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Comment by nyrikki | Hacker News Reader

The belief that adult brains can’t change after childhood has been debunked. There are dramatic changes in the first two years of life our brain never loses its ability to form new connections and most children with iPads are older than 2.

Neuroplasticity as a concept is challenging but even when Torsten Wiesel was sewing kitten and cat eyes shut the adults could adapt. And the claims that the kittens rewired more are problematic.

The neurons originally attuned to the closed eye did not acquire new functions, they heightened their response to the input from the open eye.

The responses were always there. Just at low levels.

Free time to to dedicate for building tactic knowledge is the main limiter for adults and not hard wiring.

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An accessable cite for the above claim that neuroplasticity not existing in adults is a myth.

https://solportal.ibe-unesco.org/articles/neuroplasticity-ho...

This feels like arguing against a straw man. I don't think anyone generally says that a brain can't change once you're an adult. If that were the case you wouldn't be able to learn anything at all. Clearly we all can learn as adults so there is neuroplasticity as adults.

The general argument that I hear which is true (from all I've seen and read) is that neuroplasticity is greatly reduced in adults as compared to children. There is a period in early childhood where brains are incredibly flexible and adaptable, and as they age they continuously lose that ability until the majority of it has been lost by adulthood.

It doesn't mean there is zero in adulthood, just that it is very small compared to childhood.

I think you're arguing against something nobody really says.

I'm not an expert at all but have also thought about this quite a bit. Neuroplasticity is definitely reduced in adults, but so is free time and exposure to novel inputs. As we get older, a higher proportion of experiences are routine or at least things we've seen before, and we have far less free time. We are also increasingly behaving based on biases we accumulate and familiar patterns and just not using the parts of our brain we use for learning as much anymore. I often wonder if it's partly a kind of atrophy and whether you might be able to restore some neuroplasticity by "practicing." A related idea that occurs to me is that as you get older and learn about the world, you tend to trade curious openness for useful heuristics to some degree just to make life easier and more efficient.

The easiest example for me is learning guitar - I started when I was 5 and got pretty damn good over the years. It would be difficult to repeat that now in my 30s, but at least part of that difficulty would be because I can't really devote 3-4 hours a day nearly every day to it like I did as a bored kid out in the country. To be clear, I'm sure the differences in neuroplasticity come from both behavioral and neurological differences. It's just fun to think about how much is set in stone and how much could theoretically be "exercised" so to speak, and how much of the neurological changes are actually due in part to the behavioral changes as we age.

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