Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Being Mentally Slow
Henry K van Eyken wrote: (01)
> With life expectancies lengthening, the slowing of mental functioning
> would be an interesting area for potential digital augmentation... (02)
Somewhere, someone pointed out that there is less oxygen in the
atmosphere than there was 100 and some years ago. (03)
I don't doubt it. We're burning the rainforests in the southern
hemisphere, and cutting down anything that looks like timber in the
northern one. Eventually, the whole planet will look like Easter
Island (whose civilization evaporated when they used up all the
trees) or Ireland (which was close enough to England to import,
but only by a knucle's whisker.) (04)
Meanwhile, global warming and the pollution we're dumping into
the sea are killing off the plankton, which is an even more
important problem. (05)
And the greenhouse gases and other by products of overpopulation
are driving down the percentage of oxygen as other gases increase
-- not only because we have more people, but because we need
more cows to feed more people, and we burn more fuels.... (06)
I think *all* of us have slowed down in mental and physical energy
to some degree, and that this effect is at least partially responsible
for the rise in obesity. (Not that I want to let partially hydrogenated
poisoners off the hook.) (07)
In particular, I've noticed since my 20's that some days I've very
alert and energetic, while others I'm very lethargic. For a couple
of years, I kept a record of how I felt mentally and physically, and
how well I performed at sports, at work, and the like. (08)
I tried everything I could think of, looking for a correlation: phases
of the moon, what I ate, successes and failures, humidity, rainfall,
temperature, weekly rhythms -- there was no visible correlation
with anything I checked. (09)
But in the last few years, I've noticed that on days at work when
I'm feeling guilty as hell because I'm not getting anything done,
most everyone I talk to is feeling the same way. And when I'm
alert and energetic, they are, too. (010)
These days, we have air quality indexes. I haven't run tried a
correlation analysis using that data, but I'm betting there would
be one -- especially if I had sophisticated enough equipment to
check for the percentage of oxygen on a daily/weekly basis. (011)
Hey -- we may wind up *needing* machines to think for us... (012)