Our Brains are Shrinking

Are we getting dumber

My friend Sharin came over for our regularly scheduled whine night a month ago, and she began by complaining that her brain was not working as well as it used to. ‘I’m becoming dumber’ she said. She lamented that she was spending too much time online, consuming unintelligent content, and she worried her attention span was taking a beating. Both of us are in our thirties and that means that any conversation about a failing attribute would be blamed on our age.

For the past few years my brain has been working like a sheepdog corralling all stray thoughts into a little manageable pen. I have always believed that I am slower than my colleagues when it comes to understanding anything on the job, but the time between a challenge being posed at work and coming up with a solution has decreased by a great extent. In various aspects of my life I have powered up my ability to problem solve. I think this is what they call fluid intelligence, which some research suggests peaks in our thirties. Fluid intelligence is our ability to problem solve and mentally adapt to new and unfamiliar situations.

For Sharin it's the mindless scrolling that was making her dumber. There are countless articles about dopamine addiction and smartphones, social media and shortened attention spans, and the visual siren song that is Instagram reels.

I looked it up, our brains are shrinking. In addition to this there are chemical and neurological changes to our brain. So apart from worrying about my knees creaking, my heels being sore, my skin breaking out from a lack of baby, I also have to consider the volume loss of my brain. The thirty year old body is akin to a plastic toy being subjected to a hydraulic press.

If Sharin was talking about short term memory, this article suggests that our memory and ability to retain names, dates, passwords, decline after thirty. Fortunately for me, my ability to retain names and dates were always terrible to begin with. There were plenty of articles about memory, dementia and the smartphonification of life. Here the scientists are divided. One faction says that phones are making it such that we no longer need to retain any information because everything is so easily available on our phones. We have reminders and the notes app, google maps and the calculator, we no longer have to count our cycle days because our phones will tell us when we need to stock up on sanitary pads. Our reliance on these has reduced our ability to retain information and that may be a bad thing.

The other faction of scientists suggest that apps such as these have made it easier for us to just go about life. Humans have always taken notes, used abacuses, stuck post-its on fridges. The apps are a better way to do this and just frees up our time for more important things.

I asked people on Instagram if they thought they were getting dumber and an overwhelming majority of the women who replied said that they did. They all complained about their brains turning to mush, and memories fading. Only two men decided to engage and they too felt they were getting dumber. A lot of the women stated that they felt that GenZ are smarter, adding that they seem to be more in tune with the world. The same Gen Z kids who think the development of their prefrontal lobe at twenty five will enable them to break out of the chrysalis of immaturity.

When we were in our twenties it was Gen X who thought they could not keep up with us. In many respects this was probably true, but I remember being completely ignorant at twenty. Although I thought I knew some things, Mother’s habit of belittling me had resulted in me cross questioning every opinion I have. The upside of this was unlike other twenty year olds I did not think I knew everything. I hardly spent time on the big bad internet, and was not consuming any content, let alone useless content. I was out with friends putting vodka in green sprite bottles and driving around. Inane things occupied my mind like my pastor boyfriend who cheated on me, or my other man-baby boyfriend who was emotionally unavailable. Hardly mind fodder.

I regret not using that time to read more, know more, see what smart people were saying on the internet. I should have read all the Russian masters, even if only to decry them as boring. I feel I wasted my twenties and I am trying to make up for it. I feel I have not caught up and the minute any kind of discourse pops up on Twitter, because someone decided to be the main character on Indian Twitter, I have to look up several things before I feel I have caught on.

Since it was mostly women who replied to me it was not long before someone brought up Imposter syndrome as the reason why only the women stated they were feeling dumber. Subsequently two women sent me a speech given by the CEO of MomsFirst Reshma Saujani given to the students at Smith College. It was more than a minute long and my reduced attention span did not allow me to watch all of it (the Wordle needed to be done, and my sister in law had just sent me a cat video). In her speech she mentioned the New Yorker essay which speaks at length about how a crisis of self doubt does not take into consideration many factors like the patriarchy, sexism, classism, race and caste. Impostor syndrome makes it an individual’s problem and does not direct responsibility to the workplaces or arenas where systems of discrimination and oppressions foment feelings of inadequacy among women. Self doubt makes women feel like we do not deserve a seat at any table because we have been placed in tenuous positions at the workplace that do not enable us to thrive.

There was another common response from the women in my dms, they all said that while they were experiencing becoming dumber, they simultaneously felt they were getting wiser. Many explained that they now know how to discern between problems that needed immediate attention or that had to be ignored. But it's important to state that in your thirties, experience has taught us to check our faulty behavioural patterns. Is that a sign of wisdom? Experience? Is wisdom experience? I mean I cannot give myself a gold star for prioritising work over binging the latest season of *insert popular series*.

I am not sure if Imposter syndrome has anything to do with us ageing and feeling dumber. Sharin insists it’s her phone that is the culprit. She worries she is not reading enough. I worry that I am not reading enough either. Most people I know are worrying about this as well.

I think she and I were talking about different kinds of deterioration. Funnily enough this discussion was just before we were about to subject our minds to the dumpster fire of trash TV that is In Real Love. We did not go any deeper into the discussion because I had already poured out the first glass of wine, and the television had been set to stun.

Self awareness is something we lean into in our thirties (one hopes). This is perhaps crystallised intelligence coming into play. We recognise patterns and behaviours and we adapt accordingly. We are better at dealing with situations and reading people. So perhaps it is not the case that we are getting dumber, we are just allowing ourselves to accept how ignorant we are. So even as our brains are shrinking, we acknowledge our limitations and at most it does make us all sound very Socratic.