I am 29, and so far I didn’t really see any mental decline, sometimes even the reverse - I become better at learning certain stuff. Although I am also more aware that I will never be on the level some very talented people are, but it’s fine.
Can't argue that.
Submitted 22 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/88a6d8fc-81d0-4b44-856f-4774b2ea45a9.png
Comments
Matriks404@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Hazzard@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
I don’t think this is neuroplasticity, as much as it is having a broader experience to bring to bear. I have so much knowledge and experience with a variety of things that I can apply and relate to new skills to learn things fairly quickly.
I also find there’s a ceiling on my abilities, like you mentioned. I’m never going to learn something to the same depth as someone who learns it as a kid and carries it forwards, things just don’t seem to sink deep into intuition and instinct like that, but I can certainly pick up something well enough to enjoy it and enjoy the process of improving at it. I love learning new skills and pushing myself, and I don’t mind the idea that that’s the way to age gracefully and stay sharp.
shaggyb@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Played a reflex-based video game against a teenager lately?
working_bee@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
I feel like reflexes are different than learning. Motor control definitely gets worse over time.
Sektor@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Played a fiddle vs the Devil?
Matriks404@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I don’t really play competitive video games, because I have always seen them as waste of time, and I easily get angry,but recently I nearly did get all retroachievements for NES Terris, so I guess my reflexes are not horrible yet.
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
DonPiano@feddit.org 18 hours ago
That’s stupid, though. If you can explain 11% of the variance of some noisy phenomenon like cognitive and behavioral flexibility, that’s noteworthy. They tested both linear and quadratic terms, and the quadratic one worked better in terms of prediction, and is also an expression of a meaningful theoretical model, rather than just throwing higher polynomials at it for the fun of it. Quadratic here also would coincide with some homogenizing mechanism at the two ends of the age distribution.
TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Yet it’s one single sample, and possibly not a great one. Few things could cause the shape seen like sample selection of healthy people ignores a lot more of the 65+ community than the younger, and also stuff like those born around the 50’s have higher lead levels could cause more of a dip, or like… plenty of stuff. After some repetitions sure but even then… that’s 11% hell I could probably put in an exponential with a negative exponent and be as accurate or better.
toynbee@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Whether you’re right or wrong, starting your argument with “that’s stupid, though” is unlikely to convince many.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
Now this should be an xkcd
onslaught545@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
But I have eyes and the curve they picked as best fit is really poorly fitting. It’s such a poor fit that is almost in a dead zone of the random points.
ddplf@szmer.info 21 hours ago
Does that mean it is not true that it becomes harder to learn new things with age?
I’m 26 and I’ve been rushing gaining knowledge and experience very much so far for fear of just not being able to fit in much more once I reach certain age.
No I’m not virtue signaling, this is fucking stressful and I will be delighted to slow down a fuckton if that’s true.
dermanus@lemmy.ca 52 minutes ago
I’ve read a decent amount of his stuff. If I had to guess from the information here, he’s dismissive because the correlation is weak. Just because you technically can draw a line of best fit doesn’t mean it’s a good fit.
Look how many dots all over are nowhere near that line.
StripedMonkey@lemmy.zip 21 hours ago
From a completely unscientific but ‘experienced’ perspective I think the problem is that life just gets in the way as you get older, and you prioritize your own life rather than trying to learn.
Whether neuroplasticity means you can learn things later or not, the opportunity to learn things later just isn’t there without effort.
Having a job, kids, a mortgage and no social obligation to learn in a structured and organized way probably impacts you more than anything neurological.
Kayday@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I’d imagine it also has something to do with becoming less practiced at learning things.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Yeah, get in what you want because in twenty years the greatest thing your brain will enjoy is not processing anything of consequence.
Could you learn cuneiform and gain a rich understanding of 18th Century Viennese intellectual culture, if you didn’t know anything about that before? Sure.
*burp* But then you’ll be like “ah, gotta bring in the trash cans and then I can sit.”
