t have regrets… minister or justice of the peace?”

Uh-oh. You promised to get married.

“… middle of semester… no refund… so could I?… Totally awesome.… You’re the best father in the world.… Where’s Thailand?”

Bankrolled by you, Bobby is dropping out of college to explore the sex industry in Thailand.

“… specially selected… one of five valuable prizes.… Act now or offer not good.… Shipping and handling… expiration date?… Outboard motor not included.”

Are you sure you want to buy a boat? Too late now.

“… leg hurts… not complaining.… Shirley’s son visits daily.… Luke’s old room?… Wouldn’t be in your way.… When?”

Lucky you. Your mother’s moving in with you.

“My wife and I wondering… like adventure?… Get to know you better… hot tub… just us… protection.”

You’re such a swinger! Hope you like the couple next door.

Finally! Some great news about the bad news. Yes, our mental agility is no longer what it was in our twenties and thirties, but the reason for this, says Michael Ramscar, a linguistic researcher in Germany, is that we oldsters know too much. Our cerebrums are filled with more facts than are contained in all the editions of Trivial Pursuit. Another guy—not Ramscar but Daniel Levitin, who wrote
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
, cites a 2011 study that says on average, we absorb the equivalent of 174 newspapers’
worth of information per day, which is five times the amount we sucked up in 1986. In the same way that it might take you longer to find that dry cleaning receipt in an overstuffed drawer full of odds and ends, so it might take you a long time to rummage through your gray matter before coming up with the name of that actress who was married to the guy from that show starring the one we thought was so funny—you know, from the gay thing? Ramscar programmed a computer to learn a certain number of new words and commands daily. He compared the computer’s performance when it “knew” as little as a young adult to its performance when it had absorbed as much data as an older adult. The “older” computer had a slower processing speed: Ramscar chalked that up to its having more stuff to process.

And the stuff just keeps a-comin’. Ninety percent of all the data in the world has been produced in the last two years. Six thousand YouTube videos are posted a minute—and that figure was computed in 2011; by now there’s probably not a number high enough to convey how overwhelming it all is. Here’s another cocktail party statistic: The amount of information we generate every two days is equal to the amount produced from the beginning of civilization until 2003. That factoid comes from Eric Schmidt, formerly of
Google, so you can partly blame him for all your mental clutter.

How to make room for new stuff to be overwhelmed by? Perhaps selective forgetting is the answer.

Yes, it is an assuagement and a palliative to know that at least until the age of sixty, our vocabulary augments and enhances itself as we peregrinate and wend our way into senectitude, senescence, and sesquipedalianitis. It is also nice that in our olditude we are better at big-picture thinking and more empathetic. Still, by the advanced age of twenty there is a very good chance that the prefrontal cortex—the real brains of the brain, responsible for problem-solving, decision-making, and complex thought—has already begun to shrivel. Humans, by the way, are the only animals whose brains are definitively known to atrophy with age and—yay us again—we are also sui generis in suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. (Recent studies suggest that cats may also be susceptible, which would make them as dotty as some of their owners.) As distinctions go, dementia may not be as monumental as, say, the opposable thumb. It is not, however, necessarily the first episode in a story that ends with your caregiver finding the butter dish in the drawer of your bedside table. To tell you the truth, I’m not guaranteeing that this won’t happen to you—genes being what they pigheadedly are. For the time being, there’s nothing that can be done to prevent Alzheimer’s, but in the last few years, scientists and
entrepreneurs have been claiming there may be measures you can take to minimize, slow down, or even reverse cognitive decline.

They would not have said this as recently as a few decades ago. Then, most biologists would have told you that your brain is fully formed during childhood and, like a photograph after it’s been developed, is doomed to degrade thereafter with neurons (nerve cells) fading like pigment on paper until you succumb to senility. Forget senility. Today we regard Alzheimer’s and other dementias as diseases rather than as consequences of normal aging. Moreover, we now consider the brain to be as labile as a digital image in the hands of a Photoshop fiend. The three-pound wrinkly glop of glopoplasm in your skull contains about a hundred billion neurons, one for every human being who ever be’d. Each neuron can hook up with up to ten thousand others (polygamy-style, not serially monogamously). Hence there are at least one hundred trillion neural connections in your brain, which is more than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy, but who’s counting.

Not only does the brain have a lifelong ability to create new neurons; like a government with an unlimited highway budget, it has an endless capacity to build new roadways. Networks of linked neurons communicate chemically and electrically encoded data to one another
(
Hey, neuron, pass it on: That stove is hot!
) at junctures called
synapses
. Fresh neural trails are generated whenever we experience something new—learn the tango, try a liverwurst canapé, take a different route to work. Repeat the activity and the pathway will be reinforced. This is why London cabbies, whose job requires them to memorize a mesh of twenty-five thousand streets and thousands of landmarks, were found to have larger hippocampi than the city’s bus drivers, who are responsible for learning only a few routes. The hippocampus plays a major role in memory formation. This is also why certain regions of the brains of bilinguals are bigger than the corresponding regions of monolinguals,
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