14 ms·

Study helps explain why motivation to learn declines with age

269 points by hhs 6y ago

intrepidhero 6y ago
I find that as I get older I have less time to learn the latest and greatest new shiny tech, while I really want to focus on deepening my understanding of topics I've already invested in. I feel annoyed when tech changes because I spent time learning the old thing and I can't get that time back. I think the core idea here is that with more demands on my time, I've become more choosy about how I spend it. This study isn't about that. They've found an area of the brain in mice that seems to be related to motivation to make decisions with complex cost benefit analysis. This type of decision making is impaired when under stress, by mental health diagnosis, or, according to the study, by an aged brain. If any conclusion is worth drawing here it's the increased importance of mental health as we age. This is not an argument for all of us to try to keep up with the shiny new language/framework/whirlwind.
- abootstrapper 6y ago
  Programming and IT in general is such a bummer in that regard. 20 years of relearning how to do the same thing differently wears on you. I learned JavaScript 15+ years ago, and I’m still having to relearn that nonsense every couple years. “JavaScript on the server now!? What? Why? Ok, fine. Here we go again.”
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Yes, I agree with the same sentiment. Part of my unwillingness to learn new shiny tech is that it doesn’t spark a deep interest and have to force myself through it. I still do catch up but skip some generations.
  - fendy3002 6y ago
    Though I understand that feeling, OTOH usually we can learn it much faster and easier since we know many of the concepts, and many of those are still used (function, request, response, serialization to name a few). Tools however is harder. Elastic, graphql, docker, front end framework (angular, react vue), are very very different conceptually compared to the past technology.
    - tamrix 6y ago
      It's not too hard to pick up new tech when you've been in the industry for a while. You can even do it on the job with some afterwork study. To me the problem is the emphasis some companies place on knowing specific tech. >Must have five years experience in Web development with a focus on front end frameworks eg react/angular and cloud experience (aws preferred) VS >must have two years experience with the following; asp net 5.0, aspnet mvc 5.0, automapper, xunit, tiny ioc and azure Webapps However, typical the good companies have the former. So you can spot it out pretty easy. Although I fear the industry is moving more to specific skill sets and certification. The certificates trend is being pushed harder as it makes a lot of money for these companies.
      - fendy3002 6y ago
        In my country I can easily fake the years experience. If you're good enough at the tools, you can bluff at the interview. Usually at least 3 from 4 companies will continue with the recruitment. With certification, I don't think it'll happen in near future, due to how hard it is to certificate a programmer and how scarce they are right now. Though it's possible for outsourced foreign developers such as India to be required certification.
      - underwater 6y ago
        It's not hard, but as someone who's done it a few times before you lack intrinsic motivation. Something that is fun to people half your age is just work for you.
      - dajohnson89 6y ago
        "afterwork study" for work sounds like "work" to me.
      - pdimitar 6y ago
        > You can even do it on the job with some afterwork study. What this assertion misses is that many no longer want to work in their free time anymore. Even if I love programming ever since 12y/o I can no longer make myself care about $day_job when I can have a proper rest, which is precious and not that much anyway.
  - vmception 6y ago
    That's pretty funny but the V8 system rewrote what javascript is while retaining and adding onto the syntax, as you might have realized by now.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Just wondering but if not JavaScript on the server then what were you using previously?
  - lowercased 6y ago
    You're using JavaScript? We've all moved on to TypeScript! ;) But yeah, much of the "relearning", I've found, is to work with new sets of tools that solve problems that... we didn't have 15-20 years ago. Or, not to the same degree, at least. And some of those new problems and changes have benefits, some don't, some are solving self-imposed problems, some are "solving" problems that don't have concrete "solutions", only "opinions".
- dwd 6y ago
  Learning a new tool when you have limited set of current tools is a good investment. But there is a aspect of marginal returns that comes into play here. It's not just the increased demands on your time, but the knowledge that it's ticking away... As you get older you get more critical/anxious about wasting time and more reticent about investing in something that has no compelling return on investment.
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rabidrat 6y ago
Learning involves being wrong, and being wrong is stressful. The older you are, the more stressful it is. In humans, there is a strong ego component, but I imagine that there is also a physiological resistance that comes from a lifetime of learned skills, models, behaviors, and traumas. Having gotten cuts, scrapes, bruises, and maybe breaks while learning to ride a bicycle, which still continues to work just fine for getting you where you need to go, it's a hard sell to suffer or risk another set of cuts/scrapes/breaks to learn to ride a bikeprime, even if it's a qualitatively better tool--it's not essential. And we also learn over the decades that our bodies and minds at 64 are not as flexible and resilient as they were at 4 or 34. If there were just one new bikeprime every few years, it would be easier to settle in for the pain and benefit. But the pace of technological change is much much faster, and along with intense marketing, it seems like there are dozens of new bikeprimes every year. Many of these turn out to be mostly hype, so it's hard to know where to invest energy. And every time a supposed bikeprime turns out to be more pain than it's worth, there's a real lesson that's learned about the value of bikeprimes in general. And so we become older, more skeptical, more rigid. I also think there is some aspect of survivorship bias in the value of "learning new skills". For every person who invested the time in learning a skill that turned out to be valuable for them overall, there are other people who spent years investing in a skill that turned out to be a dead-end.
- mhb 6y ago
  OK - what's a bikeprime? Google couldn't help me.
  - strstr 6y ago
    It’s a rhetorical construct here: they mean a non-bike thing that also requires scraping your knees to learn.
  - deedree 6y ago
    From the context I would say, the latest fad. The new hot thing, mode, rage, trend?
    - 6y ago
chovyfu 6y ago
I'm 46 and started building web sites in 1995. I think as I grow older I want to specialize rather than chase the latest new shiny technology. That doesn't mean I don't want to learn. It means I want to learn to be better at what I already know.
- Rochus 6y ago
  One rarely sees mice in IT. And neither Maslow had mice in mind when he developed his theory of motivation. EDIT: Okay, apparently I need to clarify the statement. Humans have so much more possibilities to learn and motivate themselves than a mouse that it really makes no sense to draw conclusions about human behavior from the experiment. You probably remember that already a few brain researchers have dared the balancing act from basic research to show business with a few colored pictures of brain activity, and even got entangled in legal philosophical debates. Sure, you can win an audience and impress your sponsors, but this is not the actual scientific work.
  - Rochus 6y ago
    It seems that I am not the only one who sees a significant contradiction between reality and the conclusions from the experiment.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I think mice don't have to manage retirement accounts, learn specialty skills, or deal with stresses of being laid off. I get that mice have similar dna, but this is not as easy as just saying "mice disinterested after doing the same thing for 5 years means people don't like learning later!"
- ojosilva 6y ago
  The correlation between mice and human is something that has been studied ad infinitum by scientists, with many models that allow them to determine the confidence levels and general relevance and similarities between the two species for a particular study. So, yeah, as you said it's "not as easy" but definitely not something you can casually dismiss either just because mice don't have mortgages.
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bsder 6y ago
As someone older, I have enough experience that I can see which things are heading to dead ends and which might lead to more experiences. Learn another foreign langauge? Sure, why not. Learn machining? Sure, why not. Go learn to skateboard or snowboard? A pass--where would I go with that at my age? Learn something new related to computers? Your bar to clear to motivate me on that is huge (but it does occasionally clear). Go back and push my Quantum Mechanics or Solid State Physics to another layer? Nah, not without a good reason.
- kmtrowbr 6y ago
