Modern medicine is nothing short of a miracle. If you take a moment to stop and appreciate just how good we have become at not dying it is pretty mind blowing. This is clearly a great thing. Without it, and without our modern lifestyle we would all still be running around throwing stones at deer and dying at the age of 45. For just a moment think about our lives compared to the lives of our ancestors, those who were nearly genetically identical to us, but living lives that we would recognize more as animal than human. Fast forward just a handful of millennia, a blink of the eye in evolutionary time, and we can get a 5000 calorie meal for just a few dollars which we most likely earned by staring at a computer screen. Now with technology we can have this life. We can get more than enough to eat and we live much, much longer. Again, this is clearly a good thing, I honestly think so. You would have to be crazy to disagree. I just have one problem, one small issue, so here we go.
This may sound a bit crazy but just try to hang, I promise this makes sense. We now live much longer mainly because over the centuries through trial and error, as well as rigorous study we came to understand our bodies very well. We know what are bones are made from, we know how to heal broken limbs, we know how to replace snapped or strained ligaments, we can replace a faulty organ with a good one from a dead person, we can even replace our aging bones and joints with artificial ones made from space age alloys. Unfortunately, while we understand our bodies, we still don’t at all fully understand our brains. Our current understandings of the interworkings of the human brain is honestly rudimentary at best. It isn’t for lack of trying, we know a ton about it, the problem is there is way too much to know. It is so complicated.
So now we have reached the issue. We have managed to make our bodies last twice as long, but for most of us our brains can’t make it that long. There is so much going on, and everything is delicately balanced. It only takes one gene being incorrectly replicated, or a receptor failing to bind its ligand consistently, or cells being unable to get rid of old proteins, and it all comes crashing down. For instance, to the best of our knowledge Alzheimer’s disease is the result of insulin receptors in the brain not being sensitive enough to insulin. This is most likely the result of too much insulin in the brain for too long. Or in other words eating too much fatty food for too long.
Obviously there is a lot more going on but this is just an example of how, in a sense, neurodegenerative disorders are as much the result of our society as they are a disorder. I think it would be more accurate to think of this as the natural process of aging and not something that needs to or can even be cured or eliminated. Even if we can prevent our minds from declining in one way they will only fail by some other inevitable route.
Mental Decline-A Societal Problem
