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> Your brain has slowed down by a factor of at least 2

I've made it into a mantra to never accept this kind of sentiment (even if it were to be scientifically proven some day). It's dangerous and only serves to undermine motivation. Sure there is an overrepresentation of old people who are tired., but that doesn't mean you have to be.

And so do I. But for the time beingn, I must admit that there's definitely something wrong. By doing that master, I'm actually fighting a lot against that state of mind; a lot harder than those who don't at least :-)

The positive side is that I'm in the second year and things have improved. I suffer less from stress and many maths are now "restored" in my mind. So it gets better. But the price is high :-)

I guess that by the end of the thesis, which is less about emorizing an dmuch more about understanding, I'll feel much better and self confidence will be boosted...

I agree, and tend to see it more as a defense mechanism. The main thing young people tend to have more of is time.

There's also a use/abuse aspect. My older body creaks not necessarily because it's old, but because I have used (maybe abused - I started Jiu-Jitsu at 40) it physically for 40+ years. I suspect the mind is similar. If it's been abused through stress and/or drugs or let go out of shape by watching TV all day, then yes it's less sharp. But age isn't the driving factor in that case.

> Your brain has slowed down by a factor of at least 2

This is only if you let it. The human brain has something called neuroplasticity. If you exercise your brain, regularly and with variety, you can slow/prevent a degradation of neuroplasticity. Some example activities include doing coding in new programming language, learning a new spoken language, doing sudoku and other puzzles, doing painting if you are right brain dominant (or logic puzzles if left brain dominant).

The OP's statement also is one of the key reasons touted for ageism within our industry, and ageism is a major problem. The benefit of vast experience drastically outweighs the minor (or no) degradation in neuroplasticity if they've kept their brain active.

Not a neuroscientist or anything, but I've always made it a point to keep learning. Initially I did it purely for economic reasons, since knowing a lot of random programming languages and frameworks and math can make you fairly valuable employee, which equates to larger paychecks and therefore a happier Tombert.

But as I kept learning, I saw that a certain set of people decided that they were just done learning new stuff the second they were done with college, and resisted any change that wasn't taught to them by their professors. This affected young and old people at roughly the same rate (at least from what I observed), but it's more apparent for the older people just because they've been half-assing the learning for longer (and because what they learned in college is probably more out of date).

This is also why I make it a point to attend conferences where I am the "dumbest guy in the room" like ICFP. These things are a bit intimidating (I do not like feeling dumb), but work as exceptional ways of highlighting gaps in my knowledge, and giving me a "path to google later".

I had a great boss (a shoutout to Greg and Terry at MCCI), once tell me 'Be the dumbest guy in the room, but also the hardest working guy in the room'. I've tried to live my life in part by that mantra. It doesn't mean be an idiot - it means surround yourself with people smarter in one way or another than you are and learn from them to fast-track your growth.

I don't disagree with that at all. Sometimes it's fun to feel smart, but generally speaking I'd rather feel stupid and have gaps in my knowledge ironed out by people who understand a subject better than I do.

To be clear, this isn't about IQ or number-of-wrinkles-in-brain or anything like that. If I were to talk to a carpenter about carpentry or Taco Bell worker about food preparation I would feel stupid since I know basically nothing about either of those subjects.

You might be using left/right brain to refer to people who typically do one thing to them do something “opposite”, ie artsy people do science (these aren’t opposite but people treat them as such).

Just be careful as there’s no such thing as left/right brained people. It’s an old idea.

It has more or less been at least conceptually proven[0].But I think many people confuse a well-organized mind: which can function well[i.e take better shortcuts] at an old age (and thus give you the impression that the mind is still very fast) with neuroplasticity.This is not necessarily the case, and not necessarily even better, think something like overfitting.Then again without defining speed and time(which are hard to do not understanding the mechanisms of consciousness,if possible at all) the discussions are kind of up in the air.I wonder how much the emotions play a role here, because anecdotally being emotionally engaged can 'slow' time down for a person. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

> I'm almost 50 years old.

I started my master's at 50 and finished it 2 1/2 years later.

> Your brain has slowed down by a factor of at least 2.