  There are some evergreen computer topics, like SQL, and bash, design patterns. I focus on those rather than the latest Javascript library. But otherwise, I really want to focus on things which help me give back, communicate, or understand the world better. For example, I am studying Latin because it helps me understand the deep history of humanity, and of languages, and the evolution of thought and consciousness. I practice guitar because I realize that music is all about communication and creating special, authentic experiences. I love to get outside, and I am more interested in geology, botony, and the birds and the animals than I ever was. Because those things are deep and unchanging.
- prawn 6y ago
  I think part of it is also about risk/reward. I can spend time learning something, but if I don't have the confidence it will pay off, I find it much harder to commit. Maybe it's about having less time ahead of you or being more cynical.
- vmception 6y ago
  Can you ski as opposed to snowboarding? I've ridden the lifts up with many older people, 60s-70s. They are there for a range of reasons but mostly related to pastimes, escape, and enjoying it. I don't know what older means to you, but I think you inadvertently described a self-limiting thing in your quest not to.
  - bsder 6y ago
    It's not about other older people doing it. If they enjoy doing it, great for them. I never learned to ski or skate, so I have to ask myself why should I learn to do that instead of some other physical activity I already enjoy. And, to be fair, as a kid I never learned to ski or skate for good reason. The kids who skied or skated always seemed to have lots and lots of broken bones. Nah, I'll pass. I've got other sports I like that don't seem to bust my bones up.
rootusrootus 6y ago
I'm 46 and trying to escape this algorithms course so I can finish my master's degree. I'm definitely feeling that motivation slippin...
- vmception 6y ago
  Don't worry, most people don't escape it so you'll have camaraderie whether you do or don't!
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Yes, I studied mathematics quite late, I didn't graduate until I was 49. If I'm being honest I was pretty sick of it by the end and just wanted to get it done. This was quite a contrast to learning technology earlier in my life and I'm sure it says more about my age than anything else.
ojosilva 6y ago
My dad, 74, just picked up Nodejs because I told him it was cool. He got so excited he started migrating part of the 50k line reporting Spring/java codebase he had written 7 yrs ago to Node at the huge telecom he's at. He says he likes rewriting sw as a way to iron out bugs and refresh neurons. My mom, 75, got her degree in law 10 yrs ago being the gramma around a bunch of college teenagers. Passed the bar exam after 5 attempts and now works at a Ngo representing women in need to get pro bono divorce and custody from their wife-beating husbands. Apparently motivation to learn increases with age in my family. I think maybe as a way to defeat death or something.
- tartoran 6y ago
  It’s good that they still can and act on it. Maybe it’s brain chemistry but so many have it and waste it. While others try really hard and can’t stop the decay. A lot of older folks who retire don’t know what to do with all the free time and end up not so well especially ones whose only social life was at work. Also having a sense of purpose can be the spark to the motivation flame. I on the other hand, at 40 with family&child, I don’t have the same patience for just anything that comes my way. Only if something sparks my interest I manage a way to make some progress. Last year I begun a slow journey into lisp/scheme and found the same flame i had when i was a junior. With other mundane things I’ll most likely get a shallow depth of knowledge to the level needed to get my work done and if needed i do some deep dives. I used to go in depth at first but lately i found that the return on investment wasn’t too appealing. I hope to still have the acument to learn later on in life when I have more time and fewer responsibilities
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    If you focus on return on investment, you won’t get anywhere. Your child can remind you how to learn something just because it’s there, without concern for return on investment. The trick is allowing yourself to invest time in things that feel like play without interrupting yourself with thoughts of “but how will I use this?” My opinion at a similar life stage, anyway.
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ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I’m 58, and I have spent the last three years, “retooling” myself. It’s worked out well. I’m currently well underway (alone) with one of the biggest projects I’ve ever been involved with, and I worked in pretty big teams. I learn something new (often, multiple somethings) every day. In fact, I seem to learn faster, and more comprehensively(understanding why, as well as what). I think that my experience helps to create a good baseline, that was missing, when I was younger.
- null_object 6y ago
  I’m having this experience also. I’ve changed technologies several times over the last 20 years, each time diving into more complex languages, and I’m finding that not only is my understanding deepening it’s also accelerating. I look back on my previous developer self and shake my head with disbelief at how little I really knew at each stage. Incidentally I also needed to learn a whole new spoken language over the same period (having moved country) and now having mastered that, I’ve begun another course to learn French (to add to the other three languages I speak). What I do recognize is the energy lacking to just follow ‘any’ project that I had in my 20s and 30s. Now my learning is focused and attuned.
chris123 6y ago
It accelerates for some. "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know." -AE
SubiculumCode 6y ago
1st the people on HN are not a random sample of the population. For those in computer science, programming, and science, learning is THE job in a sense...and there is definitely evidence for use-it-or-lose it and the brain. So all the personal stories here won't tell us much about what happens to the average human as they age...and even then it will happen to us at some point. Also, pontificating on how stressful it is for older people to be wrong without empirical evidence is rich. Overall, the quality of HN posts about non computer/ML topics is quite poor.
- taffronaut 6y ago
  This. I feel I learned a lot more about insecurity related to 'keeping up' in tech from this thread than I did about brain changes in mice.
at_a_remove 6y ago
I bellyflopped over to a completely different section of IT needs and I am middle-aged. Partly, I think I was motivated (or anti-motivated) because I did not want to go through another round of what I call "disposable learning" at my last job, wherein I would learn something completely ephemeral and not carry any of it forward five years later. In retrospect, I believe my then-boss was practicing on some scheduling platforms that would appear in his next job. We had one ticketing/scheduling/org conglomerate, and then the whole organization was scheduled to hit something else in nine months, but he wanted to try out this thing in the meantime, even though we would get four months with it. Also more frameworky business. Just churn churn churn.
robodale 6y ago
47. I want to be effective. Now. Time is not on my side. If the tech I learned and mastered gets me from point A to B, and the users love the results...that's all I need. Read Joel Spolsky's "Fire and Motion" if you have concerns.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  At the time Spolsky was writing that he was creating a desktop application in VB6 and C++ (CityDesk). Some times you really do need to move on.
gnicholas 6y ago
I appreciate the scientific research that went into this, as I have seen family members become very uninterested in thinking deeply in order to be able to understand current events. I always assumed that the waning desire to learn new things in old age was simply a function of the cost-benefit analysis. If you are 20 years old and learn something new, you benefit from it for 60 years or so. But if you're 75 and considering learning that same new thing, you would benefit from that knowledge for a much shorter period of time. I wonder how much of the decline in motivation is tied to this commonsensical explanation, and how much is related to the scientific process that the researchers observed in mice.
- randcraw 6y ago
  I think utility is surely a significant factor in motivating humans to learn some topics. If you're retired, you're unlikely to take much interest in mastering Jira or getting CPA certification or a six sigma belt — skills you'll never use. Likewise, if future prospects for using a skill seem more limited with age, you're very likely to be less inclined to pursue means to such ends. Or perhaps mice just relish sugar water less as their taste buds fade with age.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  Uh...they have already seen the "current events" three times by now. It gets old and very predictable.
ta1234567890 6y ago
We are constantly learning, every day, pretty much almost every second we are awake/alive. This might be conflating academic studying with actual learning. We learn names of people, we learn their stories, we learn the news and tons of other stuff that we don't even notice or realize that we are learning all the time.
gumby 6y ago
