brown2020

Biochemist Gregory Petsko gave a talk at TED forecasting how an aging population will lead to an epidemic of neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. As advancing science cures or reduces the mortality of other diseases, the last to go is the brain. More people than ever are living long enough to face cognitive decline. Is that really such bad news?

As the focus of medicine shifts to the brain, we will see new advances and discoveries in brain science. We have already learned that the brain is plastic and can continue to grow and develop even into old age—if we keep challenging ourselves to learn new things. Petsko ends his talk with what we can do about neurological disease: “use it or lose it.” An entire industry of brain fitness and brain training is emerging because baby boomers don’t want to lose their minds.

While many have expressed concerns about how immersion in digital media technology is shaping the brains of young people, not enough people are talking about the potentially positive impact of new social media on the brains of people young and old.

Social media, and the rapidly changing digital devices and tools that enable it, force us to learn something new every day. To fully participate, we need to write down our thoughts and ideas, take notes on our experiences, and share them. We need to form sentences, make decisions about which photos to keep, edit the videos down to something compact enough to share, and choose soundtracks to spice them up.

Participating in social media can be hard cognitive work. Writing a WordPress blog post, editing a YouTube video, or touching base with 100 old friends on Facebook is like a good hard run for the brain. One of the best remedies for the neurological epidemic might be sitting right in front of you right now.