6 ms·

As people get older, their minds tend to filter out most things around them as a consequence of familiarity. Hence, they become oblivious to details of their en

As people get older, their minds tend to filter out most things around them as a consequence of familiarity. Hence, they become oblivious to details of their environment. They lose their sense of wonder and their minds become less active and eventually stale. When I was young, I often wondered why adults seemed so "stupid" when it came to learning things, and I do think this is a big part of it. As we get older, it's necessary to make a conscious effort to pay attention to details of our environment, and to be acutely aware of the great uncertainty found all around us, even in everyday life. This is the difference between a person who becomes a "stupid" adult, and one whose mind is still sharp as a razor at age 70.

nabla9 10y ago
>adult, and one whose mind is still sharp as a razor at age 70. I have never met sharp as a razor person at 70 who is not showing signs of reduced learning in new situations. They learn new stuff faster than most of other people in their age, but they still do it slower than younger people. What they have is large crystallized intelligence (Gc-factor) they can apply successfully to learn new things. This makes them usually great people to learn from and hang around. I suspect that if we didn't expire the gravity of this accumulated cognitive perspective – habits of thinking, tough patterns, overfitting – would become intellectual disability even for the best of us.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > I suspect that if we didn't expire the gravity of this accumulated cognitive perspective – habits of thinking, tough patterns, overfitting – would become intellectual disability even for the best of us. We are "designed" to exist only for a limited time. The patterns are everywhere, including in the way the brain works.
  - Fordrus 10y ago
    I call bullshit! And it's not because of the teleological implication you're making - it's because you're overfitting a pattern - limited existence - where you have no data to observe the correctness of your conclusions! You think you see reasons why an overly long-lived human would encounter difficulties because of limitations you perceive that they'll encounter, but your observation set is so limited that your conjectures must be treated as conjectures, not as solid understanding! The limitations on learning we observe in older human could easily be due to a huge number of factors, almost all of which are extremely solvable. The one mentioned here, that crystalized intelligence, which is an advantage in some ways becomes a liability in this case - that one is not immediately solvable in my view - But when I discuss radically increased lifespans for humans, and I discuss it often because I want to see it happen and am already participating in a startup whose success I believe will hasten that effort, I often hear people giving reasons much like yours are reasons why my efforts are not worthwhile. Honestly, seriously, people are using justifications like yours to avoid investing in efforts like mine, and it's maddening to hear such an unsure, ephemeral hypothesis - and I honestly regard the conjectures you've made above to be among the most uncertain hypotheses in history of humankind - to be used as a reason to deprive concrete efforts of concrete investment. Absolutely maddening, especially because I don't even necessarily disagree, but if the actual pattern for humans is that after, say, 1,000 or 100,000 years, we've got too much cruft as a part of us to continue, we'll never know unless we investigate it, and we can't investigate it if everyone just blindly trusts in silly design pattern hypotheses!!!
    - ansible 10y ago
      Assuming you are running on well-maintained hardware (your brain), I don't think there's any set limitation to how well your intellect will function after a long period of time. We forget. A lot. As a normal course of thinking. And that's OK. Old habits (good and bad) do die, with a bit of effort, if they aren't being constantly reinforced. If you make it a point to continually refine and improve how you think (trying to disabuse yourself of invalid ideas), then you are setting yourself up for a better future.
    - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