For those who have commented "I am/this other person is not like that, note that the article (MIT Press release actually) begins by saying "As people age, they often lose their motivation to learn new things or engage in everyday activities." (emphasis mine) I think HN selects for people who do not fit into this demographic. Also note that there could be other consequential results earlier in the lives of people who exhibit this phenomenon.
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ghostcluster 6y ago
It seems these researchers have potentially zeroed in on the specific neural regulatory system behind the adage that 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks'. That they are able to administer drugs to manipulate the gradual deadening of this risk/reward learning mechanism is incredibly cool. I wonder if there is an adaptive reason for this circuitry to cool with age, and if there will be any serious unintended side effects from artificially boosting it. In any case, this new finding is exciting, with potentially broad applications for future medicine, and the tantalizing ability for more people to continue to live life to the fullest in older age.
hbarka 6y ago
As you get older, there’s literally a pile somewhere in the house, metaphorically the pile of broken dreams or pile of unfinished projects. The wish to learn something else is additive to the pile, probably the definition of the root of procrastination. Nothing to do with decline but more with anxiety.
Izkata 6y ago
> When the researchers used genetically targeted drugs to boost activity in the striosomes I was expecting direct stimulation through electrodes or something, but designer drugs? Really? Pop a pill when you start college/university or a new job, get a motivation boost to everything new. This would be crazy. (...maybe a bad idea at college due to the risk factor boost, but still...)
yters 6y ago
All my freetime dissappeared and what I have is monopolized by existing obligations and projects. Work is too scattered to allow the necessary focus to learn.
rvn1045 6y ago
A lot of the motivation to learn comes from being insecure about not knowing. Especially when your young. As you get older you become less insecure about not knowing and have less to prove, so motivation to learn declines.
- randcraw 6y ago
  This research addresses only learning in mice, who are unlikely to deliberate why they no longer have their old passion for running mazes or tapping levers for sugar water. So I think it's a bit fanciful to equate senescent mouse substantia nigra with human ennui.
ggm 6y ago
What I find, is that my investment in learning has bifurcated. I invest in learning how to negotiate the s/w systems I have no choice but to use, (jira) to my advantage. There is a strong cost/benefit outcome favouring this learning. I invest in learning enough about things otherwise that interest me, to decide if I need to deep dive or not. I did a haskell MOOC for this reason (Glasgow Uni) and the outcomes were mixed: I had no opportunity to move this into the first category (directly applicable at work) but I felt very motivated by what I learned about FP and typed languages. I try not to over-invest in anything in this space, learning is hard. I'm 59. I hope I can continue to learn, and maybe even pick up the pace, but learning is hard, and being made to do courses in stuff I don't want to (leadership, presentation skills, new whizz-bang techniques to do old things) costs me brain time I think of now a as a precious asset.
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8bitsrule 6y ago
A surplus of curiosity kept me in college for a lot longer than I needed to be there. That curiosity never left me. I'm very sure that's true of many if not most people, in both the arts and sciences. Maybe it's a personal thing, but I suspect strong curiosity inborn in most of us. We all had to learn a very complex language after all. Necessity may keep many from feeding it --cultural factors may also discourage it -- a crappy educational environment may foster cynicism - then maybe it goes away if it isn't nurtured. A lot of (well-known human) educational researchers came to similar conclusions. If a study of brain circuits in rodents finds otherwise, well, rodents aren't human.
godelmachine 6y ago
My father who is 53 years of age called me up and said he’s enrolling for GeorgiaTech Web Developer boot camp. He’s a functional consultant and is pissed off at the way developers whiz past him and dominate during client conversations. That’s my point.
- godelmachine 6y ago
  Post-factum correction: My father is 59.
herendin2 6y ago
"Stay hungry. Stay foolish" is an attempt to counteract this tendency
known 6y ago
"You are a product of your environment" --Clement Stone (b. 1902) https://archive.is/yPhyn https://archive.is/yPhyn
johnnujler 6y ago
I know a lot of people including my dad and several of his friends who picked up music and programming after retiring from their 30 year old accounting job at the age of 62. Also many people like to term this as an exception rather than rule, but know that it is not. My observation has been that people who lack the motivation are either the ones who are constantly stressed with their job and life, or who are content with what they know. Take some time off from work, meditate, be idle. Your mind will automatically want to do something that is productive. Most of these researches are averaged out observations which say no more about your ideal bp than I can by looking at you. So please learn all you want and please don't base your decision to learn new things based on a generic research result. And no MIT is not an authority on your life. If you really want to know your brain health, go get an fmri, but please don't let your desire to learn be dictated by what others say.
brigandish 6y ago
> “If you could pinpoint a mechanism which is underlying the subjective evaluation of reward and cost, and use a modern technique that could manipulate it, either psychiatrically or with biofeedback, patients may be able to activate their circuits correctly,” Friedman says. In my experience there tends to be someone, somewhere, who figured this out a long time ago and is doing some action that manipulates this mechanism, but because it's cloaked in archaic or (at least quasi) religious language it will be dismissed and we'll have to put up with years of scientists fumbling around to recreate it. Mindfulness meditation is probably the latest example. NIH isn't something that only affects programmers.
supernova87a 6y ago
I thought there's also a selection effect at play. People who get to be successful in life and live a good old age (you tend not to talk to or see the opposite) -- with all those years of experience behind them, they start to think that the traits and opinions that got them there are probably correct. And that radically different or new things that they might benefit from learning, probably in their mind aren't going to be more successful (or of much potential benefit) than what worked for them already. There's basically a full slate of things that made them successful. And that's not a bad thing! People couldn't survive so well without a sense of what good things worked for you. But I think as you get older (unless you're exceptionally alert and open-minded), this confirmation bias of your own success starts to close your mind off to new, different thoughts and pathways. Unless you actively make it a point of erasing and making space for new ideas, you fall back on the old and don't seek out the new to fill your mind.
PeterStuer 6y ago
I feel that as I get older there is no lack of motivation or ability to learn at all. In fact, I'd say I have become more efficient at it through getting better at the meta. I most certainly have become more critical of what to learn. I prefer diving deep into subjects of substance rather than threading water learning the syntax of yet another niche programming language that arguably marginally improves on use case X if all the stars allign or leaning the quirks of yet another framework Y that is flavor of the month and just a rehash of a fashion of 5 years ago.
- tayo42 6y ago
  Yeah, i feel less motivated to spend effort on things Im pretty sure won't have any pay off in the end. What I'm slightly worried about is being to critical and writing everything off as a waste of time. There's not a a lot of good ways to tell not learning something was a good idea or not, so you don't get feedback.
sbierwagen 6y ago
Ctrl+f "explore" on OP: 0 results. Ctrl+f "explore" in the HN comments: 0 results. The generalized disinclination to learn towards the end of your life is known as the explore-exploit tradeoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit >In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem (sometimes called the K-[1] or N-armed bandit problem[2]) is a problem in which a fixed limited set of resources must be allocated between competing (alternative) choices in a way that maximizes their expected gain, when each choice's properties are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may become better understood as time passes or by allocating resources to the choice.[3][4] This is a classic reinforcement learning problem that exemplifies the exploration–exploitation tradeoff dilemma. The name comes from imagining a gambler at a row of slot machines (sometimes known as "one-armed bandits"), who has to decide which machines to play, how many times to play each machine and in which order to play them, and whether to continue with the current machine or try a different machine.[5] The multi-armed bandit problem also falls into the broad category of stochastic scheduling. >In the problem, each machine provides a random reward from a probability distribution specific to that machine. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls.[3][4] The crucial tradeoff the gambler faces at each trial is between "exploitation" of the machine that has the highest expected payoff and "exploration" to get more information about the expected payoffs of the other machines. The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is also faced in machine learning.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Looks like a variation of the Law of Diminishing Returns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns I can learn many new things for fun but I already know a lot of things I'm fond of, which one should I give away given that time is finite? I didn't know anything when I was little and much less than now when I was half my age. Furthermore there are a few things I like and I became reasonably good at, professionally or for fun. I won't give them away unless I have to.
