To learn more quickly, brain cells break their DNA (2021) | Hacker News Reader

To learn more quickly, brain cells break their DNA (2021)

quantamagazine.org

108 pointschriskanan13 comments

> The discovery is all the more surprising because DNA double-strand breaks, in which both rails of the helical ladder get cut at the same position along the genome, are a particularly dangerous kind of genetic damage associated with cancer, neurodegeneration and aging.

It's amazing how much, yet how little we know of our bodies and living organisms in general. I hope vast advances in understanding biology become the 21st century-equivalent of the technological revolution of the 20th century.

Does this imply that thinking too hard, cramming, and other rapid learning strategies may actually increase brain cancer risk?

Somewhat horrifying to think about... Oops.

> High levels of education linked to heightened brain tumor risk

> Gliomas, in particular, more common among university-educated, large observational study shows

> Men with university level education, lasting at least three years, were 19% more likely to develop a glioma

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160620221757.h...

I believe, for a rare cancer, a 19% increased risk is not a very big deal. It's still low risk. (And of course, only the correlation is known.)

One can speculate and find many ways that thinking too hard would increase cancer rates, although none of these speculations are strong enough to be actionable.

For example, thinking harder leads to greater metabolic activity in the brain, and greater metabolic activity can increase the risk of cancer. Therefore, thinking harder increases the risk of cancer.

Thinking hard can be associated with increased stress, and increased stress can cause the induction of endogenous viruses, which can themselves cause cancer or other serious problems.

I could go on, but the reality is, even while all of these are realistic statements, they contribute far less to overall risk than obesity or driving.

There also seems to be evidence that not thinking hard enough also causes issues however. Just as high metabolic activity in muscles can increase risk of cancer, very low metabolic activity also causes a wide range of problems.

While that doesn't sound very likely, I'm not a biologist or doctor (I don't think there's any current evidence to support such a theory.)

Anecdotally people I know who dont give an f live longer than the overachieving ones.

Actually I would think the other way around.

Though, this doesn't seem to be a clear correlation.

How would the mechanism work in your example?

Daily Mail headline: "Thinking gives you cancer!"

Next time when you have to work on something hard, just think, is it worth getting brain cancer over this.

Articles like this make me think that possibly our GPU algorithms based on nascent ideas regarding how the brain works may be missing something very fundamental.

First thing that came to mind was stimpacks from SC2

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