I for one, welcome our inarticulate overlords.
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Maybe communism was right all along but for the wrong reasons. The accumulation of capital allows people to sit back and take it easy, turning their brains into mushy consumers of dreck.
I could when I was younger.
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Affluenza is real!
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Interesting! Will have to track down the study (I’m a doctor working primarily with dementia). I’d add to that that while deficiency in verbal fluency on animal naming is strongly associated with specific Alzheimer’s dementia and dysexecutive syndrome - however so is object recall with AD. And!
- Verbal fluency is strongly effected by processing speed and can be adjusted for
- normal age related cognitive changes come with delayed processing speed without loss of recall
…do people with higher vocabularies at baseline get a double hit to processing speed that starts to show up in cognitive testing?
The survivor bias also pretty important too of course.
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That also makes logical sense to me as well; as reading books tends to sharpen one’s intellect, so does watching television dull it, at least in my personal experience.
Most studies can be flawed, biased or even intentionally skewed to produce a desired result, so it’s always wise to take them with a big grain of salt… still, the basic ideology espoused here seems viable.
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Depends on the books and the shows, IME. Some books are simple, and some TV shows require a lot of work to keep the plots straight. And now that streaming services like Netflix give easier access to foreign language TV, you can really give your brain a workout.
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Oh totally; there are always exceptions, and individual subject matters greatly.
For instance, I love Doctor Seuss and Shel Silverstein and have plenty of their work in my permanent library, but while those kinds of books help grow basic empathy and compassion for others, they won’t exactly give an adult brain a vigorous workout.
TV can be educational and enlightening, but all too often it’s been a useful tool for dumbing down the masses, due to how much mindless crap and advertising inundates the medium.
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Thank you, my loyal - ah, what’s the word again?
I’ll have my, er, PA, isn’t it? get back to you.
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hah, so my early years of poverty means I’m gonna be that what’s it called thingee that’s good.
Okey-Doke.
Something like that, you know what I mean.
The word your looking for sir, is heir. Just sign these papers…
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Now you’re just getting nastier, again.
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Welcome to the family!
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…do people with higher vocabularies at baseline get a double hit to processing speed that starts to show up in cognitive testing?
One of the questions that the article doesn’t address. Which is fair; it’s addressed at a general audience and not scholars (even dilettantes like me.) Besides which, good research raises more questions than it answers.
As usual, basing anything on a single study other than designing the next study is generally not wise. This is why most studies end with the famous line “Further study is needed.” Having said that, the problems noted above, namely survivor bias and percentage decline would need to be corrected somehow. No statistician, me, so I will leave that to those as do such things.
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It’s not scientific at all but I’d wager on the survivor bias. It’s very likely that people with any cognitive decline who are also poor simply die much much younger. In fact, it lines up with the pattern I’ve seen all my life. As some one who made a jump from “likely not to live past 20” to “trying to find a way to retire someday” I’ve feared some kind of cognitive decline more than absolutely any other thing. Anything else I might be able to survive, but take that away and this world will have me dead in five to ten years. The pressure of that anxiety is palpable. If you don’t have money you have your wits to survive on and the charity of others… and charity doesn’t count for much.
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The rate of decline might be faster, but is the average score lower?
Then I have some extremely bad news about Trump (at 5:35)
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