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Ask HN: Why is it harder to learn new things the older you get?

by bsvalley on 11/26/18, 5:10 PM with 19 comments

• by __float on 11/26/18, 5:35 PM

  I think the issue here is not learning new things, but having the time to sit down and focus on them. As a child and young adult, you usually have fewer distractions -- whether a significant other, a mentally or physically exhausting job, bills to pay, etc. -- and spending hours on a single task is not so difficult.

  I have found a lot of success in waking up earlier to do the "learn a new thing" part of my routine, before the hectic work day begins.

• by evo_9 on 11/26/18, 6:55 PM

  It that true? I'm 51 and I feel it's easier to learn new things now, I have a much larger base of knowledge and experience to draw from.

  I'm genuinely curious if this a proven fact or something that just assumed to be the case.

  I do recognize that most people I know have stopped really trying to learn new things; seemed like most of my friends got stuck around 35-40.

• by axelrosen on 11/26/18, 5:47 PM

  Used to be really into language learning, this topic comes up a lot there. I'm of the opinion that while the intrinsic ability to learn does drop in some ways [0], a larger part of the difference is simply the fact that we don't put in the same effort. In first language acquisition this is pretty obvious. The incentives are all there. And I'd argue, in a much subtler way, similar mechanics persist in many fields of learning.

  Diminishing returns, lower tolerance for messing up, a lot of other going concerns, I could go on and on. The point is you're probably not putting in the same effort.

  [0] say as we age our hearing ability predictably diminishes, accounting for some of the difficulty in learning accents etc. But the majority opinion, I believe, over-attributes the difference to reduced plasticity and the likes.

• by amerkhalid on 11/26/18, 5:46 PM

  Someone told me it is because what we learn basically creates patterns in the brain (New connections between neurons, perhaps).

  Later in life, we have well established patterns. When we learn something new, brain tries to match it against existing patterns, either consciously or subconsciously. That's why we see blog posts like "React for PHP programmers" etc.

  The problem is when brain get stuck in matching new concepts to existing patterns even when they are completely different.

  I had the hardest time learning React & functional programming because I was looking at it from OO perspective. It took some effort but my learning accelerated when I stopped comparing it with OO & PHP.

• by gamechangr on 11/27/18, 12:15 AM

  It isn't.

  In my case, it's been much easier to learn the older i get. I have a vast amount of previous knowledge to draw from, better routines, motivation, and overall a stronger focus.

  Maybe one size doesn't fit all?

  Maybe it's easy to confuse priorities with capacity?

  Maybe I wasn't as good at focusing as I could have been in my 20's, it would be hard to measure that.

• by DrNuke on 11/26/18, 8:40 PM

  Shallow learning in the form of a quick, correct grasp of almost anything new (and interesting) is easier to me now than 25 years ago because of good foundational skills and broad industrial experience. On the other hand, deep focus on something alien for a long and sustained period is a no go: I have not the time, not the patience, not the need to find my place in life at this stage, so I can just take what helps me directly and move on.

• by pixelperfect on 11/26/18, 9:11 PM

  Are you sure it's because you are getting older, and not because of another factor like technology? There is growing evidence that the constant consumption of information e.g. on social media and mobile devices is negatively affecting people's ability to focus. In my opinion the only way to rule out that possibility would be to go several months without it, pretending like you live in 2005.

  I know a psychiatrist who works at a university who said she has had many students tell her that they can't focus as well as they used to in high school. Since these students are in their late teens and early twenties, I doubt it is due to their age.

• by Isamu on 11/26/18, 8:05 PM

  Focus is a thing you can lose, or regain by active cultivation. Your muscles don't stay the same after you stop running every day. Likewise if you haven't "hit the books" in years, your ability to do so will be affected.

  You won't have the mental plasticity of your younger self but you can improve your ability to focus by training on it. Like you wouldn't expect to run a few miles after not doing so for years, you can't expect to focus for long periods right off the bat either.

  Train your ability to focus. Start small and don't expect to improve quickly. Do some meditation as well. Get away from high-distraction things for a while, like the smart phone, the laptop and the tv.

• by sixhobbits on 11/26/18, 5:55 PM

  The science is still very young, but it's often called "fluid" and "crystallised" intelligence. Fluid is thought to peak at around 25 years old by some people.

  It's a really controversial topic that provokes super emotional reactions and a lot of bad debate but it's worth reading about the terminology and studies that have been done.

  This article[0] has a header image that summarises the answer to your question

  [0] https://examinedexistence.com/the-difference-between-fluid-i...

• by segmondy on 11/26/18, 8:02 PM

  Sorry that you fell into that set, it's easier for me to focus and learn new things as I get older. The only challenge is free time due to more responsibilities.

• by JohnHaugeland on 11/26/18, 6:13 PM

  I'm not convinced that it actually is.

  Here's the thing. You see this, a lot, in people. But you also don't see it, a lot.

  I suspect that

  1) you're seeing fatigue

  2) you're seeing focusing on work instead of school

  3) you're seeing not-George-Dantzigs, who aren't aware they're supposed to struggle, and therefore do not

• by ummonk on 11/26/18, 10:07 PM

  Personally I just don’t have the mental energy for it, unless I’m between jobs. Software engineering is a mentally taxing career.

• by milesvp on 11/26/18, 11:51 PM

  So there's a couple of things going on here. There basic biology, which is that we've evolved to have a really long childhood. We're 24 before myelination has mostly taken over our brain, greatly reducing it's plasticity. You can think of myelination as the brain spending energy to cement synaptic pathways that have so far proven to be useful. Now, new synaptic connections need to compete with existing connections, which I suspect actually takes more energy to form, and thus feels more effortful when learning.

  Aside from biology, I suspect we have a hard time learning new things as we get older for similar reasons that other computer learning gets harder with age. At some point each new piece of data represents a smaller percentage of the total data gathered. Which is to say, that if you're trying to generalize something each new data point can only move the average/median by a smaller and smaller amount. As such you need to spend more and more time feeding in variants of this new data to have any hope of it having an effect on your model. This can be seen most painfully, if you take something like a neural net and try to train it to do something other than what it was initially trained to do. You're not going to find a chess playing NN, that will be able to then learn to play go any time soon. And if it did learn to play go to any decent degree, it would probably no longer be able to play chess nearly as well.

  But, aside from all that, that doesn't mean you can't learn as you get older. Brains are far more plastic, even into old age than we once believed. "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" has been empirically shown to be false, time and time again, especially as we get more and more FMRI data from older people.

  I will say, that what others have talked about in this thread, is that there are obstacles other than biology that get in our way for learning. Sleep is a big one. Sleep is key for long term memory formation. If you're not getting enough full REM cycles every day, learning is going to suffer greatly. Also things like adult obligations can really get in the way. There seems to be some growing evidence that people's achievements severely dip in their 30's and 40's, which coincides with raising kids, or caring for aging parents. But mostly, in my experience, seems to be sort of a peak for social obligations that can't easily be blown off. There are times when I'd like to stay home on a sunday night, and make time and space to do something new and difficult, but instead have to go to the inlaw's for dinner to maintain that relationship. And as cliche as that sounds, I like my inlaws, so I make that a priority. Eventually, people die, or move away, and maybe you can work fewer hours, and learning can get easier again, largely because you have more large uninterrupted chunks of time. I hear many anecdotes that musical instruments, of all things, are something that retired people get really good at, relatively quickly, because of the time they have to practice.!