In this episode, we discuss the concept of brain rot, which is the phenomenon of people falling into a repetitive pattern of thought that makes it hard for them to hold complex ideas. Simone and I discuss why this might be happening, and why it happens so often.
00:00:00.000It 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?
00:00:10.580Like, does this person, why is this person interacting with me from their perspective?
00:00:15.820What's interesting is his wife isn't like that.
00:00:17.900She's very sensitive to what people are saying.
00:00:20.440I think the key is she maintains a relationship with her old sorority friends.
00:00:26.360And I'm pretty sure they're pretty catty and mean to each other and very competitive.
00:00:30.960So it's funny because you can look at it from one perspective and be like, gosh, you're in all these toxic relationships.
00:00:35.640But then from the other perspective, you'd be like, wow, thank goodness you're in all these toxic relationships because it keeps her sharp and entertaining.
00:00:42.080Because 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.
00:00:48.160You're not getting that feedback, the training.
00:00:50.840Well, and we're so used to being through all these different scrolling consumption pathways, just passive information and entertainment being served to us with no requirement that we serve anything back.
00:01:17.180It is wonderful to be here with you today.
00:01:18.660Today, we are going to talk about a concept that we internally call brain rot.
00:01:24.220And 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.
00:01:37.920And originally, it was sort of a theory.
00:01:40.480Like, it seems like this might be what's happening in their brains.
00:01:44.040And 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.
00:01:58.900And it is weird to me that other people don't seem to have noticed this.
00:02:02.660What people will say is, well, as people become older, they become stuck in their way.
00:02:08.160Or as people become older, there's some degree of cognitive decline.
00:02:11.240But what I am noticing here is not a general cognitive decline, but a very specific type of cognitive decline that is very noticeable.
00:02:20.760Specifically, 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.
00:02:47.680And 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 particular topic with any attempt to model the target of this loop.
00:03:07.540So they will not be thinking, how will this modify your perception of them?
00:03:12.700They will not be thinking, how does this telling them this further my goals?
00:03:16.660They will not be thinking, is this something individual wants to hear?
00:03:34.800So I have a very strong belief that this is a use it or lose it dynamic.
00:03:40.100That basically, and this is regardless of age too.
00:03:44.100This shows up across so much of the research I see.
00:03:46.720Basically, if you use something, it will maintain fairly good condition, be it your muscles, be it your eyes, be it whatever.
00:03:55.760And if you do not use it, it will atrophy.
00:03:57.960This seems to be backed up pretty well in research.
00:04:00.460For 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.
00:04:16.580Whereas actually a different study found that playing a video game did not correlate, like sort of inversely correlated with cognitive decline in older people.
00:04:24.480So like more engagement 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, AKA J-A-G-E-S, J-A-G-E-S, found that engagement in intellectual and creative activities may be associated with reduced risk of dementia.
00:04:49.140There'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, 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.
00:05:10.220And when we're talking about brain rot, we are really talking about forms of cognitive impairment, you know, this, this is, it's, it's bad.
00:05:19.220So I think that's a really huge thing.
00:05:20.980And that's one thing that makes me so against the concept of retirement, this idea that like, oh, I'll stop working.
00:05:27.640Yeah, you're consigning someone to death by allowing them to retire.
00:05:31.240I 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.
00:05:40.580I think at a time of more engaged communities.
00:05:42.860What 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.
00:05:52.400The type of cognitive decline that they experience is not general cognitive decline.
00:05:57.960It is very, very focused and leads to a very narrow set of behavioral patterns.
00:06:04.800Well, to me, it does not seem downstream.
00:06:07.640So 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, that is mentally emulating the people around them stops working because that's the specific thing that they're not using.
00:06:25.240And 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?
00:06:35.920Like, does this person, what, why is this person interacting with me from their perspective?
00:06:40.580Well, you see 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 shit that you care nothing about because no one is pushing back on them.
00:06:56.180They've gotten past that point where they have to actually keep people engaged in order to get them to do what they want or pay attention.