      Hold on a sec, I'm not at all in the group you think I am in. I've also put the word "design" in between double quotes for a reason; please be a kind reader and re-interpret it the way it was meant to be perceived. Online discussions have a way of erasing subtle nuances, let's try and resist that trend, shall we? I am 100% for research into radical life extension. I am 100% pissed off by those who oppose (or are indifferent to) this research for whatever reason. I totally hear ya. But I am also a realist. We have been optimized by evolution for spreading the more successful genetic sequences, nothing more. Once the machine has served that purpose, its subsequent fate is inconsequential. That's been the high level trajectory of the blind optimization process so far, for billions of years. The human brain is absolutely optimized to peak early and struggle mightily at the game of Spread Your Genes. It's chock-full of subroutines that kick in and help it play the game and hopefully win. Once that's been statistically achieved (by the end of your 20s, according to our default genetic programming), the same subroutines sort of don't care about it anymore and slowly begin to fade out. That's not to say this is acceptable, or we should just lay down and take it. I've very little doubt that a solution could be engineered to stop and eventually reverse the aging process. But we're unlikely to succeed if we don't acknowledge the challenges that litter the path to this goal.
  - taneq 10y ago
    To fend off the hysterics which the word 'design' might cause, I'd maybe phrase this as "evolution hasn't optimised us to last longer than ~80-90 years." I agree that, in keeping with all efficient system structures, we seem to be built so that all of our systems fall in a heap at roughly the same time.
- calinet6 10y ago
  Moral of the story: learn as much as you can from uncertain situations now, because you may have less ability to when you get older.
- taneq 10y ago
  I dunno, I think it's an exponential process whereby each year you 'consolidate down' your total current knowledge by X% to make room for new data. You keep the broad strokes of the least recently used knowledge but lose the fine details. One example I've observed of this consolidation process is that I'm way more prone to accidentally using homophones of a word than I used to be. I know the difference if I'm focusing on it, but if I'm typing I'll accidentally use eg. 'there' instead of 'they're'. When I was 16 I never, ever made this kind of mix-up.
branchless 10y ago
I love spending time with my kids for this. They see this detail and bring it to my attention. Often when they do I resolve to try to see as they do, but it's hard when you have seen most of "it" before. I envy them. This is also my theory on why "time flys by when you get older". We lack original experiences and so one day melds into the next. When each day is an adventure then of course it seems long.
- dorfsmay 10y ago
  I always assume that time flys by for adult because as we get older, a given unit of time is a decreasingly smaller percentage of our entire life. One year is 1% of a hundred year old person, one day is 50% of a 2 day old baby.
  - piva00 10y ago
    I remember reading this in some article and also remember some kind of debunking of it from a neuroscientist. Tried to find both right now and wasn't really successful but stating it here so if anyone else want to give a shot finding them I know that they exist.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    But the root cause of that is the same as for the effect described in the paper. As you're older, your mental machinery filters more.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >This is also my theory on why "time flys by when you get older". We lack original experiences and so one day melds into the next. When each day is an adventure then of course it seems long. See, that's just why you have to put effort into making sure you experience new and original things in life over time. If you make yourself do stuff, you can look back on even weekends and think, "Wow, a whole lot of time passed then!" In fact, let's see... * Friday night, went out to a new pub with fiancee. Great dinner and beer. * Saturday, particularly the afternoon: did some last-minute costume shopping with visiting friends, watched Futurama together in the evening, a proper New England thunderstorm finally hit our area for the first time in the summer. * Sunday: went swimming at the pool in the gym for the first time, fiancee was sad in the evening. * Yesterday: worked all day, got a kick to more responsibility dumped on me, went home and got incredibly frustrated with my side-project's precision numbers going down rather than up. Eventually derped around on internet for the evening, realized I was measuring the precision of the whole joint distribution rather than of single observables. * Today: talked to Chabadnik friend from grad-school, tested out measuring the precision of single features, at work now. Going to go swimming again tonight for exercise. Do stuff!
nickbauman 10y ago
I gave a 10-year-old girl a unicycle for her birthday last week. I can never put into words the look on her face when she made, only an hour later, her first three cranks in a row before falling off (it took me 2 days to get that far in my early 30's). It is this type of experience that makes growing old worth the pain: to see the world through their eyes as though it were all new again (paraphrasing Virgil).
- moron4hire 10y ago
  Uhm, her center of gravity and power-to-weight ratio is also significantly different than yours.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - yoha 10y ago
