From: bencollver@tilde.pink
Under 40's Declining Memory
===========================
A Large US Study Finds Memory Decline Surge in Young People
Cognitive Disability
====================
Has social media engineered the collapse of the human mind? The
answer is yes, if we believe the results of a measurable scientific
research of this catastrophe, which was recently published in the
journal Neurology. The paper, by Ka-Ho Wong and colleagues, is a
data-rich examination of 4.5 million survey responses. Its finding is
that "serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making
decisions" is no longer a fringe complaint, but a surging public
health crisis.
Those 4.5 million survey responses were gathered over a decade
through the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Its
outcome is clear on the data, more and more younger people have:
serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions
because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition.
The numbers are unambiguous. From 2013 to 2023, the age-adjusted
prevalence of such "cognitive disability" in U.S. adults rose from
5.3 to 7.4 percent. But the real shock lies in who changed. Among
adults 18 to 39 years old, the supposed cognitive prime, the
prevalence nearly doubled, from 5.1 to 9.7 percent. It climbed across
every racial and economic line. It tripled even among the
highest-income bracket, those meant to be buffered by privilege.
Cognitive disability
This being said the authors do acknowledge that "Younger adults,
racial minorities, and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups are
disproportionately affected, highlighting the urgent need for
targeted interventions." And, with scientific rigor, the researchers
"excluded participants who self-reported depression ... to better
identify non-psychiatric cognitive impairment."
Because what they have found is not a disorder hidden in a
subpopulation. It is the first measurable biological signature of a
civilization rewiring its own nervous system.
Disattention
============
For fifteen years we have been building, at planetary scale, a
machinery of disattention: social platforms that auction attention by
the millisecond; search engines that outsource memory; feeds that
weaponize emotion for engagement. The result is an economy that grows
in inverse proportion to our capacity to think. Now the data have
arrived like a coroner's note. The youngest generation, those who
have never known a world before the machine, are reporting that they
can no longer concentrate, remember, or decide.
The authors, although cautious, propose the polite hypotheses. Social
isolation. Increased reliance on technology. Maybe "greater
awareness" of cognitive problems. One almost applaud the decorum and
understatements. A "greater awareness" of forgetting, what a phrase.
As though we are choosing to notice that our minds are leaking.
People are not more willing to report it; they are less able to
conceal it.
The study itself betrays the timeline. The statistically significant
rise began in 2016, four years before lockdowns, before "long COVID."
The pandemic did not cause the decline; it simply sealed us inside
the apparatus that was already doing the work.
And what an apparatus. We have built a trillion-dollar system to
externalize thought, then act astonished when the interior world
collapses. To name "reliance on technology" as a risk factor is like
diagnosing "submersion" in a drowning victim.
What the paper records is not a warning but a postscript, the data
catching up to what daily life has been telling us for years.
Hovering Mind
=============
A friend of mine, a novelist, disciplined, once able to lose herself
for hours in text, told me recently that she can no longer read a
book. Her eyes move, but the mind skitters. "It's as though my
attention has been trained to hover," she said, "like a cursor that
can't click." The Wong et al. study gives her condition a
bureaucratic dignity: cognitive disability. Her failure is no longer
moral; it is systemic. She is not weak. She is collateral damage from
being constantly online.
Yet this is larger than individual suffering. A population unable to
concentrate, remember, or choose is not merely an unproductive
workforce. It is an ungovernable polity. Democracy presumes a citizen
capable of following an argument across paragraphs, of remembering
yesterday's promise when voting tomorrow. If cognition fragments, so
does self-government. A people who cannot remember are condemned not
just to repeat the past, but to be told what the past was, and to
believe it.
The political question of our century is no longer who controls the
means of production? but who controls the means of perception?
Perpetual Stimulation
=====================
In that light, the paper's most haunting choice, the exclusion of the
depressed, acquires philosophical weight. The researchers sought a
"clean" signal, free of affect. They wished to see the thing itself.
And what they found was a doubling. Perhaps this is the affect.
Perhaps the mind, faced with an environment of perpetual stimulation,
begins to disable itself as a last act of defense, a biological
attempt to lower the volume by breaking the dial.
Meanwhile, at the far end of the data, a small mercy: among adults
70 and older, the prevalence of cognitive disability has declined.
They are, in statistical terms, the last generation to have lived
most of life before the feed. Their synapses were wired by books,
conversations, and silence. They can still recall what it felt like
to finish a thought.
The young cannot. They are digital natives in the truest, bleakest
sense, born in a country that remembers nothing of itself.
Wong's paper will be filed, cited, and forgotten like the rest. But
read plainly, it documents the first epidemiological evidence of a
cognitive collapse engineered by design. The authors close with
professional understatement: the findings "warrant further
investigation." One hopes we remain capable of conducting it.
Stay curious
Colin
From:
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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