tl;dr:
It's exercise, or physical activity. That's why these tribe members' brains are aging more slowly.
The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
41–50 of 67 posts
Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies. I think a really solid case can be made that agriculture was the biggest mistake humans have made.
Yeah, starving sounds awesome, hate that so many people will miss out on it.
Only took about 10,000 years to reach the average height of hunter gatherers through agriculture.
Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#43Reminds me of this article which talks about how the introduction of the 'western' diet corresponded with a systemic deterioration of societal health: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/04/the-modern-diet-is-a...
Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they reportedly looked down on farming and agrarian societies. I think a really solid case can be made that agriculture was the biggest mistake humans have made.
Yeah, starving sounds awesome, hate that so many people will miss out on it.
[deleted]
Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#45Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#46It's been interesting to watch the health and fitness space around brain health and correlations with diet and exercise. People seem to finally be converging around some common truths that have been known for thousands of years. I All roads seem to be pointing towards finding a balance between what we are evolved for as a species and modern life.
We didn't know anything about diet thousands of years ago beyond "this tastes nice" and "I'm hungry", we merely endured starvation, prions, and scurvy… or died because we couldn't endure it. Sometimes we just got lucky with good fishing or fertile farmland, but we were never in control. I'm not confident enough about the history of exercise to make an equivalent claim for that.
People thousands of years ago were not dumb. They had probably roughly the same pattern recognition skills as you or I. Just because they didn't have "physics" (mechanistic explanations of the effects they observed) doesn't mean they didn't have some understanding of good vs bad stuff.
Take the entirety of Chinese medicine, for example: there is a reason it's still popular, in that it works. It may not work how we think it "should" per Western standards in terms of direct methods of action of known compounds in the substances being ingested, but it still works: probably some combination of actual "healthy" compounds as well as a good dose of placebo.
Diets were likely similar for those of old: that guy over there only eats berries and rabbits and somehow he's been fine this whole time! He is strong like a bear, because he eats the things bears eat. This guy over here eats only foraged greens and is suffering from something we can't discern so we just say the forest spirits are mad at him.
Observational learning is present in many animals of much lower intelligence than humans even tens of thousands of years ago. Patronizing speculations of historical people only serves to obscure the notion of civilization's progress over these long time spans so what, we can pretend time began when writing started?
Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The majority, or reasonably close to it, I imagine. The average American walks about 2 miles per day (about half what is considered the minimum recommended amount -- and half of what the average American child walks), and I rather suspect that most of the world walks more than the average american.
Do you have a citation for that number? I'd be somewhat surprised if the median walking distance is actually that high. Walking two miles would take most people 30-50 minutes depending on various factors. Perhaps this reflects my bubble but I live in a relatively walking friendly city and most people I know will look for some other form of transportation if the distance is longer than a mile. 10 miles a day is a good…
Here's one. The statistics are easily found online, from many different sources, and they all generally agree with each other. So if you don't like this source, I'm sure you can find one that you do like.
https://www.healthline.com/health/average-steps-per-day
> 10 miles a day is a good amount of walking. It will take most people 2.5-4 hours depending on fitness and terrain.
Perhaps this is a source of misunderstanding -- this is adding up all the walking people do throughout their day, not talking about single-trip walks. So all the walking around the office, while shopping, etc.
I think little things add up. For instance, I walk about 6 miles per day on average. Much more than the average American. But, unlike the average American, if I'm going somewhere close (say, two miles or less), I don't drive -- I walk.
Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
only 4.5% of the world's population lives in the USA
I don't see how that points to a global average of walking distance that would make 10 miles a trivial amount.
I never said 10 was a trivial amount. Only that it didn't seem remarkably high.
The US is unusual in that we drive a lot more than most of the world, which eliminates a lot of walking. So I'm making the inference that Americans walk a lot less than most of the world.
I just checked my own records, and on average I walk about 6 miles/day.
EDIT: I tried to find what the global average is, but (understandably) there is only good data on modern industrialized nations. Amongst modern industrialized nations, the average appears to be around 5 miles/day. So I still think that 10 is not a remarkably high amount. I'm guessing the global average is around 8 or so (but that's 100% a guess).
Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hopeful that with a lot of these realizations, we change our habitats to be more in tune with our nature. Something like walking meetings or setting time aside to move. Humans are incredibly intelligent, however intelligence doesn't mean we should forget our ancestral roots. We are meant to move; sitting in offices and eating junk food while getting information blasted into our brains from glowing rectangles is a…
Sounds better than the 40k future.
Never fear, you can always be lobotomized into a servitor.
Re: The Modern World Is Aging Your Brain
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
We didn't know anything about diet thousands of years ago beyond "this tastes nice" and "I'm hungry", we merely endured starvation, prions, and scurvy… or died because we couldn't endure it. Sometimes we just got lucky with good fishing or fertile farmland, but we were never in control. I'm not confident enough about the history of exercise to make an equivalent claim for that.
People thousands of years ago were not dumb. They had probably roughly the same pattern recognition skills as you or I. Just because they didn't have "physics" (mechanistic explanations of the effects they observed) doesn't mean they didn't have some understanding of good vs bad stuff. Take the entirety of Chinese medicine, for example: there is a reason it's still popular, in that it works. It may not work how we th…
The problem with TCM is that they don't accept what they don't know, they'll just make something up about "heat" or something. So while there are for sure real treatments that work, it's also lumped in with a bunch of other BS so you can't ever be sure it will work.
That's the main difference between western and TCM. Western medicine we quite often know something works (because of double blind studies) but we don't always have an explanation. TCM is fundamentally untrustyworthy in the 21st century.
And you can get placebos anywhere.