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    I think the multi-armed bandit problem would assume that the probability distribution, for each choice, would remain a constant for the duration of the problem. Diminishing returns would imply that some subset of those choices would have decreasing probability of a positive pay-off the more they are used. This would be more realistic, and much harder to model. With the constant probabilities with the payoff being for a single score, it makes sense to just search for the highest expected value score. But that expected value relies on the probability distribution remaining the same!
sieste 6y ago
... in mice.
- commonturtle 6y ago
  Yeah the title is misleading and the results are probably not going to replicate in humans. But surprisingly the comments on this post are really interesting and good quality.
blodkorv 6y ago
in contrast to everybody who seems to be wanting to learn more by age, i can really feel like my brain is getting calcified. Things used to be more of a mystery for me and learning would always seem like an way to open things up. There also was a naive undertone of a feeling that the things i am learning will greatly benefit me work wise or that learning howto solder on a mod-chip on a ps1 would make me smarter. I now view learning much more differently and i find many subjects really boring to learn and not useful at all. I also know my limits and abilities now when i am 30 much better than when i was 13-25. Before i felt like there was a chance i could be really good at learning something, or that i had some hidden abilities yet to be discovered. But i no know way too well thats not the case. I much more enjoy simpel things in life now, like eating good food and being with friends. The fire of learning has left me, maybe a bit too early(30) but i already know enough to live the life i want.
- nmlnn 6y ago
  Exact same boat here. My motivation died around 30 (34 now) once I realized I wasn't going to make any kind of impact on humanity. So now it's harder and harder to answer the question of "what's the point?". Whereas, drinks with friends or walks by the sea never seem to give rise to that question in the first place. So even though I still like to read about interesting things, once any initial curiosity has been satisfied, I'm out, there is no depth to the learning anymore, and soon enough you forget it all anyway.
  - bloodorange 6y ago
    > My motivation died around 30 (34 now) once I realized I wasn't going to make any kind of impact on humanity. Seeing your confidence in that outlook, if you permit me an intrusion, I'd go so far as to say, you probably could say "decided" instead of "realized" and it would be accurate. There are decades ahead for most people at that age. And instead of starting from scratch like an infant, you already have a lot of things going for you. If you were a close friend, I'd have badgered you relentlessly to believe in yourself. I hope as an internet stranger, I can plant a seed of belief in your mind. Most people are capable of far more than they believe. Good luck!
  - 6y ago
Hokusai 6y ago
Reading all the comments about "I want to learn something deeper instead of just shinny things" (I completely agree on that) makes me think that one thing does not exclude the other. We that are over 40 may want to stop chasing trends because is wasteful and we have learned that brings little value, but maybe also because our brains are wired to think that way. I think that I would not notice the difference of changing what I learn because I though about it or because my though changed because underlying physical changes in the brain. If I could take a pill and re-active the "brain circuit that is critical for maintaining this kind of motivation [for learning]" that would be awesome. I would be able to compare my reasoning before and after the pill. That's an experience that I would like to have.
novocaine 6y ago
IN MICE. https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice calls out headlines like this regularly.
davidtranjs 6y ago
We don't need any scientist to explain why we don't want to learn as we age. The simple reason is we have too much responsibilities as an adult. As an adult, we have to: - Take care for the kids - Take care for our partners. - Take care for our job - Cooking and cleaning the house every day. In order to learn something we have to focus, imagine getting disturb every 15 minutes because of our responsibilities above. We will give up learning soon. Actually I found out the when I grow up, my thinking ability getting better than when I was a child.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  We need scientists to deconvolve the "more responsibilities" bit from a physical change inside the brain. It is easy to imagine that both are occuring at the same time. But it is difficult to prove this since they both confound the effect of the other.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > The simple reason is we have too much responsibilities as an adult. I don’t think it is that simple. I spend a lot of time in communities of people of leisure. Not millionaire celebrities, but just people who were savvy with saving and investing, and able to retire already in their 30s and spend the rest of their days on a tropical beach somewhere. These people have almost no responsibilities, but as they get older many lose all interest in acquiring new skills, even learning the local language or a new hobby. With regard to learning’s interaction with “responsible adult life”, the cynic in me wonders if the situation is the reverse: learning new skills is a way to display mating behavior in young adulthood, and once people acquire a spouse and start a family, there is less need for going through the motions of showing one is an intelligent mate.
throwaway7281 6y ago
My grandma went to university lectures until she approached the age of 90, and the only thing holding her back now is her bad ear and bad leg. The mind is a wonderful organ.
dkarl 6y ago
It seems the older I get, the more my life fills up with obligations. The bits left over are lower and lower quality. It used to be that an entire evening would be unplanned; I would grab something out of the fridge for dinner, sit down, and think about if I wanted to read a book or write some code or watch a new movie I was excited about. Even if I was "lazy" and chose the movie 50% of the time, I was still getting through a couple of books a month. Now at 6pm I am wanted for something, guaranteed. If it is not something specific, it is to be available for interruptions. At the end of the evening, when I really should be asleep already, I am released from interruption duty, and sometimes I can get an hour or more to myself, depending on how much sleep I want to rob myself of. At that point I would be sleepy if I wasn't stressed out, and I've probably had a couple of drinks, but that's when I hack on a personal project, or (more likely) switch to YouTube if I am not coherent enough to write code that actually works. And if I watch something like 3Blue1Brown or a software presentation then I count that as "learning."
- mtberatwork 6y ago
  > I am released from interruption duty Ha, that's an apt way to put it. It seems to me as well that we aren't living in the information age insomuch as we are living in the interruption age.
x87678r 6y ago
When you learn new skills your old skills slowly degrade. For young people it doesn't matter because they dont have old skills, but for me I have found often I just end up as half-good at the old and new skills, so now choose carefully.
nbzso 6y ago
I am no expert, but it seems that keyword here is "motivation" and motivation can be tricky. Learning has two dimensions in my personal view. Desire to know and habit to learn. Desire to learn new things has emotional motivation and is complex system dependent on social validation or abstract pleasure. I am more in camp of abstract pleasure my self.
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musicale 6y ago
Great, maybe next they can explain why kids' motivation to learn declines when they go to school.
ralphc 6y ago
If you live in Georgia, USA, and you're 62 or older, you can attend college classes for free. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2016/01/04/senior-citizens-free-college-classes/78278904/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2016/01/04/senior-citize... At 59 it gives me something to look forward to in a few years.

