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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

Eh, I think it's less like a cigarette and more like the car. We're not going back. Americans are famously less healthy the more car dependent they are, and now people walk/run as an explicit task to be healthy. People will start going to a "thinking" gym, or engaging in additional manual mental activities for sport, like we do with chess today.

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Or when the Internet came and made memory kinda obsolete. Why remember facts if you can simply index them and then lookup on demand.

But now we delegate thinking itself, so I wonder what is left.

The Internet in no way made memory obsolete. People who know things off the top of their heads are far more capable than people who have to look things up.

This is an age-old argument actually, the same one was raised when the printing press was invented and reading became a more generally available skill.

Merely leading to the upending of the political structure of most countries.

Funny that you mention that. A month ago I started the Duolingo chess course, and just yesterday I noticed that my brain is clearer, more capable of deep thought than it has been in years. It's like stepping out of a fog. I also started CPAP recently, so it's hard to attribute the change to either, but I feel certain that the chess helped.

> I also started CPAP recently

A proper nights sleep is massive! I'd put 99% down to this..

Yeah CPAP is doing the heavy lifting most likely.

The interesting thing about jogging is I do my best thinking while jogging. I've found it impossible to do deep thinking while driving, as driving evidently requires higher functions of the brain. Jogging doesn't require any of that, I can jog deep in thought and have no recollection of the previous mile.

Apparently Petri was driving when he figured out a new fingering for a Chopin Etude he'd use at a concert later that evening[1]. The passenger survived to tell that story, so I think this is more about your correct risk-assessment than physical limitations of the brain. :)

1: Just to unzip: "I don't like this fingering; let me imagine playing with this other fingering; yep, that will feel more comfortable and stronger; I'm now confident enough in the change that I'll do it that way in public, for one of the most difficult piano pieces, without ever having practiced it physically..."

I wonder who would be working in these thinking gyms? Nice idea. Extra mural studies for the age of agentic ai.

You do realise most people aren’t in shape right?

The idea that most people have the discipline to keep themselves mentally in check is false. We already know this! Millions and billions of people who spend hrs a day consuming media on platforms such as instagram.

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