    This is a very good point. I have observed that people tend to forget the physical differences between being small and being tall. Not everything is proportional [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law
  - nickbauman 10y ago
    Yes but not in the little girl's favor. Unicycling favors taller people and taller seat-to-ground height. The larger the distance, the easier it is to balance and maneuver.
  - GavinMcG 10y ago
    This isn't the worst thing in the world, but I hope it'll be helpful to know that the "Uhm" can come across as condescending. It seems to suggest that it's obvious or that someone not considering it is stupid.
    - moron4hire 10y ago
      Uhm, yeah
mr_tristan 10y ago
Anecdotally, I've noticed a very big difference in elderly people who have lived in several places, especially abroad, versus those who have mostly spent their life in one home. They are usually much more lucid and easier to communicate with. Less prone to social miscues, that sort of thing. There seems to just be more awareness since you are forcing yourself to learn to deal with new environments. I wonder if there's been any kind of study on frequency of moving or travel on the brain.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I've heard that there's a negative correlation between people who speak multiple languages, and dementia and Alzheimer's. I'm wondering if that relates to your anecdote, and how much impact traveling vs languages help.
- ranit 10y ago
  Relevant: Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2013/11/06/01.wnl.0000436620.33155.a4 http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2013/11/06/01.wnl.000...
- ericd 10y ago
  I think you might be able to generalize that to say that feeding the brain novelty keeps it from degenerating, by forcing it back into learning mode. Have you ever noticed how sometimes when you read a really interesting book, and you learn some really key insights about the world, suddenly, you get a burst of new ideas? As though a flood of neurotransmitters has just been released? Maybe that has health effects related to dementia.
- Teever 10y ago
  Maybe it's because more intelligent people tend to travel more and intelligence is correlated with decreased rates of dementia?
doc_holliday 10y ago
I think sometimes bravado of knowledge can play into this. People as they become adults like to think they are very knowledgeable and don't want to come across as "stupid". This means most adults will never ask the simple questions and pretend like they understand something complex quickly or already know. It's a dangerous mindset to develop but it's difficult not to. As most on here are programmers how many times have you been in a meeting or technical discussion where you are judged for asking a "simple" question? We need to stop the judgement of those that ask "simple" questions.
- rublev 10y ago
  >This means most adults will never ask the simple questions and pretend like they understand something complex quickly or already know. It's a dangerous mindset to develop but it's difficult not to. I grew up with people locked into this mindset and it completely fucked me. Still trying to get over the knee jerk reactions I get to certain pieces of info, and getting over using hyperbole all the time. Have been slowly unravelling the politics that come with that train of thought.
- jharger 10y ago
  Interestingly, as I get older, I find myself asking more questions. Where once I considered myself an "expert" I now feel like I know so very little. I think part of what helped was to get interested in some completely unrelated thing. I was pretty much just a programmer, but have been getting into drawing and other art, and it's given me that sense of curiosity back and let me learn knew things even about programming topics.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
As an Olde Pharte(tm), I'm pretty sure most things are less certain year by year. To mangle a metaphor from physics, the Universe is expanding; we're all like dots on a balloon being inflated, and the space between the dots gets larger. Likewise, as the economy grows, the space between "dots" goes up, resulting in more fragile systems. We have to innovate things into the economy to make those less fragile. Parts go obsolescent and the supply chain weakens, year by year. It'd be interesting to know whether or not actual formal training in uncertainty changed all this. By "uncertainty", I mean the term as it is used in information theory. As I watch my age cohort... age, I think it's more that people just get bored with it all and lose interest in favor of other things. It's easier for me to think that becoming established just leads to complacency, and I for one don't wanna do that.
amckenna 10y ago
Other studies posted here have mentioned that LSD can increase activity in the brain that is similar to what is seen in a child's brain. Does this mean then that LSD or other drugs could be used to increase learning potential in the elderly?

