8 ms·

I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude. I generally find kids more eager to jump into new things, while adults are more stub

• trav4225 8y ago
  > I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude I wonder that too and do believe that it is largely about attitude. Part of it, however, is also wisdom. For example, as adults, experience has brought us to the point of realizing that a lot of what drives younger people is just buzz and bullshit. 99.9% of the things everyone claims are "THE NEXT BIG THING YOU MUST NOT MISS OUT ON!" end up being of no practical consequence whatsoever to life or society.
• hinkley 8y ago
  I think you have to find a kind of patience. Going through your life psyching yourself up about how amazing and life changing this new experience is going to be doesn’t last. For most people the mid life crisis is the last time they try that. All of the new stuff I’ve started has been on the cautiously optimistic end of the scale. This could be the best thing ever but it’ll take a long time for it to be so. Just show up until then.
• anothergoogler 8y ago
  Is brain elasticity an objectively scientific thing? Can it be measured? It seems like an invention to fit observed mental rigidness with age.
  • padthai 8y ago
    Yes, it is. In mice we even know some enzymes responsible for this: https://futurism.com/fountain-youth-effect-young-blood-old-mice/ https://futurism.com/fountain-youth-effect-young-blood-old-m...
  • shakna 8y ago
    Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's ability to transfer neurons across areas of grey matter. Essentially moving function. It is observed in adults as well as children, but there is definite decay in that ability. By 'observed', neuroplasticity has been observed at the microscopic level, as well as higher levels, such as brain remapping of function following injury.
• always_good 8y ago
  I wonder the same thing trying to learn a new language. I notice the biggest difference between me and a child is that children don't care about messing up. Meanwhile I often have this worthless apprehension of "better not practice Spanish on these Spanish speakers, I might mess up and feel stupid." I tried to learn Spanish like I learned how to program. Now I'm living proof that you can become good enough to read books in Spanish yet amaze people with your inability understand spoken Spanish.
  • dahart 8y ago
    I suspect adults learn languages a lot faster than kids, when we spend the same amount of time being exposed & practicing. All the polyglots say you have to be willing to mess up a lot and work to shed your fear of feeling stupid. In fact, try to seek it out because that's the primary way you get feedback & learn.
    • amenod 8y ago
      And it is the same with almost everything, including programming. If you are afraid to admit you don't know something you will spend much more time before you learn it. Sure, you are playing with your reputation - but in my experience it is better to have a reputation of a fast learner than the reputation of a know-it-all.
    • hermitdev 8y ago
      I'd suspect it's easier for children to learn unfamiliar spoken languages than adults (they don't have to un-learn certain patterns from a native language). I'd postulate it's probably easier for trained adults to learn new programming languages as they're more familiar with structured syntax and the semantics involved, and are more likely to have exposure/experience with a similar language. Also, concepts from one programming language carry over to another, even if they're expressed differently. I don't have any studies to back this up; it's just my gut-feel.
      • EliRivers 8y ago
        My experience is the opposite. I don't have to unlearn native patterns. I learn a different pattern, and switch to it. Because I understand grammar and the parts of speech as an adult, at a level beyond simply having copied it from people around me, I can understand foreign, completely different grammar, at an intellectual level. When I speak (and learn) Japanese, my conscious understanding of Japanese grammar simply makes it easier. The same when I speak French. I don't unlearn anything; I learn different patterns, and I simply switch to them. In fact, it's what you suggested about programming languages, but for spoken languages. In my experience, adults can learn foreign languages far faster than children can. Maybe it appears that children are better at it because they are completely immersed in the language they need to learn and have no other means of communication. If I spent 16 hours a day immersed in a foreign language, with people trying to communicate with me and no other way of communicating back, I reckon I'd pick it up pretty swiftly.
• ataturk 8y ago
  Eh, you can have all the attitude you want, but I'm watching my mother wither away with dementia (she's 81). There's nothing attitude-wise that is involved there. It's just luck whether you can still do coding at 40,50,60,70+. You WILL reach an age where you will not be mentally capable of doing all the things you want to do whether that is coding or driving a car. Maybe science and modern medicine can save us, but it's too late for my poor mother.
