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Study finds memory decline surge in young people
Study: https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000214226 https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000214226
- alsko 11mo agoThe paper discussed in the article: https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000214226 https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000214226
- verbify 11mo agoI'm not sure it's social media as much as just mobile phones. I used to memorize phone numbers, addresses, directions, short notes, etc. Memory works like a muscle - use it or lose it.
- Brajeshwar 11mo agoQuite a while back (I think 10+ years), I began to realize that I was too dependent on Phones for even the basic info. So, I’ve gotten back to writing a lot more and use Notebook + pen. It helps. I still use Phones but I like the idea of being able to know numbers, and details without pulling out the phone for everything. Using the dialpad instead of the Saved/Favorite Name in the phones is an interesting habit I built up even for most used numbers such as my wife, sister, and even the neighbors. I remember quite a few numbers; even if I cannot say it, I can look at a keypad and the muscle memory kicks in. This is the same for some key Passwords, I quite often just type them out. Again, I might not remember but my fingers just glides through the keyboard. I remember it being handy at a hospital making some large payment saving my brother’s family from malaria in a Hospital in Bombay. Btw, it is also fun to no look at Map on the phone for most journey that I already have an idea or traveling for the 2nd time and henceforth.
- apparent 11mo agoI recently participated in a research study, and at one point, the researcher told me I was going to be given 3 minutes with a list of 20 words. I was to memorize as many of the words as possible. I would then be asked to perform a specific task, and then repeat back as many of the words as I could. When I was given these instructions, I realized it's been many years since I had to memorize anything of meaningful length. I spent the first 20 seconds trying to remember as much as I could about how to memorize things, and the rest of the time actually memorizing. It truly is a muscle, and I was very out of practice.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo agoI’m in my thirties. I have to mail books around the world and country because so few of my friends read. (It’s worst in the 50+ cohort.)
- chadcmulligan 11mo agoI've taken to audio books over reading, not sure how this will affect me but I do enjoy them.
- Gigachad 11mo agoZoomers these days have to memorize hundreds of reaction wojaks so they can bring up the correct one immediately in an argument.
- politelemon 11mo agoLikely both, the phone acts as an easy access point to social media, making the two a mentally lethal cocktail.
- agumonkey 11mo agoNot only we don't use it, but it seems that everything we see is of no value at all, streams of meaningless events
- Noaidi 11mo agoThis is more important than you know. Since "A variety of memory systems are regulated by dopamine in the brain." [1], being force feed stimulation after stimulation will affect memory due to the diminishing release of dopamine of less stimulating events. Being from the first year of Gen X I lived both of these lives. I remember reading newspapers on the subway going to work in Manhattan, having to focus to scan the small stock market print. Yes the news was stimulating, but comparatively slow and limited. I could never read the news at work, but in my later years, working in tech, it was a constant thing throughout the day. Dopamine if the fuel of capitalism, even illegal capitalism, like the drug trade. This is not dismissive of capitalism, it is just a truth. The only thing that changed is that humanity has found a newer, stronger way to milk dopamine out of the human brain. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/edited-volume/abs/pii/B9780124081390000055 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/edited-volume/...
- agumonkey 11mo agoI'm not sure it's entirely similar to what you mentioned, but I too remember the sensation of focus, that I'm struggling to get these days. I started to realize this after the web2.0 era.. thinking that ajax infused web apps would allow for better communication and thinking but it mostly unleashed noise, and whenever I run into old, limited forms of communication, i get the sense of value and focus back. Only the things that matter gets to your attention, and it reaches deeper and faster.
- cenamus 11mo agoGwern's writing on working memory might also interest you https://gwern.net/dnb-faq https://gwern.net/dnb-faq
- harvey9 11mo agoMaybe we're memorising different things. On this site it will be remembering where different settings are found in different software tools, or the map of languages to libraries to functions.
- throwaway2027 11mo agoWouldn't it also have something to do with it being hard to judge quality in the quantity of information today?
- tonis2 11mo agoIts the low quality food, my memory improved a lot, after I stopped eating sugar and most refined foods. Theres even some research that Alzheimer starts from bad bacteria in the gut, that loves sugar.