nabla9 10y ago

>adult, and one whose mind is still sharp as a razor at age 70. I have never met sharp as a razor person at 70 who is not showing signs of reduced learning in new situations. They learn new stuff faster than most of other people in their age, but they still do it slower than younger people. What they have is large crystallized intelligence (Gc-factor) they can apply successfully to learn new things. This makes them usually great people to learn from and hang around. I suspect that if we didn't expire the gravity of this accumulated cognitive perspective – habits of thinking, tough patterns, overfitting – would become intellectual disability even for the best of us.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> I suspect that if we didn't expire the gravity of this accumulated cognitive perspective – habits of thinking, tough patterns, overfitting – would become intellectual disability even for the best of us. We are "designed" to exist only for a limited time. The patterns are everywhere, including in the way the brain works.
- Fordrus 10y ago
  I call bullshit! And it's not because of the teleological implication you're making - it's because you're overfitting a pattern - limited existence - where you have no data to observe the correctness of your conclusions! You think you see reasons why an overly long-lived human would encounter difficulties because of limitations you perceive that they'll encounter, but your observation set is so limited that your conjectures must be treated as conjectures, not as solid understanding! The limitations on learning we observe in older human could easily be due to a huge number of factors, almost all of which are extremely solvable. The one mentioned here, that crystalized intelligence, which is an advantage in some ways becomes a liability in this case - that one is not immediately solvable in my view - But when I discuss radically increased lifespans for humans, and I discuss it often because I want to see it happen and am already participating in a startup whose success I believe will hasten that effort, I often hear people giving reasons much like yours are reasons why my efforts are not worthwhile. Honestly, seriously, people are using justifications like yours to avoid investing in efforts like mine, and it's maddening to hear such an unsure, ephemeral hypothesis - and I honestly regard the conjectures you've made above to be among the most uncertain hypotheses in history of humankind - to be used as a reason to deprive concrete efforts of concrete investment. Absolutely maddening, especially because I don't even necessarily disagree, but if the actual pattern for humans is that after, say, 1,000 or 100,000 years, we've got too much cruft as a part of us to continue, we'll never know unless we investigate it, and we can't investigate it if everyone just blindly trusts in silly design pattern hypotheses!!!
  - ansible 10y ago
    Assuming you are running on well-maintained hardware (your brain), I don't think there's any set limitation to how well your intellect will function after a long period of time. We forget. A lot. As a normal course of thinking. And that's OK. Old habits (good and bad) do die, with a bit of effort, if they aren't being constantly reinforced. If you make it a point to continually refine and improve how you think (trying to disabuse yourself of invalid ideas), then you are setting yourself up for a better future.
  - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    Hold on a sec, I'm not at all in the group you think I am in. I've also put the word "design" in between double quotes for a reason; please be a kind reader and re-interpret it the way it was meant to be perceived. Online discussions have a way of erasing subtle nuances, let's try and resist that trend, shall we? I am 100% for research into radical life extension. I am 100% pissed off by those who oppose (or are indifferent to) this research for whatever reason. I totally hear ya. But I am also a realist. We have been optimized by evolution for spreading the more successful genetic sequences, nothing more. Once the machine has served that purpose, its subsequent fate is inconsequential. That's been the high level trajectory of the blind optimization process so far, for billions of years. The human brain is absolutely optimized to peak early and struggle mightily at the game of Spread Your Genes. It's chock-full of subroutines that kick in and help it play the game and hopefully win. Once that's been statistically achieved (by the end of your 20s, according to our default genetic programming), the same subroutines sort of don't care about it anymore and slowly begin to fade out. That's not to say this is acceptable, or we should just lay down and take it. I've very little doubt that a solution could be engineered to stop and eventually reverse the aging process. But we're unlikely to succeed if we don't acknowledge the challenges that litter the path to this goal.
- taneq 10y ago
  To fend off the hysterics which the word 'design' might cause, I'd maybe phrase this as "evolution hasn't optimised us to last longer than ~80-90 years." I agree that, in keeping with all efficient system structures, we seem to be built so that all of our systems fall in a heap at roughly the same time.
calinet6 10y ago
Moral of the story: learn as much as you can from uncertain situations now, because you may have less ability to when you get older.
taneq 10y ago
I dunno, I think it's an exponential process whereby each year you 'consolidate down' your total current knowledge by X% to make room for new data. You keep the broad strokes of the least recently used knowledge but lose the fine details. One example I've observed of this consolidation process is that I'm way more prone to accidentally using homophones of a word than I used to be. I know the difference if I'm focusing on it, but if I'm typing I'll accidentally use eg. 'there' instead of 'they're'. When I was 16 I never, ever made this kind of mix-up.

branchless 10y ago

I love spending time with my kids for this. They see this detail and bring it to my attention. Often when they do I resolve to try to see as they do, but it's hard when you have seen most of "it" before. I envy them. This is also my theory on why "time flys by when you get older". We lack original experiences and so one day melds into the next. When each day is an adventure then of course it seems long.

dorfsmay 10y ago
I always assume that time flys by for adult because as we get older, a given unit of time is a decreasingly smaller percentage of our entire life. One year is 1% of a hundred year old person, one day is 50% of a 2 day old baby.
- piva00 10y ago
  I remember reading this in some article and also remember some kind of debunking of it from a neuroscientist. Tried to find both right now and wasn't really successful but stating it here so if anyone else want to give a shot finding them I know that they exist.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  But the root cause of that is the same as for the effect described in the paper. As you're older, your mental machinery filters more.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>This is also my theory on why "time flys by when you get older". We lack original experiences and so one day melds into the next. When each day is an adventure then of course it seems long. See, that's just why you have to put effort into making sure you experience new and original things in life over time. If you make yourself do stuff, you can look back on even weekends and think, "Wow, a whole lot of time passed then!" In fact, let's see... * Friday night, went out to a new pub with fiancee. Great dinner and beer. * Saturday, particularly the afternoon: did some last-minute costume shopping with visiting friends, watched Futurama together in the evening, a proper New England thunderstorm finally hit our area for the first time in the summer. * Sunday: went swimming at the pool in the gym for the first time, fiancee was sad in the evening. * Yesterday: worked all day, got a kick to more responsibility dumped on me, went home and got incredibly frustrated with my side-project's precision numbers going down rather than up. Eventually derped around on internet for the evening, realized I was measuring the precision of the whole joint distribution rather than of single observables. * Today: talked to Chabadnik friend from grad-school, tested out measuring the precision of single features, at work now. Going to go swimming again tonight for exercise. Do stuff!