269 points by hhs 6y ago

I find that as I get older I have less time to learn the latest and greatest new shiny tech, while I really want to focus on deepening my understanding of topics I've already invested in. I feel annoyed when tech changes because I spent time learning the old thing and I can't get that time back. I think the core idea here is that with more demands on my time, I've become more choosy about how I spend it. This study isn't about that. They've found an area of the brain in mice that seems to be related to motivation to make decisions with complex cost benefit analysis. This type of decision making is impaired when under stress, by mental health diagnosis, or, according to the study, by an aged brain. If any conclusion is worth drawing here it's the increased importance of mental health as we age. This is not an argument for all of us to try to keep up with the shiny new language/framework/whirlwind.

abootstrapper 6y ago
Programming and IT in general is such a bummer in that regard. 20 years of relearning how to do the same thing differently wears on you. I learned JavaScript 15+ years ago, and I’m still having to relearn that nonsense every couple years. “JavaScript on the server now!? What? Why? Ok, fine. Here we go again.”
- tartoran 6y ago
  Yes, I agree with the same sentiment. Part of my unwillingness to learn new shiny tech is that it doesn’t spark a deep interest and have to force myself through it. I still do catch up but skip some generations.
- fendy3002 6y ago
  Though I understand that feeling, OTOH usually we can learn it much faster and easier since we know many of the concepts, and many of those are still used (function, request, response, serialization to name a few). Tools however is harder. Elastic, graphql, docker, front end framework (angular, react vue), are very very different conceptually compared to the past technology.
  - tamrix 6y ago
    It's not too hard to pick up new tech when you've been in the industry for a while. You can even do it on the job with some afterwork study. To me the problem is the emphasis some companies place on knowing specific tech. >Must have five years experience in Web development with a focus on front end frameworks eg react/angular and cloud experience (aws preferred) VS >must have two years experience with the following; asp net 5.0, aspnet mvc 5.0, automapper, xunit, tiny ioc and azure Webapps However, typical the good companies have the former. So you can spot it out pretty easy. Although I fear the industry is moving more to specific skill sets and certification. The certificates trend is being pushed harder as it makes a lot of money for these companies.
    - fendy3002 6y ago
      In my country I can easily fake the years experience. If you're good enough at the tools, you can bluff at the interview. Usually at least 3 from 4 companies will continue with the recruitment. With certification, I don't think it'll happen in near future, due to how hard it is to certificate a programmer and how scarce they are right now. Though it's possible for outsourced foreign developers such as India to be required certification.
    - underwater 6y ago
      It's not hard, but as someone who's done it a few times before you lack intrinsic motivation. Something that is fun to people half your age is just work for you.
    - dajohnson89 6y ago
      "afterwork study" for work sounds like "work" to me.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      > You can even do it on the job with some afterwork study. What this assertion misses is that many no longer want to work in their free time anymore. Even if I love programming ever since 12y/o I can no longer make myself care about $day_job when I can have a proper rest, which is precious and not that much anyway.
- vmception 6y ago
  That's pretty funny but the V8 system rewrote what javascript is while retaining and adding onto the syntax, as you might have realized by now.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Just wondering but if not JavaScript on the server then what were you using previously?
- lowercased 6y ago
  You're using JavaScript? We've all moved on to TypeScript! ;) But yeah, much of the "relearning", I've found, is to work with new sets of tools that solve problems that... we didn't have 15-20 years ago. Or, not to the same degree, at least. And some of those new problems and changes have benefits, some don't, some are solving self-imposed problems, some are "solving" problems that don't have concrete "solutions", only "opinions".
dwd 6y ago
Learning a new tool when you have limited set of current tools is a good investment. But there is a aspect of marginal returns that comes into play here. It's not just the increased demands on your time, but the knowledge that it's ticking away... As you get older you get more critical/anxious about wasting time and more reticent about investing in something that has no compelling return on investment.

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rabidrat 6y ago

Learning involves being wrong, and being wrong is stressful. The older you are, the more stressful it is. In humans, there is a strong ego component, but I imagine that there is also a physiological resistance that comes from a lifetime of learned skills, models, behaviors, and traumas. Having gotten cuts, scrapes, bruises, and maybe breaks while learning to ride a bicycle, which still continues to work just fine for getting you where you need to go, it's a hard sell to suffer or risk another set of cuts/scrapes/breaks to learn to ride a bikeprime, even if it's a qualitatively better tool--it's not essential. And we also learn over the decades that our bodies and minds at 64 are not as flexible and resilient as they were at 4 or 34. If there were just one new bikeprime every few years, it would be easier to settle in for the pain and benefit. But the pace of technological change is much much faster, and along with intense marketing, it seems like there are dozens of new bikeprimes every year. Many of these turn out to be mostly hype, so it's hard to know where to invest energy. And every time a supposed bikeprime turns out to be more pain than it's worth, there's a real lesson that's learned about the value of bikeprimes in general. And so we become older, more skeptical, more rigid. I also think there is some aspect of survivorship bias in the value of "learning new skills". For every person who invested the time in learning a skill that turned out to be valuable for them overall, there are other people who spent years investing in a skill that turned out to be a dead-end.

mhb 6y ago
OK - what's a bikeprime? Google couldn't help me.
- strstr 6y ago
  It’s a rhetorical construct here: they mean a non-bike thing that also requires scraping your knees to learn.
- deedree 6y ago
  From the context I would say, the latest fad. The new hot thing, mode, rage, trend?
  - 6y ago

chovyfu 6y ago

I'm 46 and started building web sites in 1995. I think as I grow older I want to specialize rather than chase the latest new shiny technology. That doesn't mean I don't want to learn. It means I want to learn to be better at what I already know.

Rochus 6y ago
One rarely sees mice in IT. And neither Maslow had mice in mind when he developed his theory of motivation. EDIT: Okay, apparently I need to clarify the statement. Humans have so much more possibilities to learn and motivate themselves than a mouse that it really makes no sense to draw conclusions about human behavior from the experiment. You probably remember that already a few brain researchers have dared the balancing act from basic research to show business with a few colored pictures of brain activity, and even got entangled in legal philosophical debates. Sure, you can win an audience and impress your sponsors, but this is not the actual scientific work.
- Rochus 6y ago
  It seems that I am not the only one who sees a significant contradiction between reality and the conclusions from the experiment.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

I think mice don't have to manage retirement accounts, learn specialty skills, or deal with stresses of being laid off. I get that mice have similar dna, but this is not as easy as just saying "mice disinterested after doing the same thing for 5 years means people don't like learning later!"

ojosilva 6y ago
The correlation between mice and human is something that has been studied ad infinitum by scientists, with many models that allow them to determine the confidence levels and general relevance and similarities between the two species for a particular study. So, yeah, as you said it's "not as easy" but definitely not something you can casually dismiss either just because mice don't have mortgages.

