Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Aging Brains

They say you get smarter every day that you’re alive until some tipping point. After that, because your brain starts to rot with age, you get dumber every day. I wonder if I'll know when it happens. That would be a bad day. “Something feels different today. I wonder what…uh-oh.”

I already forget more things than ever. But to be fair, I have more things to forget. So even if my retention-to-forgetting ratio stayed constant, I’d be forgetting more next year than I knew by the age of 17. At that age if I couldn't eat it, bounce it, or masturbate to it, there was no place for it in my world.

I used to worry because I have less energy than I did when I was a kid. Then I learned that kids sleep about 12 hours a night. If I slept that much you’d have to medicate me to keep me in my chair too. And I’ll bet I wouldn’t need to check my Blackberry when someone asked for my address. Not that I’ve done that as recently as this morning.

All the experts agree that kids can learn new languages faster than adults. I am not impressed. If I had as few problems as a 9-year old, I could learn Chinese over the weekend. Let that kid start worrying about his HTML code, Iran’s nuclear program, and the Alternative Minimum Tax trap – then let’s see who can conjugate faster.

To compensate for my inevitable mental decline I am already doing triage on entire categories of my memory. Anything I don’t need will be purged to make room for new stuff. I already got rid of the category I call “who wore what.” If I see you in the gym wearing a full chicken outfit I will remember that as “saw you working out.” Luckily I’m male, so it didn’t take much work to purge that category.

Eventually I plan to release all knowledge of complicated explanations for the world whenever simpler ones will do the trick. Evolution has to go. That’s way too complicated. I plan to remember only a few dozen species anyway, mostly the cute ones. I think we can all agree that there are too many unnecessary animals. I can’t be expected to remember them all. My long term objective is to remember nothing about animals except that the political party with the donkey symbol exists only to raise my taxes.

I’m also going to start lumping things together in my mind based on their similarities just to save space. From now on, stem cells are babies, and Iranians are Arabs. And they all live in North Korea with Osama.

And then I’ll vote.

November 17, 2006 in General Nonsense
Dilbert.Blog by Scott Adams


After 6 months thinking about reading Scott's blog I finally got the time. And voila, one of the posts.