Frazz by Jef Mallett for April 22, 2024

There are now some studies showing that the US at least is losing ground on several intelligence metrics. But we’re getting much better at online shooter games.

She’s right, lots of ignorance and stupidity multiplying across the land!

All of that college, and all I can remember is the quadratic formula.

There is no cure for stupidity?

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale …

“We’re the good guys who never let a friend down.”

She said “mostly,” that Bluey theme is catchy.

Well, why would you want something easily remembered, catchy, and saleable to represent your show?

Tunes stick in the mind. Set poems to music and you have a song.

Arie Perry composed songs on the subject of neuropathology, including facts about the diseases, as memory aids for medical students. One was titled “Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease”. I believe Perry got a deal on Shark Tank (with Kevin O’Leary) to produce his songs.

No doubt others have done similar things.

It’s one thing to learn something and then forget it. It’s entirely different to be proud of not learning anything.

The digital mind takes in more, and retains less. Or so I’ve heard, but I can’t say when or who I heard it.

Not surprising. The attention span of the average adolescent has become shorter than the time it takes for lightning to fade.

Camera action in modern films is like trying to watch one flea in a bag of them. Motion never stops, even in scenes of personal conversation.

Cell phone users are always in hand and body motion, flicking through their captures, sending them on.

Waiting rooms are full of people on cells, their legs jerking and twitching as if in an episode of some kind.

I’m surprised tranquilizers are still on the market. Nobody has time to relax.

Theme songs had to be cut or seriously reduced due to the amount of commercial time being added on. There is barely time to have a show with all the commercials.

When i record a show and fast forward through the commercials, I and amazed at the amount of commercial time, sometimes the show barely gets going when another set of commercials begins.

Go listen to the original “Hawaii 5 O” starring Jack Lord and then listen to the intro of the newer Hawaii 5O. Big difference.

We heard those TV theme songs weekly for years. Thankfully our professors did not say the same thing week after week for four years — unless you failed the course for four years.

I AM retaining a whole lot! Now, what does retain mean again?

AT least two-thirds of the material taught in my college classes was stuff that I was neither interested in nor ever used again after the test. Lookin’ at YOU, Kreb’s Cycle! (“learned” and forgot this in four different classes!)

“Remember to listen to what you watch, because somewhere, sometime, you’ll be at a party and they will be playing some music and people will ask “What is that?” And you’ll know." Robert Emmet, The Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show on KFJC 89.1 and on the Internet Saturday mornings 9:00 am – 12:00 noon Pacific time.

Ha! We’re too distracted by,,, hold on I’m getting a text….

I’d say Grandpa is way ahead of his peers if he remembers half of what he learned in college. At least as far as the classroom goes, I’m not anywhere close to that!

“Person, woman, man, camera, TV!”

If you can retain all that, you might just be a … Genius! And very, very Stable.

“Seinfeld” may be partly responsible. A few bass notes were all the opening it needed.

That’s what earworms do to your brain.

People who study how we learn have come up with 2 observations relevant to today’s topic:

 (1) If you don’t use it, you tend to lose it.

 (2) Things that are stored in 2 different parts of the brain (like lyrics and melodies or written descriptions and pictorial depictions) are more easily remembered. Thus nursery rhymes and jingles are destined to outlast “don’t step on the cat”, and the pythagorean theorem (accompanied by a convenient mental image of a right triangle) is likely to come back faster than F = ma, let alone E = ½ mv².

The radio station I listen to in the car asks how you remember all the lyrics to all these songs and can’t remember where you put your keys.