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bsder 6y ago

As someone older, I have enough experience that I can see which things are heading to dead ends and which might lead to more experiences. Learn another foreign langauge? Sure, why not. Learn machining? Sure, why not. Go learn to skateboard or snowboard? A pass--where would I go with that at my age? Learn something new related to computers? Your bar to clear to motivate me on that is huge (but it does occasionally clear). Go back and push my Quantum Mechanics or Solid State Physics to another layer? Nah, not without a good reason.

kmtrowbr 6y ago
There are some evergreen computer topics, like SQL, and bash, design patterns. I focus on those rather than the latest Javascript library. But otherwise, I really want to focus on things which help me give back, communicate, or understand the world better. For example, I am studying Latin because it helps me understand the deep history of humanity, and of languages, and the evolution of thought and consciousness. I practice guitar because I realize that music is all about communication and creating special, authentic experiences. I love to get outside, and I am more interested in geology, botony, and the birds and the animals than I ever was. Because those things are deep and unchanging.
prawn 6y ago
I think part of it is also about risk/reward. I can spend time learning something, but if I don't have the confidence it will pay off, I find it much harder to commit. Maybe it's about having less time ahead of you or being more cynical.
vmception 6y ago
Can you ski as opposed to snowboarding? I've ridden the lifts up with many older people, 60s-70s. They are there for a range of reasons but mostly related to pastimes, escape, and enjoying it. I don't know what older means to you, but I think you inadvertently described a self-limiting thing in your quest not to.
- bsder 6y ago
  It's not about other older people doing it. If they enjoy doing it, great for them. I never learned to ski or skate, so I have to ask myself why should I learn to do that instead of some other physical activity I already enjoy. And, to be fair, as a kid I never learned to ski or skate for good reason. The kids who skied or skated always seemed to have lots and lots of broken bones. Nah, I'll pass. I've got other sports I like that don't seem to bust my bones up.

rootusrootus 6y ago

I'm 46 and trying to escape this algorithms course so I can finish my master's degree. I'm definitely feeling that motivation slippin...

vmception 6y ago
Don't worry, most people don't escape it so you'll have camaraderie whether you do or don't!
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Yes, I studied mathematics quite late, I didn't graduate until I was 49. If I'm being honest I was pretty sick of it by the end and just wanted to get it done. This was quite a contrast to learning technology earlier in my life and I'm sure it says more about my age than anything else.

ojosilva 6y ago

My dad, 74, just picked up Nodejs because I told him it was cool. He got so excited he started migrating part of the 50k line reporting Spring/java codebase he had written 7 yrs ago to Node at the huge telecom he's at. He says he likes rewriting sw as a way to iron out bugs and refresh neurons. My mom, 75, got her degree in law 10 yrs ago being the gramma around a bunch of college teenagers. Passed the bar exam after 5 attempts and now works at a Ngo representing women in need to get pro bono divorce and custody from their wife-beating husbands. Apparently motivation to learn increases with age in my family. I think maybe as a way to defeat death or something.

tartoran 6y ago
It’s good that they still can and act on it. Maybe it’s brain chemistry but so many have it and waste it. While others try really hard and can’t stop the decay. A lot of older folks who retire don’t know what to do with all the free time and end up not so well especially ones whose only social life was at work. Also having a sense of purpose can be the spark to the motivation flame. I on the other hand, at 40 with family&child, I don’t have the same patience for just anything that comes my way. Only if something sparks my interest I manage a way to make some progress. Last year I begun a slow journey into lisp/scheme and found the same flame i had when i was a junior. With other mundane things I’ll most likely get a shallow depth of knowledge to the level needed to get my work done and if needed i do some deep dives. I used to go in depth at first but lately i found that the return on investment wasn’t too appealing. I hope to still have the acument to learn later on in life when I have more time and fewer responsibilities
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  If you focus on return on investment, you won’t get anywhere. Your child can remind you how to learn something just because it’s there, without concern for return on investment. The trick is allowing yourself to invest time in things that feel like play without interrupting yourself with thoughts of “but how will I use this?” My opinion at a similar life stage, anyway.
  - 6y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I’m 58, and I have spent the last three years, “retooling” myself. It’s worked out well. I’m currently well underway (alone) with one of the biggest projects I’ve ever been involved with, and I worked in pretty big teams. I learn something new (often, multiple somethings) every day. In fact, I seem to learn faster, and more comprehensively(understanding why, as well as what). I think that my experience helps to create a good baseline, that was missing, when I was younger.

null_object 6y ago
I’m having this experience also. I’ve changed technologies several times over the last 20 years, each time diving into more complex languages, and I’m finding that not only is my understanding deepening it’s also accelerating. I look back on my previous developer self and shake my head with disbelief at how little I really knew at each stage. Incidentally I also needed to learn a whole new spoken language over the same period (having moved country) and now having mastered that, I’ve begun another course to learn French (to add to the other three languages I speak). What I do recognize is the energy lacking to just follow ‘any’ project that I had in my 20s and 30s. Now my learning is focused and attuned.

chris123 6y ago

It accelerates for some. "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know." -AE

SubiculumCode 6y ago

1st the people on HN are not a random sample of the population. For those in computer science, programming, and science, learning is THE job in a sense...and there is definitely evidence for use-it-or-lose it and the brain. So all the personal stories here won't tell us much about what happens to the average human as they age...and even then it will happen to us at some point. Also, pontificating on how stressful it is for older people to be wrong without empirical evidence is rich. Overall, the quality of HN posts about non computer/ML topics is quite poor.

taffronaut 6y ago
This. I feel I learned a lot more about insecurity related to 'keeping up' in tech from this thread than I did about brain changes in mice.

at_a_remove 6y ago

I bellyflopped over to a completely different section of IT needs and I am middle-aged. Partly, I think I was motivated (or anti-motivated) because I did not want to go through another round of what I call "disposable learning" at my last job, wherein I would learn something completely ephemeral and not carry any of it forward five years later. In retrospect, I believe my then-boss was practicing on some scheduling platforms that would appear in his next job. We had one ticketing/scheduling/org conglomerate, and then the whole organization was scheduled to hit something else in nine months, but he wanted to try out this thing in the meantime, even though we would get four months with it. Also more frameworky business. Just churn churn churn.

robodale 6y ago

47. I want to be effective. Now. Time is not on my side. If the tech I learned and mastered gets me from point A to B, and the users love the results...that's all I need. Read Joel Spolsky's "Fire and Motion" if you have concerns.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
At the time Spolsky was writing that he was creating a desktop application in VB6 and C++ (CityDesk). Some times you really do need to move on.

gnicholas 6y ago

I appreciate the scientific research that went into this, as I have seen family members become very uninterested in thinking deeply in order to be able to understand current events. I always assumed that the waning desire to learn new things in old age was simply a function of the cost-benefit analysis. If you are 20 years old and learn something new, you benefit from it for 60 years or so. But if you're 75 and considering learning that same new thing, you would benefit from that knowledge for a much shorter period of time. I wonder how much of the decline in motivation is tied to this commonsensical explanation, and how much is related to the scientific process that the researchers observed in mice.

randcraw 6y ago
I think utility is surely a significant factor in motivating humans to learn some topics. If you're retired, you're unlikely to take much interest in mastering Jira or getting CPA certification or a six sigma belt — skills you'll never use. Likewise, if future prospects for using a skill seem more limited with age, you're very likely to be less inclined to pursue means to such ends. Or perhaps mice just relish sugar water less as their taste buds fade with age.
datavirtue 6y ago
Uh...they have already seen the "current events" three times by now. It gets old and very predictable.

ta1234567890 6y ago

We are constantly learning, every day, pretty much almost every second we are awake/alive. This might be conflating academic studying with actual learning. We learn names of people, we learn their stories, we learn the news and tons of other stuff that we don't even notice or realize that we are learning all the time.

gumby 6y ago

For those who have commented "I am/this other person is not like that, note that the article (MIT Press release actually) begins by saying "As people age, they often lose their motivation to learn new things or engage in everyday activities." (emphasis mine) I think HN selects for people who do not fit into this demographic. Also note that there could be other consequential results earlier in the lives of people who exhibit this phenomenon.

