Are we getting stupider? |
Brain rot is everywhere. Our feeds are filled with slop, misinformation is ubiquitous, and AI is increasingly doing our thinking for us.
And the crisis goes even deeper: Math and reading scores are falling, trust in science has been declining, and our attention spans are shrinking. Some even say we’re in a Golden Age of Stupidity.
But all is not lost when it comes to matters of the mind — at least, according to Andrew Budson, a neurologist at Boston University who specializes in and researches memory disorders. He says there’s definitely a way to reclaim our brains, and he talks all about it on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
How does our memory work?
Once we are able to pay attention to something, it then gets stored by a structure that’s deep in our temporal lobe called the hippocampus. The hippocampus actually takes the separate sights and sounds and smells and thoughts and feelings that you’re having at that instant, and it binds them all together into a coherent hole.
This bound representation is the representation of your memory. It then gets tagged with an index that will allow you to retrieve that information later.
Is it like a filing cabinet?
Yeah, it’s a little bit like a file cabinet, but the twist is that the files are just the blueprints or the schematic of the memory. What your brain needs to do is to take this blueprint and very actively recreate the memory. It........