00:07:01.920Actually, I've noticed this as well. Yeah, brain rot, you do get early brain rot in people who are very senior in hierarchies.
00:07:12.600I've also noticed it in people in hierarchies.
00:07:14.000If they're surrounded by yes men, you know, there are lots of people who are senior in hierarchies who are sharp as a knife and very good at mentally modeling others and very engaging because they, they force themselves into positions in life where they have to.
00:07:29.320Where people are telling them to shut up sometimes.
00:07:30.960Yeah, where people, yeah, keep them in line.
00:07:33.860But no, I've also noticed it disproportionately with people in bureaucratic jobs, like people who work in government positions and stuff like that, where they seem to fall into brain rot much faster than other positions.
00:07:44.780And that would make sense if it's that you do not need to worry about mentally modeling others.
00:07:52.380Like, I think also having a lot of kids or grandkids around is helpful because they, they let you know when they are bored and you have to constantly fight to earn their respect and attention.
00:08:04.080I mean, the thing is that some people are clearly resistant to it.
00:08:06.880So we were on a Jim Rutt's show recently and he is my dad's age.
00:08:12.020He actually worked with my dad running the Santa Fe Institute and they.
00:09:04.260I think 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.
00:10:37.740And if that's the case in radical life extension, if this can happen to any human, it's a terrible idea.
00:10:43.120Because the one thing about brain rot is that once it's set in, like if you at all enter any stage of your life where like for five to six years, you're just not having people push back against you regularly, it's probably permanent.
00:10:58.100I think my argument though, is that it's, while it does correlate with age, I, and I think it also correlates with other physical aspects of cognitive decline that I have seen it in teenagers.
00:11:17.020And a really interesting place where we see it and started talking about it a lot was in our own toddlers when they first started learning how to speak.
00:11:25.540When all they could really talk about was like, I'm doing this, I'm doing that.
00:11:30.660Our, our almost two-year-old Titan only speaks in loops about her top thoughts, which is look a baby deer, look a baby deer.
00:12:50.860But it's interesting that that can exist both in very old people, but we also see this basically in toddlers before they develop a theory of mind.
00:12:59.640Before they can understand what we need to hear.
00:13:03.420So they're just going on about, well, this is an interesting thing I've noticed about brain rot, especially at the early stages.
00:13:09.740So there's a later stage where it's like just narrative loops, right?
00:13:13.300Where it's just, I did X yesterday, or I did X growing up, or this thing happened to me and here it is without any thought as to whether or not that is useful information to the person who's hearing about it.
00:13:23.620Some, it's at the early stages, it is really, really, really focused on self-identity reinforcement.
00:13:31.700By that, what I mean is they will focus on narrative loops that are meant to try to reinforce the way they think about themselves through conveying it to you.
00:13:42.940Is they will tell you stories about themselves that are meant to reinforce a way that they desire to see themselves without any concern as to, is this actually modifying the recipient's perspective of me in a way I wanted to modify their perspective of me?
00:14:00.300And without any concern of, does this other person care?
00:14:04.100And, you know, where you'll really get this frequently I've seen in elderly people is often in medical stories, where they'll be like, I had X injury and I went to the doctor and the doctor did this, and then the doctor did this, and then I had this follow-up.
00:14:18.300And it's like, why would anybody care?
00:14:47.920Like you should, you must say thank you.
00:14:49.800I say, if you say thank you to people, more people will like you and be nice to you and you'll get more things you want.
00:14:56.120And I want to make it really clear to our children that we don't just do manners because that's what you do, because you need to be conformist.
00:15:04.420You do manners because if you want to get nice things from people, you have to make their lives more comfortable.
00:15:11.300You have to show them courtesy and respect.
00:15:12.780What's the Emily Post line about this?
00:15:14.600Doesn't she have something on like why manners exist or why etiquette exists?
00:15:17.640Well, yeah, I mean, roughly speaking, I have this, Malcolm knows this is like 1942 Emily Post book that I considered to be my Bible basically.