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ghostcluster 6y ago

It seems these researchers have potentially zeroed in on the specific neural regulatory system behind the adage that 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks'. That they are able to administer drugs to manipulate the gradual deadening of this risk/reward learning mechanism is incredibly cool. I wonder if there is an adaptive reason for this circuitry to cool with age, and if there will be any serious unintended side effects from artificially boosting it. In any case, this new finding is exciting, with potentially broad applications for future medicine, and the tantalizing ability for more people to continue to live life to the fullest in older age.

hbarka 6y ago

As you get older, there’s literally a pile somewhere in the house, metaphorically the pile of broken dreams or pile of unfinished projects. The wish to learn something else is additive to the pile, probably the definition of the root of procrastination. Nothing to do with decline but more with anxiety.

Izkata 6y ago

> When the researchers used genetically targeted drugs to boost activity in the striosomes I was expecting direct stimulation through electrodes or something, but designer drugs? Really? Pop a pill when you start college/university or a new job, get a motivation boost to everything new. This would be crazy. (...maybe a bad idea at college due to the risk factor boost, but still...)

yters 6y ago

All my freetime dissappeared and what I have is monopolized by existing obligations and projects. Work is too scattered to allow the necessary focus to learn.

rvn1045 6y ago

A lot of the motivation to learn comes from being insecure about not knowing. Especially when your young. As you get older you become less insecure about not knowing and have less to prove, so motivation to learn declines.

randcraw 6y ago
This research addresses only learning in mice, who are unlikely to deliberate why they no longer have their old passion for running mazes or tapping levers for sugar water. So I think it's a bit fanciful to equate senescent mouse substantia nigra with human ennui.

ggm 6y ago

What I find, is that my investment in learning has bifurcated. I invest in learning how to negotiate the s/w systems I have no choice but to use, (jira) to my advantage. There is a strong cost/benefit outcome favouring this learning. I invest in learning enough about things otherwise that interest me, to decide if I need to deep dive or not. I did a haskell MOOC for this reason (Glasgow Uni) and the outcomes were mixed: I had no opportunity to move this into the first category (directly applicable at work) but I felt very motivated by what I learned about FP and typed languages. I try not to over-invest in anything in this space, learning is hard. I'm 59. I hope I can continue to learn, and maybe even pick up the pace, but learning is hard, and being made to do courses in stuff I don't want to (leadership, presentation skills, new whizz-bang techniques to do old things) costs me brain time I think of now a as a precious asset.

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8bitsrule 6y ago

A surplus of curiosity kept me in college for a lot longer than I needed to be there. That curiosity never left me. I'm very sure that's true of many if not most people, in both the arts and sciences. Maybe it's a personal thing, but I suspect strong curiosity inborn in most of us. We all had to learn a very complex language after all. Necessity may keep many from feeding it --cultural factors may also discourage it -- a crappy educational environment may foster cynicism - then maybe it goes away if it isn't nurtured. A lot of (well-known human) educational researchers came to similar conclusions. If a study of brain circuits in rodents finds otherwise, well, rodents aren't human.

godelmachine 6y ago

My father who is 53 years of age called me up and said he’s enrolling for GeorgiaTech Web Developer boot camp. He’s a functional consultant and is pissed off at the way developers whiz past him and dominate during client conversations. That’s my point.

godelmachine 6y ago
Post-factum correction: My father is 59.

herendin2 6y ago

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish" is an attempt to counteract this tendency

known 6y ago

"You are a product of your environment" --Clement Stone (b. 1902) https://archive.is/yPhyn https://archive.is/yPhyn

johnnujler 6y ago

I know a lot of people including my dad and several of his friends who picked up music and programming after retiring from their 30 year old accounting job at the age of 62. Also many people like to term this as an exception rather than rule, but know that it is not. My observation has been that people who lack the motivation are either the ones who are constantly stressed with their job and life, or who are content with what they know. Take some time off from work, meditate, be idle. Your mind will automatically want to do something that is productive. Most of these researches are averaged out observations which say no more about your ideal bp than I can by looking at you. So please learn all you want and please don't base your decision to learn new things based on a generic research result. And no MIT is not an authority on your life. If you really want to know your brain health, go get an fmri, but please don't let your desire to learn be dictated by what others say.

brigandish 6y ago

> “If you could pinpoint a mechanism which is underlying the subjective evaluation of reward and cost, and use a modern technique that could manipulate it, either psychiatrically or with biofeedback, patients may be able to activate their circuits correctly,” Friedman says. In my experience there tends to be someone, somewhere, who figured this out a long time ago and is doing some action that manipulates this mechanism, but because it's cloaked in archaic or (at least quasi) religious language it will be dismissed and we'll have to put up with years of scientists fumbling around to recreate it. Mindfulness meditation is probably the latest example. NIH isn't something that only affects programmers.

supernova87a 6y ago

I thought there's also a selection effect at play. People who get to be successful in life and live a good old age (you tend not to talk to or see the opposite) -- with all those years of experience behind them, they start to think that the traits and opinions that got them there are probably correct. And that radically different or new things that they might benefit from learning, probably in their mind aren't going to be more successful (or of much potential benefit) than what worked for them already. There's basically a full slate of things that made them successful. And that's not a bad thing! People couldn't survive so well without a sense of what good things worked for you. But I think as you get older (unless you're exceptionally alert and open-minded), this confirmation bias of your own success starts to close your mind off to new, different thoughts and pathways. Unless you actively make it a point of erasing and making space for new ideas, you fall back on the old and don't seek out the new to fill your mind.

PeterStuer 6y ago

I feel that as I get older there is no lack of motivation or ability to learn at all. In fact, I'd say I have become more efficient at it through getting better at the meta. I most certainly have become more critical of what to learn. I prefer diving deep into subjects of substance rather than threading water learning the syntax of yet another niche programming language that arguably marginally improves on use case X if all the stars allign or leaning the quirks of yet another framework Y that is flavor of the month and just a rehash of a fashion of 5 years ago.

tayo42 6y ago
Yeah, i feel less motivated to spend effort on things Im pretty sure won't have any pay off in the end. What I'm slightly worried about is being to critical and writing everything off as a waste of time. There's not a a lot of good ways to tell not learning something was a good idea or not, so you don't get feedback.

sbierwagen 6y ago

Ctrl+f "explore" on OP: 0 results. Ctrl+f "explore" in the HN comments: 0 results. The generalized disinclination to learn towards the end of your life is known as the explore-exploit tradeoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit >In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem (sometimes called the K-[1] or N-armed bandit problem[2]) is a problem in which a fixed limited set of resources must be allocated between competing (alternative) choices in a way that maximizes their expected gain, when each choice's properties are only partially known at the time of allocation, and may become better understood as time passes or by allocating resources to the choice.[3][4] This is a classic reinforcement learning problem that exemplifies the exploration–exploitation tradeoff dilemma. The name comes from imagining a gambler at a row of slot machines (sometimes known as "one-armed bandits"), who has to decide which machines to play, how many times to play each machine and in which order to play them, and whether to continue with the current machine or try a different machine.[5] The multi-armed bandit problem also falls into the broad category of stochastic scheduling. >In the problem, each machine provides a random reward from a probability distribution specific to that machine. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls.[3][4] The crucial tradeoff the gambler faces at each trial is between "exploitation" of the machine that has the highest expected payoff and "exploration" to get more information about the expected payoffs of the other machines. The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is also faced in machine learning.