nickbauman 10y ago

I gave a 10-year-old girl a unicycle for her birthday last week. I can never put into words the look on her face when she made, only an hour later, her first three cranks in a row before falling off (it took me 2 days to get that far in my early 30's). It is this type of experience that makes growing old worth the pain: to see the world through their eyes as though it were all new again (paraphrasing Virgil).

moron4hire 10y ago
Uhm, her center of gravity and power-to-weight ratio is also significantly different than yours.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- yoha 10y ago
  This is a very good point. I have observed that people tend to forget the physical differences between being small and being tall. Not everything is proportional [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square-cube_law
- nickbauman 10y ago
  Yes but not in the little girl's favor. Unicycling favors taller people and taller seat-to-ground height. The larger the distance, the easier it is to balance and maneuver.
- GavinMcG 10y ago
  This isn't the worst thing in the world, but I hope it'll be helpful to know that the "Uhm" can come across as condescending. It seems to suggest that it's obvious or that someone not considering it is stupid.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    Uhm, yeah

mr_tristan 10y ago

Anecdotally, I've noticed a very big difference in elderly people who have lived in several places, especially abroad, versus those who have mostly spent their life in one home. They are usually much more lucid and easier to communicate with. Less prone to social miscues, that sort of thing. There seems to just be more awareness since you are forcing yourself to learn to deal with new environments. I wonder if there's been any kind of study on frequency of moving or travel on the brain.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I've heard that there's a negative correlation between people who speak multiple languages, and dementia and Alzheimer's. I'm wondering if that relates to your anecdote, and how much impact traveling vs languages help.
ranit 10y ago
Relevant: Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2013/11/06/01.wnl.0000436620.33155.a4 http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2013/11/06/01.wnl.000...
ericd 10y ago
I think you might be able to generalize that to say that feeding the brain novelty keeps it from degenerating, by forcing it back into learning mode. Have you ever noticed how sometimes when you read a really interesting book, and you learn some really key insights about the world, suddenly, you get a burst of new ideas? As though a flood of neurotransmitters has just been released? Maybe that has health effects related to dementia.
Teever 10y ago
Maybe it's because more intelligent people tend to travel more and intelligence is correlated with decreased rates of dementia?

doc_holliday 10y ago

I think sometimes bravado of knowledge can play into this. People as they become adults like to think they are very knowledgeable and don't want to come across as "stupid". This means most adults will never ask the simple questions and pretend like they understand something complex quickly or already know. It's a dangerous mindset to develop but it's difficult not to. As most on here are programmers how many times have you been in a meeting or technical discussion where you are judged for asking a "simple" question? We need to stop the judgement of those that ask "simple" questions.

rublev 10y ago
>This means most adults will never ask the simple questions and pretend like they understand something complex quickly or already know. It's a dangerous mindset to develop but it's difficult not to. I grew up with people locked into this mindset and it completely fucked me. Still trying to get over the knee jerk reactions I get to certain pieces of info, and getting over using hyperbole all the time. Have been slowly unravelling the politics that come with that train of thought.
jharger 10y ago
Interestingly, as I get older, I find myself asking more questions. Where once I considered myself an "expert" I now feel like I know so very little. I think part of what helped was to get interested in some completely unrelated thing. I was pretty much just a programmer, but have been getting into drawing and other art, and it's given me that sense of curiosity back and let me learn knew things even about programming topics.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

As an Olde Pharte(tm), I'm pretty sure most things are less certain year by year. To mangle a metaphor from physics, the Universe is expanding; we're all like dots on a balloon being inflated, and the space between the dots gets larger. Likewise, as the economy grows, the space between "dots" goes up, resulting in more fragile systems. We have to innovate things into the economy to make those less fragile. Parts go obsolescent and the supply chain weakens, year by year. It'd be interesting to know whether or not actual formal training in uncertainty changed all this. By "uncertainty", I mean the term as it is used in information theory. As I watch my age cohort... age, I think it's more that people just get bored with it all and lose interest in favor of other things. It's easier for me to think that becoming established just leads to complacency, and I for one don't wanna do that.

amckenna 10y ago

Other studies posted here have mentioned that LSD can increase activity in the brain that is similar to what is seen in a child's brain. Does this mean then that LSD or other drugs could be used to increase learning potential in the elderly?