My brain has never been better. I had decades of experience to lean on, and was an unofficial TA in most classes. It was fun and challenging, and only one course gave me any problems due to my lifelong math disability (I love it, it hates me).

I disagree about the 35 years old statement. I took a full time in-person Masters in Data Science while also working full time from 36 to 38. I finished it with a GPA of 3.9/4 and I feel it was the best time to do it.

It was my third time going to school. The first one was to take a undergrad+grad in CS when I was 18. I did not even know why I was there. The second one was I was 29 for grad school in quantitative finance, why? Because everybody in my professional environment was doing it. I definitely did not enjoy that either and did not learn much. My third time, well I clearly knew I wanted to learn becase I truly enjoyed the matter, no professional need but I simply liked it. And I knew about the math part.

Now I am almost 40 and I know almost for sure I am in the same shape or even better to go to school again and enjoy it. To me is just to do something because you like it, not because of social pressure, professional reasons or hype. Also, I think to have a good time while doing it you have to be aware of your personal situation. Mine was totally favorable.

Is it your actual brain or is it having a million things to worry about? Eg. if you could do a one-month retreat away from it all, would you get the same out of it as your younger self?

Of course it's also true one's younger self had other distractions, so it can be hard to compare.

The full story is I had a severe burn out (so that means exactly that : your brain is really damaged). My family is super supportive so I don't have that many things to think about.

As a young er student, I had tons of "side projects" (like coding games) :-) So I was definitely not studying all the time. Nowadays I'm 100% focus so it means I work about 8-10 hours a day on my courses. I have very good sleeping habits, I eat well (vegetables but just too much chocolate), I walk 45 minutes 5 days per week and practice taichi about 20 minutes a day.

I tend to outperform students (about 2 standard dev above mean) in practicals but for examinations, where I have to memorize the whole course, that's another story, I perform just as the average BUT I pass half the exams so it means I'm really underperforming... The stress is a big issue but the memorization is the biggest one. It just doesn't work like when I was 20. It's super frustrating.

I have a master im compsci + 2 years phd preparation. But after 20 years, data science is totally foreign to me. It's just math math math, I don't recognize anything I know (so it's super interesting, but I'm really lost :-))

Also I chose data sciences because I was scared to see some COBOL programmers who didn't jump into the web/java/you name it track and who are now old and can't make the effort to switch). So I felt, business intelligence is moving outside the realm of application developpers (because many companies now know how to to business processes with IT) to the realm of data sciences (because that's where there is more room for improvements). I hope I was not too wrong :-)

I recognize what you mean about exams. With some distance from it I now think a lot of what is needed to study for an exam is not really important, it's just incidental stuff that you need to perform in a timed setting, eg memorizing derivations.

On the practical side it makes total sense that you're better, because young people generally have not practiced long term productivity.

Another thing that's likely changed from your earlier days: the % of students taking the exam with you on prescribed stimulants.

I've found that cutting out sugar and eating more fat (especially EPA+DHA) has made my brain feel a lot sharper. Also strictness with bedtimes and getting natural light and exercise in the early morning get's ever more important with age. However, I agree ageing and family are definitely terrible for you :-)

I’ve found the exact opposite, age has given me greater focus, at 50 I’ve been able to study while working and raising four kids, I was not capable of the same in my 20s

How was memorizing going ? For me it's real bad. Things just don't stick in my mind (I've never experienced that before).

I have theory on this, I don't think I'm worse at remembering (yet!), I think what matters is the energy you can bring to focusing at the time your absorbing information in the first place. I have to plan to have that energy in advance, doing some exercise the day before so I can sleep, go to bed at 9 pm the night before with one earplug so I can still have an ear out for emergencies but not the snuffles and shuffles of children and pets, get up at five when the house is dark, go outside for a bit - then hit the books uninterrupted in the quiet morning. If I do that, my fifty year old focus is better than I ever had as a 20 year old - but! If I look ahead, at the older generations of my family, I'm confident I've got a good ten years, maybe fifteen, but don't see another 20.

Like many on here, I think I had a high potential - low discipline brain. I was never setting the world on fire, and even if as I age the potential ceiling of my cognitive capacity has come down, it was never an ceiling I was in danger of hitting, and now with a little more willpower I'm getting more out of the (possibly diminishing) total mental horsepower I have, than I ever did as a younger me.