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
As long as you continue to learn new things, then no, it doesn’t become harder with age. In fact, studies show that people who are lifelong learners can actually increase their ability to learn as they age. Learning, for example, a foreign language in later years has been shown to be just as attainable as in childhood, and might even give some protection against dementia. Your brain can actually become more plastic as you age if you continuously push it to do so, and it can actually become easier to learn if you train yourself to do so.
The idea that learning capacity diminishes with age seems to be a widely accepted myth (which may have roots in sociological and cultural biases), and the opposite may actually be true.
blackbrook@mander.xyz 20 hours ago
Well the ‘myth’ you speak of is based on the fact that the opposite of what you describe is also true. Those who lose any interest in learning new things become progressively more rigid and stuck in their mindset and become less and less likely to learn or adapt as they age. I suspect there are more people leaning towards that than lifelong learners, but I may just be a pessimist.
DonPiano@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Well, your comment is a better variant of mine, i should have checked. :o) Thanks!
WalterLego@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
I started doing Capoeira and learning Portuguese with 40 years. I am fluent in Portuguese now after three years. My Capoeira skills are still pretty basic, but I progress and for the first time in my life I feel like I really have a grasp on any kind of sports.
I also changed from marketing to IT last year and I am getting really good at what I do.
It helps if you have a reference system for your new knowledge. I studied computer science which helps in my new job and I had French in school which helps with Portuguese.
So don’t worry. Keep learning, avoid stress and drugs and prioritize getting enough sleep. You’ll be fine!
hperrin@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
I have to learn new things all the time for my job, and I find as long as I never run out of caffeine, it’s not really a problem. I’m approaching 40, so take that as you will.
DonPiano@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Keep learning, and it’ll stay easier than if you didn’t. See if you can find changes for the structure of what you’re learning so you don’t get too ossified about that, either. Like, have a decade where you focus more on sciences, one more for arts, one more for languages, one more for understanding people who are very different from you… Maybe a decade is too big a chunk, but you get the idea.
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 21 hours ago
I’ve seen (and experienced in my fifties) that age does affect the working of your mind. I’d compare it to sleep deprivation. You know, when you’re young and reckless and haven’t slept well for a week, maybe pulling all-nighters for fun? It affects your concentration, your reflexes, and your general memory.
Age is like a mild sleep deprivation that gets a little bit worse each decade. It takes effort to stay lucid.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
I agree with you, but I wonder how much of this is that most of us are worked to our last nerve until we’re at least 65, so many of us don’t have the luxury to maintain our brain plasticity? Once we’re 70ish, if we didn’t have that opportunity when we were living hand-to-mouth, and our brains are kind of set by that point.
We all have the potential, but not the opportunity until it’s kind of too late?
OpenStars@piefed.social 21 hours ago
I find that I get smarter as I get older, as stupid stuff that held me back gets discarded. You do have less energy I hear, but even there I think a fit 50 year old would be more energetic than a lazy 25 year old? Obviously having kids is a huge energy drain, but that’s not technically aging, just correlation rather than causation.
So anyway even if this graphic were true, it would be irrelevant as the major factor seems to me to be a willingness to learn, only after which raw ability would come into play.
In your case the adage that now is the time to learn is true, but not for any of the reasons mentioned above. Once you shift your perspective that the time for hard work is over and the time for personal play is at hand - to watch more TV, play games, hang out with friends, etc. - then it’s incredibly hard (most people phrase that as “impossible") to ever go back to that college mindset of “it’s study time, let’s go!!!”. That’s not even just human nature, but rather the raw physics of inertia coupled with adaptation that lowers energy requirements that were evolutionarily built into our brains and bodies.
Discipline is a mindset that is mostly independent of age, except it trends towards older as those who have seen how it works first-hand now realize its value (coupled with individual survival of those who have more rather than less of it, i.e. the most reckless die the earliest in life), plus also younger as people listen and thus benefit from the accumulated wisdom of others.
flora_explora@beehaw.org 11 hours ago
What has discipline got to do with it? I feel it’s pretty independent or may even get in the way of learning. If you force (discipline) yourself to learn something, it will feel much harder than if you do it out of joy. But maybe I didn’t fully understand what you were saying.