- iamacyborg 11mo agoBacteria (and your body) like sugar because it’s an easy to use fuel source. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having reasonable amounts of sugar in your diet.
- parasti 11mo ago"Eating sugar" and "reasonable amounts of sugar in your diet" are two very different things.
- iamacyborg 11mo agoSure, but like literally anything else, the dose makes the poison.
- PeterStuer 11mo agoAs a European visitong the US, I am constantly amazed at how there is masses of sugar added to 'normal' food over there. You take a bite expecting a certain flavour, and go wtf did someone glace this with caramel or drop some candy in the flour mix?
- naIak 11mo agoThere’s no reasonable amount of sugar, unless there’s fibre to go with it. Sugar by itself (ie refined sugar) is a poison.
- iamacyborg 11mo agoWhat kind of content are you looking at to believe nonsense like that?
- autoexec 11mo ago> Those 4.5 million survey responses were gathered over a decade I'd feel more confident about the results of this research if it didn't entirely depend on self-reported data from a survey. At least in this case it was a phone survey and not just an internet questionnaire posted to social media sites. I'd put more faith in a much smaller sample of young people being professionally evaluated for memory problems. The survey asks the question: "Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, do you have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?" It doesn't ask what physical/mental/emotional condition they have, or even if they were diagnosed with it by a professional (although it does at one point ask if a doctor has told them they have a depressive disorder). Some years the survey included optional questions (which people may or may not have been asked) that asked if they were taking medicine or receiving treatment from a doctor or other health professional for any type of mental health condition or emotional problem, but again, didn't ask what that condition was. If you told me that there has been a surge in young people over the last ~10 years who self-identify as having a mental or emotional problem that they themselves suspect has caused difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions I wouldn't be at all surprised. I'd be more curious to know if there were a surging number of young people who were being diagnosed and treated for serious memory disorders recently.
- purple_turtle 11mo ago> internet questionnaire posted to social media sites This has got to have a strong selection effect.
- autoexec 11mo agoI think so, but that hasn't stopped it from being a popular way to gather data, or from often being the only source of data used in a paper. I get that internet surveys are dirt cheap and it's easy to get large number of responses, but you have to take the results with a such a massive boulder of salt that it seems more like a convenient way to churn out papers (or even an easy way to get a desired result) than a way to conduct actual worthwhile research.
- 11mo ago
- begueradj 11mo agoNot surprised when you are born in the smartphone era where your attention and memory are constantly hijacked.
- hulitu 11mo ago> Study finds memory decline surge in young people Who would have thought that bread (fast food) and circus (smartphone) would dumb them down. /s
- Thiez 11mo agoSo fast food was invented around the same time as the smartphone?
- Geee 11mo agoThese are survey results, not actual memory test results. They answered positively to having "serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions”. I'd bet $1000 bucks that these people don't have actual memory problems.
- naIak 11mo agoWhat an unspecific question that is. Could very well be memory problems, could very well be problems concentrating.
- hexbin010 11mo agoI think I remember a study about this a few years ago but I can't recall the details
- grebc 11mo agoEveryone also forgot their sense humour too.
- metalman 11mo agothis is real. the cognitive environment has changed, where the the things that are retained in order to survive and thrive, one, have been removed and comodified, and are no longer absolutly personal and private, and two, there is a never ending merry-go-round of changing passwords, apps, submissions,sign ins, acciunt verifications, two factor authentications, to get at, what was once absolute, personal, and private. What has been created is compliance and a lack of personal agency, and any motive to give a damn....whats the point of remembering something that you have zero chance of holding onto and building from? A population stuck in that mid stage of grief , always letting go......
- yc-kraln 11mo agoMy big issue with this study is it points to a cause. How can they know the issue is social media, and not, say, the climbing atmospheric CO2 or other long-COVID related issues?
- watwut 11mo agoStudy does not point at causes. The blog post does. A blog post inspired by a study and study itself are two different things.