This sounds like me a bit. I'm 40. I've worked as a programmer for 15 years, but I've always known my lack of maths is holding me back abd adds to my imposter syndrome. I've decided the new programming language I'm learning is, well maths. I'm just working through khan academy. I'll give myself this year's free(ish) time. I've got a family and a job, but I need to feel some sense of progression. I ll see what happens.

I like maths but I'm a CompSci first. Going to full-math mode is not easy after years without practicing. For example, the first 6 months, I spent a lot of time bringing back memories of basic stuff. In my case : probability calculus (the very basic stuff, expecations, conditional probabilities, etc.), Bayes theorem, least square derivations, Lagrangian, linear algebra, simplex method. Be sure to reach a teacher at some point because these "simple" things are actually quite fundamental and thus sometimes hard to grab.

After that I can understand more complex stuff: GAN's, GLM's, SVM's, PCA, you name it... Things that were totally alien to me 1.5 years ago.

But well, just do it, in any case you'll be better! And proud of yourself!

Thanks, ah I am way behind all of that still...

I'm 54 and my brain is as effective as in my twenties, if not more. Where's the evidence that the human brain "slows down by a factor of at least 2"?

slows down may be the wrong way to think about it. Myelination is a very real thing though. By 24 the majority of the brain is grey matter, as opposed to pink matter. Grey matter is super fast at signal speed due to myelin sheaths around highly used neurons. The amount of pink matter continues to shrink as you get older. This seems to have measurable effects with knowledge, the main one being whatever you learned when you were younger is much easier to access and riff on when you’re older. It is believed that this contributes to it being more difficult to learn “new” things, particularly if they are unrelated to your current knowledge as you get older. (There is some evidence however that learning “new” related topics is even easier as people age)

So if someone says their brain is slower, they may be talking about how much harder it seems to be at learning new topics. I’d bet dollars to donuts they’re as fast a thinker on things they’ve been doing for 30 years as ever.

Just to encourage people who might otherwise be discouraged by your post - I completed my CS Masters at 44. While it was time consuming, I found it rather refreshing compared to normal work.

Work is full of ambiguities and complexities whereas academic work has straightforward success criteria and you're always starting from a blank slate. I enjoyed it, but I was also lucky to have the support of my family to spend my time that way.

> slowed down by a factor of at least 2

How do you even quantify that?

By watching student's 25 years younger passing exams without actually studying them (if I'd do that, I'd bascally failed; I've tested that approach :-))

Not to minimize your own feelings/experience, but I wonder too if younger students are just so much more exposed to the technology that you were being taught that they only needed to learn half the 'net new' information you did.

For example, I went to school for a video game programming/design B.Sc. First couple of years were super basic programming to get non-programmers up to level, so to any of us who programmed since gradeschool it meant no studying/effort for a year while we breezed through simple loops/conditionals/Java stuff.

Obviously, things cranked up a notch when we finally got to new material.

Don't sell yourself short. The biology isn't as clear cut as this, brains retain more plasticity that people used to think!

“Oh I didn’t study at all for this test” - heard a thousand times, never true in my opinion. Maybe you are just more honest with yourself.

I have to say that I think I disagree with the last sentence. My mom started (and finished) law school at age 39 and finished at 42, with a 3.8 GPA, while raising four kids (one of which (me) was an extremely obnoxious teenage boy). She wasn't working, but I think it's reasonable to say that raising four kids is probably harder than anything I do at work.

When did you start noticing this? I'm 39 and dont feel this at all. I have less motivation and energy for lots of things. But that stems from a jadedness and pickiness. It's different to what you describe. I feel my mental faculties are as strong as ever, and my gut feel is that they're not declining anytime soon.

There's nothing like having kids and other commitments to sharpen one's focus and make timekeeping a thing of perfection.

I note the older students (40+/50+-year-olds, with families, etc) getting their work in way ahead of schedule whilst actively participating in discourse, moreso (dare I say) than the significantly younger ones in our cohort.

My step-father is in his 50s and is currently doing a masters whilst working full time. His kids are admittedly old enough to mostly look after themselves at this point, but 1 of them still lives at home and he also most of the cooking and cleaning in around the house.