  • beenBoutIT 8y ago
    Out of curiosity, did she retire before the dementia or after? It's by no means scientific, but among all of the old people I know, the strongest predictor of dementia would be retiring. I haven't been able to find any studies on the relationship between stopping working and the onset of dementia, although it seems like working or keeping busy might somehow help stave it off.
    • gowld 8y ago
      Could pre-dementia cause people to be ineffective / uncomfortable at work, causing them to retire?
      • beenBoutIT 8y ago
        That's entirely possible. Maybe the old people who keep working keep working because they're not gradually becoming demented.
• kilroy123 8y ago
  Totally anecdotal, but my grandpa is 90, and he made it a point to learn how to use facebook and youtube. (I saw him on Facebook the other day when I visited him.) He wanted to be able to follow family and see everyone's pictures and whatnot. He was always into learning tech and liked gadgets though. I remember in the early 90s he had a car phone. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and he was the only person I knew with one.
• narrator 8y ago
  I wonder how much attitude is controlled by brain elasticity? Seriously, most non molecular biological explanations with regards to brain function are just tautologies. Your brain doesn't work because you don't try hard enough. You can't try hard enough because your brain doesn't work. This is the subject matter of thousands of clickbait articles.
  • bazooka_penguin 8y ago
    Fair point but I think people generally intuitively separate learning ability or speed and willingness to learn. I've met my share of determined idiots and passive geniuses, given mostly when I was in school. To me it seems like, while they're probably related, brain elasticity and openness aren't inextricably linked, such that one is directly responsible for the other
• TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Coming from the chess world, I suspect your hypothesis is correct. I've taught adults and children and all else being equal adults learn and improve vastly faster than children. But the all else being equal part is the catch. Adults often don't put as much effort into the work as children and a big problem is preconceptions that people have difficulty letting go of. I also consider myself some slight degree of proof of the hypothesis. I didn't even learn how the pieces moved until I was 17, which is ancient in the chess world, and didn't take it seriously until I was in my 20s. And now I have enough grandmaster scalps to create a.. err.. something that uses lots of scalps!
  • gowld 8y ago
    Teaching beginners? Sure, most little kids are immature and don't understand the big picture concepts of general strategy that adults already learned before they started studying chess. And adult many likely already had some chess experience. But Progressing through to expert or world-class? History verifies the conventional wisdom that ages ~12-30 show the greatest gains. And when you look over to things like language and music, the difference in learning ability is vast. Kids can become trilingual effortlessly, while adults almost never get close.
    • learc83 8y ago
      If a child tried to learn language the way adults do, they would be far more likely to fail. The difference in circumstances is likely greater than the difference in brain plasticity past a few years old.
      • jadedhacker 8y ago
        For what it's worth, the actual structure of the brain starts off with way too many neurons and connections and starts paring them down. Learning is creation, but it is also destruction. Removing useless connections is valuable. A lot of the paring down happens in your teens with the process reaching a stable state in the mid-20s. This doesn't mean learning ceases past the point (clearly not). But it does mean that changing synaptic weights and forming new synapses comprise the bulk of learning rather than new neuronal projections and creating new neurons of which the later two become insignificant with small exceptions (such as the generation of new neurons in a small region called the SVZ and also in the hippocampus, a region important for memory though I don't know if the role of these new neurons is known in any great detail). Adult learning necessarily uses restricted mechanisms compared with children and adolescents. It's still a general learning machine though, though rate of learning might suffer (I'm not familiar with that part of the field).
• hobofan 8y ago
  I think it's not just about attitude, but also about having learning as a habit. I can't find it, but I recall an article in Science showing that Myelin production is increased when there is a continued demand for it (so Myelin production can be trained like a muscle to some degree). The higher-level interpretation was that since Myelin production is connected to brain elasticity and learning, that once you get over a initial bump of starting to pick up the habit of learning more Myelin would be produced and it would be easier to learn going forward. Anecdotally I found that to be very true. It was always easier for me to pick up new things during the week when I kept my brain in a "learning state" on my off-days by reading books or having a stimulating discussion with friends. But who knows, that might just as well be a Placebo effect. (Sorry for missing reference, and the unscientific jumping to conclusions)
  • incadenza 8y ago
    This kind of relates to the “neural Darwinism” idea. Or “use it or lose it” as it relates to certain behaviors. I don’t know if it’s true but it’s a useful way to think about it.
