The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind | Hacker News Reader

The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind

newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com

51 pointsrmason21 comments

These studies drive me crazy. Maybe I'm wrong, but I always feel like some researcher got busy with a dataset and a copy of R, saw some correlation and then wrote a blog post about how we're all doomed.

My personal experience is that I'm sharper at 40 than 20, I know more, and I learn more quickly because I've learned to be more efficient with my time. I cannot say the same about all of the other people I grew up with. Often, they're just too tired to read a book, learn a new instrument, write some code or (heaven forbid) start a company. They'd rather chill out and watch TV.

Which is fine, but if you're not using your noggin, it's not going to be as sharp as it was when you were being forced to use it in college.

My experience is pretty much the same as yours. I feel sharper in some ways. I definitely work much smarter than I did in my 20s by magnitudes.

Although, mildly annoying, I find myself more frequently going to another room to fetch something and forgetting what the thing was.

Wiser, sure. More productive and efficient, sure. But raw cognitive power to learn wholly new ideas/languages, no way.

I dunno.. most of the spoken languages that I've learned I picked up in my 30s (bits of japanese, chinese, swedish, irish). I also took up piano at 38 and can play reasonably well, having never played an instrument before in my life.

I would agree with misterjangles about memory. My 6 year old daughter can beat me the odd time in various memory games. When I do beat her, I think it's probably because I'm relying on strategy as well as memorization. But is my memory getting weaker because I can use strategy instead, or is it just some kind of natural decline?

I wonder too, is your daughter more able to completely focus on the game?

"My personal experience is that I'm sharper at 40 than 20 "

I think it is hard to judge oneself objectively, especially a self that is 20 years in the past.

It is better to look at other people. My older colleagues usually seem to take more time to understand stuff. But analyzing this closer, during discussions for example, reveals that they think a lot more while they try to fit the new stuff into what they already know. Young colleagues accept things much faster and want to go on. As a consequence they seem to be less critical and farseeing in average.

Also, my smart older colleagues usually have really good and sophisticated solutions to problems. Judging by the degree of sophistication, I am rarely surprised, that it takes them longer to develop solutions.

Did you read the article at all? The new study says that we are NOT doomed.

My personal feeling is that around 40, your new skill gathering has not declined too much, yet you have a ton of experience which helps you with analogies and enforcing connections in your brain.

I got my masters in late 30s and it was much different than for people doing it in early 20s. That is I did most of the learning by analogy, drawing from my own experience, but I had a hard time with lot of minutia which was much easier in 20s. It certainly felt my blade had dulled and still feels that way (and is not going to get better!).

Also, I am still waiting for examples of people taking up a completely new skill in their 30s or 40 and reaching proficiency of those who started in their teens.

So far I have not found any. The best has been someone in their late 20s starting to play chess and becoming a master, when they were already holding high dan at shogi.

How about a writer who started at 44 and then made a big name for herself at the age of 64?

http://flavorwire.com/349249/10-great-literary-late-bloomers...

>crystallized knowledge (as measured by New York Times crosswords, for example) climbs sharply between ages 20 and 50 and then plateaus, even as the fluid kind (like analytical reasoning) is dropping steadily — by more than 50 percent between ages 20 and 70 in some studies.

That seems very strange, because it contradicts my own experience completely. As I grow older my ability to remember things gets worse, but my ability to understand and reason about things has gotten so much better it's not subtle at all.

Now, of course it is very possible that my sample size of 1 is slightly inadequate to draw any conclusions at all. But I would have expected that at least the direction of the trend would have to be the same for all individuals.

http://www.granitenet.com.au/assets/images/Sjohnstone/my%20b...

That theory would predict that people on the same age, but with bigger vocabulary (or expertise in a particular domain) take more time to pick words (or make decisions in that domain) which is the opposite of what seems to happen in everyday life.

I find myself struggling more to pull a specific word out of memory than I did when I was younger. I have chalked that up to the amount of information held in my memory, and that my search algorithm isn't very efficient. Sometimes the answers to a question take days to bubble up out of my memory banks.

Does this imply that people who read more might end up having less mental agility earlier on in life?

The results seem scary. With how much information people take in now days (media is everywhere!), might mental agility be slowing down at an even earlier and earlier age?

Personal anecdote time: I feel my cognitive abilities enhanced by reading. When you're paying attention to how the author conveys ideas, puts thought into words, you can subconsciously retain that structure and put it to use for your own purposes. After going without reading any novels for an entire semester (college life without humanities classes ugh) and then voraciously consuming Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon I tangibly felt my vocabulary and capacity for articulated thought come easier.

One of the odd pleasures of reading for me is noticing how hard it is not to mimic the style of novels I'm reading

Say, after reading Anthony Burgess, I'll use more $5 words than after I've just read a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

Also, how painful it is to write in what passes for academic or business formal style.

Just some fun speculation - perhaps it means on average we're consuming the same amount of data no matter what we do (assuming full mental cognition; and with a +/- ~25% variance depending on intensity of data consumption). So the hard-drive fills up regardless, with our choice being what the data consists of.

i'd guess that the phenomenon of "mental fatigue" is a natural limiter on the amount of information you can retain and process. with easy-to-process things like light novels, you can read them all day, but try reading K&R C for more than 4 hours without your eyes glazing over.

I think rate of data consumption can vary. For example, I consume a lot more information reading than if I am watching a TV sitcom. (Ignoring the multimedia aspects of TV, the actual amount of information acquired, and then processed, is going to be higher reading, for example, discussions on hacker news)

I'm sharper now, but I was a lot more motivated when I was 20.

So basically, evidence for declining mental ability with age + fancy unverifiable model => evidence for increasing mental ability with age.

This is the worst kind of PC science.

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