Dasus@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Neural plasticity isn’t exactly the same as learning but, yeah, there seems to be a thing around 27 where neural plasticity seems to plateau a bit.
But I’m wondering if that’s more the effect than the cause. Perhaps it’s because a lot of people, up until they’re around 25-30, have a very quickly changing life. Schools are changing, jobs are changing, people are changing. But when you start to get into late twenties, early 30’s, most people already have a routine of some sort. And it would seem logical to me that it could mean lowered neural plasticity.
And perhaps it could come just as well if you started having as much variance and stimulation as earlier in your life. Perhaps not as much.
But yeah I don’t think there’s any sort of biological limit that you just can’t learn things anymore. Never too old.
MissJinx@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
As a subject I cam confirm. No
Eheran@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
guess the correlation, looks about like a solid 0.1. Whoever put that regression line in there is crazy, the confidence interval is insulting.
Gladaed@feddit.org 7 hours ago
Why does that fucking Thing require my Google account?
Eheran@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
No idea, sorry.
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
Was about to say that. It’s sad that your comment is the very last in this thread.
LillyPip@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
1: it’s not last, and 2: it’s not sad, because 3: people aren’t reading the source material. I love xkcd, too, but that doesn’t apply here.
We don’t need to throw satire pies in the just because results don’t match expectations doesn’t mean we should throw pies of satire in their face. This is actually interesting.
DonPiano@feddit.org 18 hours ago
How do you think a case of “this explains some of the differences in the population, but not a lot” should look?
And that looks potentially fine for an error bar. For a mean estimate, SE=SD/√N , so depending on what error band they used this looks quite plausible.
DonPiano@feddit.org 18 hours ago
Also, the R^2 is even in the picture: .11
Eheran@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Take a look at these examples of regression. See how any one of the conclusions is absurd? Mind you the data in that example is far less random!
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
Goddamnit Taleb.
What is this, a black swan event you could not have predicted as being within the realm of possibility, and thus have no idea how to react?
God Damnit, Taleb.
sus@programming.dev 6 hours ago
Taleb’s mind just isn’t antifragile enough. Or maybe too antifragile. Idk I didn’t read his book
Juice@midwest.social 4 hours ago
I read a couple Teleb books about 15 years ago, they’re very funny. You go in thinking they’re these books about systematic collapse, but mostly its just about how he’s so smart he gets to be friends with Benoit Mandelbrot.
The theme of Anti-Fragile is “don’t be a sucker” which is really good advice tbh, but if you’re not a sucker you wouldnt have fallen for the apocalyptic framing of a book about how he’s so smart because he read some entry-level philosophy at some point
staph@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
Some beliefs are more antifragile than others
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
Wait so… his own brain isn’t antifragile (neuroplastic) enough to consider the idea that some other people his age have brains that actually are antifragile (neuroplastic)?
You could probably make a 5 or 10 minute sketch, for econ nerds, out of how absolutely absurd this is.
echodot@feddit.uk 11 hours ago
But we know for a fact that plasticity does drop with age, that’s why it’s so difficult to learn foreign language after childhood.
sleen@lemmy.zip 2 minutes ago
For a fact, until it isn’t for a fact. Unfortunately things may change like how majority of physics was disproven in the early 1900
sus@programming.dev 6 hours ago
Neuroplasticity does drop with age, but the drop is smaller than it was previously assumed to be, especially outside of early childhood (you may note that eg. this graph starts at 20 years old)
echodot@feddit.uk 4 hours ago
As far as I can tell. They have just drawn a line on a random distribution.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 7 hours ago
this is like saying you can’t run after 30, yeah sure it generally becomes less trivial but if you actually try to do it and don’t do it in the worst way possible it’s absolutely doable without much struggle.
kids absorb language like a sponge, adults are like silica gel, just expose yourself to the target language often and you’ll learn it. The problem is that many people are horrendously impatient and try to brute force language learning in like 2 months by memorizing individual sentences and shit, which isn’t how our brains work…
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
I’m not sure that analogy holds since running is an almost entirely physical task, and the brain’s plasticity is relatively unique and different than the muscles in your legs
ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
R^2 = 0.11
Image