Week 1535 - Courting Grinding Friction

The Concept Explained

Counting Down to 90 - Week 1579

Why 1579

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

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I couldn’t write this yesterday because of a combination of events, but here I am one day late. 

I came across a post by Paul Junn titled “ The defense again slop and brainrot”, where he describes his methods to prevent stagnation and rotting. The essence is that we need grinding repetitive friction in our lives to reduce cognitive dulling. 

For example, there is no short-cut to extending life by building muscle through resistance training. No amount of Ozempic or Mounjaro or steroids or protein or diet fads can help you build the muscle resilience you need as you grow older, to prevent sarcopenia and to ensure a good healthspan within that lifespan. You have to show up, lift weights regularly, 2-3 times a week and keep doing that week after week, month after month, year after year. There are no shortcuts.

It is the same thing with writing and reading. If you stop reading long form (long articles, novels, etc.) and your primary method of “reading” becomes a combination of tweets and instagram posts and short reels and YouTube videos, it will dull your brain and reduce cognitive resilience. Writing makes you think, focus, understand ways to use words…if you give it off to ChatGPT, then you lose one more skill that keeps the neurons in your brain alive.

It is and will be the same with reading scans. Our brains work differently when we have to look at the entire image set and identify all the findings and then make a diagnosis. If AI starts doing first reads for us, we will lose the ability to actually look at the scans in detail and we will make mistakes, especially when AI also gets it wrong. Our minds work differently if the scan has already been pre-read, whether by a human or by AI and it is easy to miss findings or make the same errors that the pre-read has already made. AI may make it easier for administrators and owners to get reports out in time, but radiologists are likely to get de-skilled. As it is the situation is bad with increasing hyposkillia, as I mentioned in my Case of the Day YouTube post, and AI will just make it worse. 

It is one of the reasons I continue to do procedures. The entire drama, from seeing the scans, figuring out whether a biopsy can be done, how safe or not it will be, then giving an appointment, speaking to the patient and relatives, performing the procedure, interacting with them before they leave, informing the referring doctors, following up the reports, and again interacting with the referring doctors regarding the reports…all this is friction that reinforces a certain set of neural connections that prevent my brain from going into stagnation mode. If all I had to do was read scans without physically putting needles inside the body, I would not be the same person I am today…and I have been doing this with some variations for almost 30 years now…grinding friction.

And that is why I keep writing…week after week, irrespective of the situation, making sure the grinding friction that accompanies the entire process…from thinking about what to write, to typing the words, editing the piece, creating the audio, posting to the blog and responding to comments…continues to keep my mind agile and active.

I will keep exploring this subject in the years and decades to come. As AI and social media reduce friction in our lives, especially when it comes to learning, it will be interesting to see what happens to our ability to understand things, to perform specific acts, to read and write well, and to be able to maintain ourselves both mentally and physically.

On a separate note.  

Sometimes, a sentence opens a world of possibilities. I follow Devin Kelly’s Substack and this Sunday he quoted Francis Ponge’s “The Pleasures of the Door” translated by C. K. Williams. Just the first sentence set me off, “Kings never touch doors.” Just follow that thought. It means so much. Four words that say it all.