- xeyownt 11mo agoThe root cause is likely to the surge of dopamine in the brain related to activities like scrolling social media, fast-paced tik-tok videos, porn, etc. This means that the brain is so much addicted to this dopamine that normal level are no longer enough to be functional.
- js8 11mo agoThere can be many causes. Aside from social media, games, porn and AI, it can also be caused by the decline of the living standards or increase of stress in the West due to shift from social-democratic to neoliberal economic policies.
- Noaidi 11mo agoPlease see my post above about dopamine and memory. The low dopamine effects memory as well as concentration. See: Novelty and Dopaminergic Modulation of Memory Persistence: A Tale of Two Systems https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6352318/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6352318/
- librasteve 11mo agowhat is a “decline surge”?
- marginalia_nu 11mo agoIt's a bit like an increase plummet but worse.
- kcaj 11mo agoThe dismissal in these comments is astonishing.
- bsenftner 11mo agoI agree. Over the last 10 years, I've been growing in awareness of how in general people, developers, and their managers, and their company owners are incapable of the communications necessary for basic cooperation in project teams, in their own self planning, and forget about their ability dealing with more complex issues like market & social-political manipulation of the public. Far too many people appear to only be capable of 1-step forward planning. Seriously. My career has become a consultant that can see multiple steps forward and when explaining this insight I get everything from angry refusals to daunting obedience, but never a competing insight, only 1 step past their present situation. People are way to quick to enter into short sighted conflict, and then completely ignore their real responsibilities.
- rpdillon 11mo agoI was ready to dismiss the article on the basis of its sensationalist writing, but I wanted to dig into the study as well. After reading through it, I asked my wife, who's a sociologist and researcher, what she thought about these conclusions based on the survey data. She said that collecting survey results in this kind of longitudinal study is considered a valid source of data about trends like this, but she said the obvious caveat is that you can't determine causation or what the practical impact is. The article does not hesitate to state hypothesis as fact, which is probably where the dismissals are coming from.
- farrighttroll 11mo ago[flagged]
- kikimora 11mo agoOne on the few pieces I was able to read from start to finish.
- binary132 11mo agoThe AI writing here is so hard to read I honestly couldn’t finish the article. “It’s not X, it’s Y” is a turn of speech that has to be consciously removed from a polite society.
- screenoridesagb 11mo ago[dead]
- walterbell 11mo ago> consciously removed Please retain this turn of speech that helps autonomic (carbon) and automated (silicon) filters.
- binary132 11mo agoI don’t think I quite caught your meaning.
- Infinitesimus 11mo agoI mean this turn of speech makes it easier to identify hunan (carbon) or machine (silicon) content. Took me a bit to figure it out too
- walterbell 11mo agoThanks, human :)
- binary132 11mo agoUh oh. Did I just get filtered?! Don’t put me in the recycling vats!
- elif 11mo agoThe surging decline in typewriters in the 90's had nothing to do with how bad typewriters were or how they were used. It's a symptom of society barrelling toward exponential progress more than a pathology imo
- kevindamm 11mo agoWe're told not to feed the wildlife at parks and beaches because of the dangers when they become dependent on visitors for their food source. It changes their natural behavior to the extent that it becomes difficult to revert to natural food sources in the absence of visitors. (there are other behavioral and disease-related dangers but they're not as appropriate to this metaphor) I think the more alarmed voices in this comment thread are not reacting to the change or "exponential progress" but are instead concerned about the impact of becoming reliant on something else to do our remembering. This last part is anecdata (but no worse than the survey data in TFA), I think smartphone users have not really lost the ability to memorize, in general, but that the things being memorized are different. If the memory test (mentioned in a cousin-comment) had a set of 20 memes instead of 20 words, I expect most study participants would be a lot better at recall. I suppose the question of "is this like junk food, though?" may be relevant.
- pessimizer 11mo agoI think it has little or nothing to do with screens. Young people are just adapting to a society that thinks of people who remember things as annoying at best and troublemakers or terrorists at worst. We've become a say the words society, not a have something to say society. You don't have to remember for very long in order to repeat something, in fact it can become a problem because you'll remember back when you were told to repeat the opposite. It's also very difficult to claim to be a victim if everyone still remembers what you did.
