Study helps explain why motivation to learn declines with age

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.

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.

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

>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.

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.

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."

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.

IN MICE.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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...)

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

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.

> “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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-citize... At 59 it gives me something to look forward to in a few years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

... in mice.

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!"

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.

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

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.