Something I've noticed is you get better at learning as you age. That is, learning is itself a skill, and you get more efficient with it. There is always an

Something I've noticed is you get better at learning as you age. That is, learning is itself a skill, and you get more efficient with it. There is always an opportunity cost to everything you do, so you can never get all the benefits while avoiding all of the drawbacks; but having been around a while, you get a sense of what's really good and what's not. So you don't need to mess around with every new "technology" and learn from those mistakes, when you can be selective, mess around with better ones, and learn even more valuable lessons. One of the biggest barriers to learning is psychological resistance. Learning to overcome that is a skill that improves with practice as well. So even assuming our brains aren't as spongy anymore, we learn how to direct them better and can still get as good or better results than when we were less selective and soaked up information indiscriminately.