This is your brain on the city
I have never been a good speller.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way: for the past year or so I have been moderately concerned with what I am convinced is a steep and steady decline in my already underdeveloped spelling skillz. Because I am a hypochondriac, my first reaction is to assume that there is something genetically and irreversibly wrong with me. But because I am neither a male nor a cartoon character, I must conclude that I do not carry the Simpson Gene and thus the problem is probably not so devastatingly life-altering.
So my next option is to blame technology! Too much facebooking, g-chatting, and cellphone txting are to blame for my embarrassing inability to spell even the simplest and most familiar words correctly (I had to have the correct spelling of “whoa” beat into me over several months of daily g-chatting with a friend who found my (much more intuitive, I think) spelling — “woah” — particularly offensive). I was fairly happy with this explanation, even if it was a bit of an easy out, until today when I read this article about how living in a city dulls brain function. I once again have reason to fear the worst.
After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control…this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.
What? Oh my god. I’ve lived in New York for over 5 years now, so how much has my brain function decreased? A lot, probably, right? Now that I think about it, there has also been a definite increase in my tendency to think of something I need to get done and then forget it immediately leaving me paralized on the street, staring into the distance as I mentally retrace my steps back to where I knew the thing I was going to do. I have not put together any charts to prove the correlation, but I’m sure it’s there.
Anyway, this is all to say that I will do my best to fill my entries with correctly spelled words (unless purposeful incorrect spelling is necessary to convey irony and LOLS, which it sometimes is). But, folks, spell check can only do so much. Feel free to correct me, for I am a fool for learning.
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