pmontra 6y ago
Looks like a variation of the Law of Diminishing Returns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns I can learn many new things for fun but I already know a lot of things I'm fond of, which one should I give away given that time is finite? I didn't know anything when I was little and much less than now when I was half my age. Furthermore there are a few things I like and I became reasonably good at, professionally or for fun. I won't give them away unless I have to.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  I think the multi-armed bandit problem would assume that the probability distribution, for each choice, would remain a constant for the duration of the problem. Diminishing returns would imply that some subset of those choices would have decreasing probability of a positive pay-off the more they are used. This would be more realistic, and much harder to model. With the constant probabilities with the payoff being for a single score, it makes sense to just search for the highest expected value score. But that expected value relies on the probability distribution remaining the same!

sieste 6y ago

... in mice.

commonturtle 6y ago
Yeah the title is misleading and the results are probably not going to replicate in humans. But surprisingly the comments on this post are really interesting and good quality.

blodkorv 6y ago

in contrast to everybody who seems to be wanting to learn more by age, i can really feel like my brain is getting calcified. Things used to be more of a mystery for me and learning would always seem like an way to open things up. There also was a naive undertone of a feeling that the things i am learning will greatly benefit me work wise or that learning howto solder on a mod-chip on a ps1 would make me smarter. I now view learning much more differently and i find many subjects really boring to learn and not useful at all. I also know my limits and abilities now when i am 30 much better than when i was 13-25. Before i felt like there was a chance i could be really good at learning something, or that i had some hidden abilities yet to be discovered. But i no know way too well thats not the case. I much more enjoy simpel things in life now, like eating good food and being with friends. The fire of learning has left me, maybe a bit too early(30) but i already know enough to live the life i want.

nmlnn 6y ago
Exact same boat here. My motivation died around 30 (34 now) once I realized I wasn't going to make any kind of impact on humanity. So now it's harder and harder to answer the question of "what's the point?". Whereas, drinks with friends or walks by the sea never seem to give rise to that question in the first place. So even though I still like to read about interesting things, once any initial curiosity has been satisfied, I'm out, there is no depth to the learning anymore, and soon enough you forget it all anyway.
- bloodorange 6y ago
  > My motivation died around 30 (34 now) once I realized I wasn't going to make any kind of impact on humanity. Seeing your confidence in that outlook, if you permit me an intrusion, I'd go so far as to say, you probably could say "decided" instead of "realized" and it would be accurate. There are decades ahead for most people at that age. And instead of starting from scratch like an infant, you already have a lot of things going for you. If you were a close friend, I'd have badgered you relentlessly to believe in yourself. I hope as an internet stranger, I can plant a seed of belief in your mind. Most people are capable of far more than they believe. Good luck!
- 6y ago

Hokusai 6y ago

Reading all the comments about "I want to learn something deeper instead of just shinny things" (I completely agree on that) makes me think that one thing does not exclude the other. We that are over 40 may want to stop chasing trends because is wasteful and we have learned that brings little value, but maybe also because our brains are wired to think that way. I think that I would not notice the difference of changing what I learn because I though about it or because my though changed because underlying physical changes in the brain. If I could take a pill and re-active the "brain circuit that is critical for maintaining this kind of motivation [for learning]" that would be awesome. I would be able to compare my reasoning before and after the pill. That's an experience that I would like to have.

novocaine 6y ago

IN MICE. https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice calls out headlines like this regularly.

davidtranjs 6y ago

We don't need any scientist to explain why we don't want to learn as we age. The simple reason is we have too much responsibilities as an adult. As an adult, we have to: - Take care for the kids - Take care for our partners. - Take care for our job - Cooking and cleaning the house every day. In order to learn something we have to focus, imagine getting disturb every 15 minutes because of our responsibilities above. We will give up learning soon. Actually I found out the when I grow up, my thinking ability getting better than when I was a child.

ImaCake 6y ago
We need scientists to deconvolve the "more responsibilities" bit from a physical change inside the brain. It is easy to imagine that both are occuring at the same time. But it is difficult to prove this since they both confound the effect of the other.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> The simple reason is we have too much responsibilities as an adult. I don’t think it is that simple. I spend a lot of time in communities of people of leisure. Not millionaire celebrities, but just people who were savvy with saving and investing, and able to retire already in their 30s and spend the rest of their days on a tropical beach somewhere. These people have almost no responsibilities, but as they get older many lose all interest in acquiring new skills, even learning the local language or a new hobby. With regard to learning’s interaction with “responsible adult life”, the cynic in me wonders if the situation is the reverse: learning new skills is a way to display mating behavior in young adulthood, and once people acquire a spouse and start a family, there is less need for going through the motions of showing one is an intelligent mate.

throwaway7281 6y ago

My grandma went to university lectures until she approached the age of 90, and the only thing holding her back now is her bad ear and bad leg. The mind is a wonderful organ.

dkarl 6y ago

It seems the older I get, the more my life fills up with obligations. The bits left over are lower and lower quality. It used to be that an entire evening would be unplanned; I would grab something out of the fridge for dinner, sit down, and think about if I wanted to read a book or write some code or watch a new movie I was excited about. Even if I was "lazy" and chose the movie 50% of the time, I was still getting through a couple of books a month. Now at 6pm I am wanted for something, guaranteed. If it is not something specific, it is to be available for interruptions. At the end of the evening, when I really should be asleep already, I am released from interruption duty, and sometimes I can get an hour or more to myself, depending on how much sleep I want to rob myself of. At that point I would be sleepy if I wasn't stressed out, and I've probably had a couple of drinks, but that's when I hack on a personal project, or (more likely) switch to YouTube if I am not coherent enough to write code that actually works. And if I watch something like 3Blue1Brown or a software presentation then I count that as "learning."

mtberatwork 6y ago
> I am released from interruption duty Ha, that's an apt way to put it. It seems to me as well that we aren't living in the information age insomuch as we are living in the interruption age.

x87678r 6y ago

When you learn new skills your old skills slowly degrade. For young people it doesn't matter because they dont have old skills, but for me I have found often I just end up as half-good at the old and new skills, so now choose carefully.

nbzso 6y ago

I am no expert, but it seems that keyword here is "motivation" and motivation can be tricky. Learning has two dimensions in my personal view. Desire to know and habit to learn. Desire to learn new things has emotional motivation and is complex system dependent on social validation or abstract pleasure. I am more in camp of abstract pleasure my self.

deleted 6y ago

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musicale 6y ago

Great, maybe next they can explain why kids' motivation to learn declines when they go to school.

ralphc 6y ago

If you live in Georgia, USA, and you're 62 or older, you can attend college classes for free. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2016/01/04/senior-citizens-free-college-classes/78278904/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2016/01/04/senior-citize... At 59 it gives me something to look forward to in a few years.