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What if regular exercise is the best cognitive exercise?

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November 12, 2022
File this under highly speculative. I'm sure there is better research
on this topic than this writing


This past week, for no obvious reason, I considered a few thoughts at
the same time:

  * Exercise is supposedly one of the best anti-aging "drugs", and
    also highly effective (relatively speaking) against cognitive
    decline
  * There's this vague idea that after you become "professionally
    inactive", you accelerate your cognitive decline
  * To avoid cognitive decline, one must keep "exercising the brain",
    so the incentive for seniors to have hobbies, do crosswords,
    sudoku, etc

Now, from this point it seems that I'd go to a very commonplace
conclusion about how exercising is probably better than sudoku or
something, and to be frank that's exactly where I'm going. But
another two things crossed my mind at the same time:

  * Recent advances in AI, and less recent advances in computing in
    general showed that a lot of the things we consider "cognitively
    hard" - from symbolic manipulation to arithmetic, "drawing" and
    even reasoning - can be reproduced by computer machinery a lot
    simpler than we originally thought, at a (likely) higher than
    human level in the near future
  * Robots still have a hard time navigating terrain and manipulating
    stuff

Now, I understand that Deep Learning AI is a different field than
robotics and it isn't that easy to translate advances from one field
to the other, but bear with me

So, here's the speculation / thesis: exercising, that is, operating
our bodies at a higher than baseline level, with everything that
entails - energy regulation, unconscious balancing, spatial
awareness, etc - requires more computing power than crosswords,
sudoku, finding relations between measure theory and first-order
logic through category theory, etc
musing speculative

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Comments

 1. [blogger_lo]
    Bob the ChefNovember 12, 2022 at 8:08 AM

    Mens sana in corpore sano.

    ReplyDelete
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 2. [blogger_lo]
    LVNovember 12, 2022 at 9:27 AM

    We expend lots of computing energy and resources in training AI.

    Where would 'learning' fit in your analogy?

    ReplyDelete
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 3. [WIN_201901]
    AkiraNovember 12, 2022 at 9:46 AM

    Interesting thesis. It would be nice is someone with professional
    knowledge of this area would comment on this post as this was #1
    hacker news today

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
        Reply
 4. [blogger_lo]
    sheerunNovember 12, 2022 at 10:49 AM

    First of all, I am all into exercising as way of improving brain
    power. Having said that, computing can be wasted on some useless
    computation, like finding a random hash that starts with like 20
    zeros, in the case of mining of Bitcoin. In such analogy
    exercising might be useless computation in some regards

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
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