Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

I find the idea that the absolute best thing for a highly intelligent person to do is get to collage as soon as possible is a little sad. Life is not a race.

View on HN

I disagree. It's a race to learn as much as you can before your brain loses plasticity.

I certainly wish some of my teachers had spent more time teaching the people that cared and less time helping the D students that didn't. It definitely resulted in a few wasted years of education for me.

Your brain doesn't lose plasticity until you're dead. Ever hear of someone remembering a conversation they had at age 70? The neurons had to form new synapses (plasticity) for that to happen.

In my experience recall takes longer with age, and that's only if it's memorized in the first place. I think anyone over 35 can relate to this.

Much of that is simply being out of practice. At 35 you generally don't spend that much time learning new things. But, if you go back and get a masters you can get back into the swing of things.

I've been lucky enough to be in school most of my career. I'm waaaay slower at learning now at 44 than I was at 20. It often frustrates me.

I had to read that first sentence a couple of times. Do you think the brain ossifies after a certain age, making you unable to learn no things?

Plasticity is the new phrenology, he doesn't really mean it, its just something ageist people signal to each other.

Well there's always antidepressants and stimulants to help with that. In all seriousness, don't become a drug addict but if you're really worried about that there's a decent amount of research going on into improving brain plasticity so i wouldn't be surprised if there are drug treatments to "de-age" your brain in the near future.

That said, most of the "critical periods" for learning are over by the time you hit puberty and the ability to learn advanced knowledge, like the kind taught in college, doesn't decline that much with age so I wouldn't worry about it.

What can we not learn after these "critical periods for leanring"?

I don't believe there is anything in my comment to suggest otherwise. I was simply trying to capture the sentiment that some feel when reading stories like these. I tend to think this feeling results not from a failure to achieve (after all, many of us have still done admirably), but rather the sense of regret that one misused a period of one's life. I didn't mean to communicate that "life is a race" at all.

Some people enjoy the race. Seems like you are implying his time could've been better spent "doing kid stuff."

Write a book, start a company or a band, volunteer, learn to meditate or Kung foo, do whatever.

It's not a question of being a kid, it's a question of living your life as a neurosurgeon because you decided that sounded cool when you were 8, and never really rethinking it until you had a lot of debt.

Sure, if this is what they really want then great. But, thinking this is a good path and they would be wasting there potential being a raft guide is terribly hollow. Getting out of high school at 15 is cool, starting collage is not a goal just a path to something else.

He's not implying anything. He's saying it's wrong to assume that everybody should want the same thing. Is it that hard to understand?

I take your point, but would rephrase it slightly differently: everybody should want the same thing: happiness, but not everybody achieves happiness in the same way.

To pick up on the racing comments from above, one should keep in mind Tal Ben-Shahar's warnings about the rat race happiness archetype, where one sacrifices in the present for perceived benefits in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com