• exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de
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    14 days ago

    I really would like to see some studies on that topic “does cognitive decline skew your position to the right”. If it does it’s usually slowly over many years. But fetterman had a huge decline suddenly and basically in love with genocide now. (I still believe he didn’t think like that before).

    Would make sense in a way - stripping away all nuance from the world by means of deteriorating perception makes people only see good and bad or my team / their team.

    • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      It would be interesting to see.

      There’s a condition called cerebral microvascular disease.

      Basically individual neurons die, but because the brain is fairly plastic the surrounding neurons pick up the slack.

      That is of course until the brain is stressed, at which point the surrounding neurons drop the extra duty to focus on just their own jobs.

      Once the stress goes away, the neurons pick up the slack again.

      Now here’s the somewhat scary part. Something like 5% of adults over the age of 50 have it, to an extent that can be seen on a CT scan.

      And 100% of those 90 and older have it.

      It’s a major cause of dementia in older adults but is usually seen as momentary brain fog.