Ask A Genius 735: “Ramble Me Silly”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/04/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re recording now, ramble me silly.
Rick Rosner: All right. So right before you started taping we were talking about how our topics and discussions have gotten ramblier and I told you that I had a good topic and then you just happened to plug into it and the topic is ‘what if I’m losing it?”
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: So we’ve been doing this for around 8 years now?
Jacobsen: It has got to be, fucking crazy. We’re nuts.
Rosner: Okay, so eight years, possibly nine but I think eight or maybe eight plus. And so we started when I was I guess 53 and I’m going to be 62 next month and I wonder if I haven’t lost it yet, will I lose it because like Carol and I are dealing with our parents and people of her generation and everybody fucking falls apart at some point. Nature’s not so kind that anybody gets to survive her mom is often very just wrong and not entirely incoherent but not either and my mom who has been sharp her entire life, has been less sharp lately. So if I’m not losing it now like odds are that I’m not going to is very low. And I have tinnitus; tinnitus is persistent ringing in the ears and some of the time I’m not aware of it and some of the time it’s very loud. But I think even when I’m not aware of it it’s probably still happening and I haven’t read that much about it but it is fairly common with one-fifth of all Americans maybe having it. I should probably research it more but it may be harmless but it’s certainly not a positive precursor. It’s not associated with people who keep their shit together longer than people who don’t have it. At best it’s neutral and at less than best it’s not a neutral sign but given that we’ve been doing this pretty extensively across millions of words for eight years, this is a nice little longitudinal study of somebody with a high IQ in late middle age. So that could be interesting depending on what happens.
[Recording End]
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