00:15:27.640But she basically explains that etiquette and manners are not arbitrary, dumb rules like they were necessarily first invented in Versailles by King Louis XIV to imprison the nobility.
00:15:39.540What good manners really are is making social transactions smooth, making them happen efficiently and successfully.
00:15:50.220So I think a lot of people think about manners as unnecessary scraping and flourishing and doing all these dumb things that don't make a difference when really it's about elegant, efficient, effective transactions between people.
00:16:04.520And that's how I want our children to understand etiquette and manners.
00:16:10.360And definitely throughout this 1942 Emily Post book that I have, it constantly reminds people quite harshly that no one gives a fuck what you think or feel and your job is to make them comfortable.
00:17:05.660Well, no, and I think you see this in online comments.
00:17:07.600You know, a lot of the comments that are just like when they're just like attacking somebody randomly, they come off as a form of like early brain rot.
00:17:16.320Because that's not a thing that a sane person would do.
00:17:18.720A sane person wouldn't think, I have a negative emotional reaction when reading something this person wrote or, you know, seeing something this person did.
00:17:30.040Therefore, I'll be like, you're a weirdo or you must be like an idiot, you know.
00:17:54.120But I think that people don't realize that in engaging in this type of behavior, they are really just exacerbating mental problems that they've already built within their mind.
00:18:04.400And they just get worse and worse and worse until because the Internet allows for new forms of brain rot, i.e.
00:18:11.000you don't necessarily need to interact with other people in your daily life.
00:18:14.460You're not getting that feedback, the training.
00:18:17.760You can be stuck in self-reinforcement loops entirely within a digital environment.
00:18:21.800Well, and we're so used to being through all these different scrolling consumption pathways and social media and in just like on Netflix and every other streaming platform and through many games, just passive information and entertainment being served to us with no requirement that we serve anything back.
00:18:59.740So there's a form of NPCism that's just like urban monoculture to the extreme.
00:19:04.580Well, you can think of it like stasis.
00:19:06.840So those people could be saved if they were presented with memes that pulled them out of the loop, right?
00:19:11.500Yeah, these individuals, yeah, they're like in a stasis, but they like are reacting the way they're reacting because they're sort of afraid of judgment of society.
00:19:21.160Yeah, well, they haven't been given the mental and mimetic tools that would allow them to get out of those defaults.
00:19:45.200Now, one thing I wanted to ask you is the extent to which you think our brain rot epidemic is also manifest now in modern media.
00:19:54.700So we with our kids have been watching The Magic School Bus because we're trying to watch – like find shows that they like that we also think aren't just complete nonsense.
00:20:06.060And Magic School Bus is great because it teaches pretty good things about science and it's also like pretty funny.
00:21:45.200I'd also say I'd really love to see like a Rick and Morty version of The Magic School Bus.
00:21:50.260I often think when watching The Magic School Bus, this would have been so much more than Back to the Future.
00:21:57.440Good source material for a Rick and Morty-like show in that Miss Frizzle has so little regard for the safety and life of her students just consistently throughout the show.
00:22:11.380She is so psychotic in the ways that she treats them.
00:22:15.200Best thing about time travel is that it's easy on the tires.
00:23:00.740And there are episodes where she will just, like, have the students doing something and be blatantly flirting with someone she clearly has a past relationship with.
00:23:11.360Here I'm thinking of the episode where they are on the school bus engineer guy.
00:23:15.220There's also so many scenes in the show where when you watch it and you watch what Miss Frizzle puts the kid through, you're like, oh my god.
00:23:23.120Like, it's genuinely more horrifying than maybe your average Rick and Morty episode.
00:41:24.340You know, do you have, you know, of my family, I'd say like the middling success level is probably runs a company that's worth over a hundred million dollars.
00:41:37.240Middling is top 0.1% probably not necessarily in terms of wealth, but I would just say broad success by our definition.
00:41:44.420Like has several kids is generally happy is generally healthy is not in financial trouble and has a position professionally of non-trivial influence.