alt Hacker NewsAnything that forces you to use your brain rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline, i'd think.
Anything that's not passive "content consumption" perhaps.
Anything that forces you to use your brain rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline, i'd think.
Anything that's not passive "content consumption" perhaps.
This "passive consumption" needs disambiguation, though.
What separates "I see colorful moving things" [watching birds] from "I see colorful moving things" [social media reels] is not the perceived passiveness but passiveness in the psychological sense.
Watching birds is active attention: you scan, predict, analyze. You get random, sparse rewards for it. Importantly, birdwatching is mostly nothing happening, which leaves room for your mind to wander - and wandering is the thing that's apparently really good for the brain.[1]
[1] - Moshe Bar, Mindwandering (2022), Michael Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (2015) and different related research papers