- lrvick 11mo agoSince giving up my cell phone entirely over 5 years ago, my productivity, memory, and overall happiness are at the highest levels they have ever been, in my late 30s. I no longer apologize to anyone for this lifestyle choice anymore since the benefits are something everyone deserves, but almost all opt out of today for made up reasons. I take photos with a pocket mirrorless, and take notes with a notebook. I tell time with a self winding mechanical watch. I pay for things at stores with cash instead of tap to pay. Like a cave man, I know. I am reachable by internet when I am at my desk, and by landline when I am at home. In an actual emergency dial 911, not me. Otherwise it can probably wait until I am at my desktop or a laptop. I was already sold on raising kids without smartphones on intuition and lived experience, but study after study point at us having access to all humans, all knowledge, and all entertainment at all times as leading to generally bad mental health and cognitive function outcomes. Our brains were simply not evolved for it. Whenever I see parents scrolling, and handing a kid a phone as well to pacify them, I wish I could report them for child abuse. I feel like I am watching them be given whiskey or cigarettes, except it is socially acceptable and no one cares.
- VladVladikoff 11mo agoThis is inspiring. I definitely need to look into getting a landline and reducing my cellphone dependence. We’ve been talking about it lately for our daughter to be able to talk to her friends outside of school. Recently another parent had suggested face time calls which we are strongly against (not so much against video calls but rather against child tablet usage).
- lrvick 11mo agoI started by deleting an app a month until my phone was so boring I kept forgetting it at home, and ultimately abandoned it entirely. It took a couple years to recalibrate my dopamine reward system gradually until I could enjoy just existing in my own thoughts and brain again while away from the internet, learn to navigate for myself, etc. For "landlines" I just ported my families cell phone numbers (with their total consent and support) to a voip service, then got VOIP ATA boxes which allows plugging traditional landline phones, including an actual payphone for fun, via ethernet or wifi. Costs a couple dollars a month.
- tsoukase 11mo agoThe memory that is involved is the working memory, which is similar to the CPU cache. The short term is RAM and the long term is the physical storage. The problem is completely reversible if you stop electronic screen usage and stick to traditional education (nature, friends, books etc)
- black_13 11mo ago[dead]
- boxerab 11mo agospike protein is known to travel across the blood brain barrier https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35052867/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35052867/ But of course something introduced between 2013 and 2023 that gets your cells to manufacture spike protein, with no way of regulating the spike dose, couldn't possibly be connected with memory decline.
- marifjeren 11mo agoWhy would that differentially affect young people?
- boxerab 11mo agoThat is a good point. Injection rates were higher with older population. I would say that younger immune systems are more robust, potentially leading to exaggerated inflammatory responses to spike protein, which could heighten neuro-inflammation and cognitive impacts.
- krackers 11mo agoPossibly same reason why youngest people had highest rates of myocarditis
- sigmoid10 11mo agoIf you approximate the youngest age group's data points as a linear trend, it starts well before 2019. After all, they originally were at the same level as the next two higher age groups. So even if you assume that the entire rise after 2020 was due to this cause, it would only explain ~50% of the total effect. And it would not explain at all how older people who were most likely to experience a severe disease (particularly before vaccines) actually show a slight inverse trend, while the age groups in between show barely any statistically significant effect. If you really want to blame covid, I would assume closing schools and mass remote-schooling to protect old people is a much more likely explanation for the trend among the youngest people post 2020. This is the one thing that truly sets them apart from all the other age groups.
- 11mo ago
- penguin_booze 11mo agoThe irony is that we're now telling ourselves, "attention is all you need".
- panstromek 11mo agoFeels like a lot of jumping to conclusion in the article. It just assumes the causation like it's been proven. It also assumes the finding is negative, which is more subtle but similarly problematic. Decline in memory might just mean that our brain is reallocating capacity for something else. It could also mean that the nature of what we're trying to remember has changed and it's now more difficult (e.g. There's more entropy in the data, or the data is changing more often). Research good, article reasoning sloppy.