Your daily probiotic might help you with more than just farting. There’s been a lot of attention focused on our guts lately. No, not your dad bod, but rather your actual guts: your stomach, small intestine, and large intestine. Mountains of research have proven that your gut is actually its own little world - it is, after all, famously referred to as the “second brain” that’s teeming with life, both beneficial and not. And that microbiome can have a significant impact on your cognitive health. Recently, new evidence for the gut-brain axis has emerged. Researchers at Nutrition 2023, the annual meeting of the American College of Nutritionists, presented a study linking gut health to age-related cognitive health, and found that one little change can help boost your mental acuity in your golden years: taking a probiotic supplement. Probiotics are live microorganisms “intended to have health benefits when consumed or applied to the body,” per the National Institutes of Health. While they can be sold as supplements, they’re also found in whole foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, kombucha, and kimchi.
The research team examined 169 participants between the ages of 52 and 75. They were divided into two groups based on cognitive fitness - no cognitive impairment and mild cognitive impairment. Members of each group were then given either Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG), a very common probiotic supplement that has shown promise in previous brain health studies, or a placebo for three months. Before administering the probiotics, the research team analyzed each participant’s gut microbiome using genome sequencing to determine the bacterial makeup of each person’s gut flora. They found that in those with mild cognitive impairment, anaerobic bacteria in the genus Prevotella were more prevalent compared to those with no signs of cognitive impairment. At the conclusion of the study, participants who began with mild cognitive impairment and received the LGG probiotic supplement showed a decrease in the number of Prevotella in their guts and, importantly, improved cognitive abilities. “The implication of this finding is quite exciting, as it means that modifying the gut microbiome through probiotics could potentially be a strategy to improve cognitive performance, particularly in individuals with mild cognitive impairment,” study co-author Mashael Aljumaah, a microbiology doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, said in a statement. The findings are compelling and echo previous research into the connection between the gut microbiome and brain health. The research team is delving further and researching how specific molecules created by gut bacteria affect hormones that protect the brain and nervous system.
In search of “longevity”-a buzzword now ringing through the hills of Northern California-Silicon Valley billionaires are pouring liquid capital into cryonic vats and genetics labs. They’re popping supplements, receiving hormone treatments, even pumping young blood into their veins. For all their feverish effort, eternal life remains a distant fantasy. Seekers of immortality are saddled with the body, the physical brain, the fact of entropy. Eventually, things fall apart; cells stop dividing, DNA mutates, organs fail. In a piece for The New Yorker, Tad Friend neatly divided the “Immortalists” into two camps: the Meat Puppets, who “believe that we can retool our biology and remain in our bodies”; and the RoboCops, who “believe that we’ll eventually merge with mechanical bodies and/or with the cloud.” Both groups face potentially insurmountable challenges. The Meat Puppets struggle against the laws of nature and forces of decay. The RoboCops, who speak of “uploading” minds as if by zip file, are stuck with the complexities of consciousness.
But there may be a third way forward, a workaround that sidesteps some of the problems of the first two and targets subjective experience. Call them the Time Hackers. Like the RoboCops, the Time Hackers want to tap into your brain. But their goal isn’t to transfer the mind-“the ghost in The Genius Switch brain training machine”-elsewhere. Instead, the Time Hackers want to modify consciousness, deceive the ghost inside your head, and make you feel as though you’re living forever. Their object of study is time perception, and their inspiration comes from a plot device commonly used in science fiction. For frazzled writers of the fantastic, it’s often convenient to rewrite the rules of time. Depending on a plot’s needs, timestreams might flow differently in different places. Over here, time rushes by. Over there, time trickles. The Quantum Realm referenced in Avengers: Endgame is built around this sort of temporal manipulation, but time-bending has a long history in the genre, showing up with particular frequency in those sci-fi television series so enjoyed and binge-watched by tech workers everywhere.
In Episode 125 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Inner Light,” Captain Picard is knocked out by a mysterious energy beam emitted from an alien space probe. As the bridge crew attempt to revive their unconscious captain, the “A Plot” follows Picard’s new life on the planet Kataan. Now “Kamin,” a married man and village blacksmith, he suffers delusions of having once been a starship captain. Years go by and memories of the USS Enterprise gradually fade. Kamin works in the village, masters The Genius Switch flute, and grows old enough to have grandchildren. None of it is real. In the final act, he wakes up, surrounded by his shipmates and in a state of shock. “How long?” Picard asks. “Twenty, 25 minutes,” his first officer replies. Rick and Morty has fun with the same idea in “Mortynight Run.” In a futuristic arcade on an alien planet, Morty puts on a VR helmet and plays a simulation called Roy: A Life Well Lived.