• t3rmi 8y ago
  I think its due to a couple of things. 1. Free "Space"/"Threads" in our brain as kids we had a clean install of an os with only hunger and sleep to worry about. As adults we juggle with dozens of things in our mind. 2. Fear of failure. As kids we dont really care about what others think as we grow older we lose this wonderful ability :(
• jdietrich 8y ago
  I think that openness and confidence are major factors. Having taught older adults to use computers, one of the major difficulties is getting them past the fear that they might "break" the computer and the need to memorise rote instructions rather than experiment with the interface. The body language is quite distinctive - tentatively pressing keys with an outstretched index finger as if the keyboard might jump up and bite them, pushing around the mouse with their fingertips rather than grasping it with their whole hand, leaning away from the screen as if it might explode in their face. Some older people just can't internalise the idea of looking at the screen for clues as to how to proceed. No matter how many times they're told and shown, they just don't get the idea that computing is interactive. They try to memorise every interaction as a series of rote steps, so if something unexpected happens they're completely lost. They are completely incapable of navigating a UI without very explicit instruction, even if it's broadly similar to UIs they know how to navigate. Something as trivial as accidentally scrolling down a few lines on a website is a complete showstopper. I don't understand it, but I find it endlessly fascinating.
  • octorian 8y ago
    I've seen these exact behaviors countless times, ever since I was the "kid who knows computers" (in the 90's) trying to walk adults through using them. Oh, and when you ask them to "look at the screen", they're only mentally able to process a 2-square-inch "window area" at any given moment. So you first have to direct their gaze, very specifically, before you can actually expect them to read and process anything. (Of course it doesn't help that many of them used bifocals that made it difficult to actually see anything up close, except maybe a book, without squinting at a weird angle. Not sure if that's still an issue today.)
    • dahart 8y ago
      As much as I'd agree with the symptoms you guys are describing when it comes to my parents and grandparents, I don't think this is much of an age problem at all. The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions, and they're uncomfortable with text commands. They don't want to type 'man' or 'help', and they give up very quickly. Everything they use on computers and game consoles are GUIs, most of them extremely easy to use by the standards of text interfaces like bash & vi. This is a familiarity problem. You have years and years of experience with your OSes, which is what allows you to see outside the 2-inch window when you use a new application. You know exactly what you can ignore, and exactly what you need to pay attention to. They don't. Being unfamiliar with all of it and not having any idea how any of it works is what makes it seem like they're not learning quickly, but it's more because they're trying to learn everything at once, and are overwhelmed, not because they're not learning at all.
• Madmallard 8y ago
  And how much of attitude is based on the genetics/physical state of the brain? So many people can be taught that a growth mindset is all you really need to continue to improve at a skill, yet the distributions are still bell curves and people still plateau where they are at.
• andrei_says_ 8y ago
  Could it be that aging has to do more with the accumulation of “knowledge”, where knowledge literally means replacing perceptions with “I know”s and thus becoming more rigid and disengaged from the senses... ...and not so much as physical aging as the cause of these. Maybe we are mostly surrounded by people who age without questioning culture around them, or their mind and body habits. I’ve found that with age and certain practices I’ve become more available to learning, more available to retraining/rewiring of habits, and more responsive to change. My strong opinions are more loosely held and I constantly focus on letting go of any grasping that causes me suffering. “Drop it while it’s hot” has a whole and new wonderful meaning. My body is aging but my experience of the world is becoming more colorful, more vibrant and more exciting. My dad is close to 80 year old, an active surgeon, at the top of his field, actively publishing papers, teaching, seeing patients, driving to jobs in different cities, with yoga and tennis on a semi regular basis while writing a book and editing a magazine. Many of these require him using a desktop and laptop computers, he just got an android smartphone which I wished him luck with because it’s too complex for me to support.
• dyukqu 8y ago
  >I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude It reminded me a quote (that I'll try to interpret/translate as best as I can): That's not you stop playing games as you get older, it is you get older when you stop playing games. I am a young person, but I live it, feel it as I age.
• profalseidol 8y ago
  > Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat This is where you've made a presumption using your imagination.