| HN Mirror

A lifestyle that includes brain-fog avoiding habits and activities, notably socialization, family and friends, and so on -- anything that provides outsize stimulus to the brain.

Generally, I wager the main cause of the brain-fog (as well as sensory issues) in most who received it from COVID is due to the lock-downs, and coinciding loss of activities that normally would keep the hypothalamus functioning properly. Instead these "creative" activities are no longer present to create and reinforce "good" neural pathways, so they start becoming pruned, so the hypothalamus shrinks, and then come the cascading effects such as reduced neuroplasticity, reduced creativity, reduced "zest" for life -- but these are just the psychological, I've ignored the physical changes that can manifest due to dysregulation in the HPTA axis.

I myself have been able to reverse a lot of this (from COVID, but also from being dealt a bad hand in life) with various experimental peptides that interact with BDNF.

A striking realization I had was that this "brain-fog" can be seen in a lot of people and its causes have become obvious to me. A notable example is senior citizens (60+ y.o.) that are "stuck in their ways" and have various forms of dementia. The easiest trick to reverse such "age-dependent reduction in neurological function" is to take steps toward integrating them into social groups with those who are "mentally young." I have tried this with both my European-born mother and my American-born father. The former succeeded at 73 in reversing age-related mental deficits and physical maladies, but the latter did not.

I posit that this is a cultural issue. European socialization is much more varied in conversation, emotion, expression, subject, and so on. While American socialization is much less in these respects. The other issue is that those socialized in the American way are more likely to be unable to "adapt" to the European way, and so will fail because they do not have the skills necessary to integrate, due to a life of having American socialization engraved in their neural pathways.

Generally, it's my opinion that a large bulk of America's mental, physical, and political maladies are greatly amplified by this lack of novel and consistent stimulus. That is to say nothing about having to commute alone daily (stress and routine boredom), cities that do not cater to exploration and low-cost novelties, a culture of individualism that precludes having deep bonds with others, anti-intellectualism, an over-bearing work culture and cautioned work-place atmosphere, and so on that reduce creativity, reduce neuroplasticity, reduce a zest for life, and create a society filled with effectively robots who have had their neural pathways reinforced so heavily into a very narrow "model of living and being" that escape is simply impossible without sustained exogenous influence.

With that, I have other things to do! -- because I do not foresee any interesting and novel conversation to serendipitously irrupt from my thoughts.