Ask HN: Aging and learning. Does it become more difficult?

I believe that we learn by applying and adapting the models implicit in things we already know to new situations. The older we get the more models we have for forming the foundations for new ideas. Beginning a new learning project might benefit from asking ourselves what is this like, how is it similar, and how is it different. Keeping this model in the back of our minds as we learn may help.

You didn't share how old you are, but I'm almost 30 and felt like before while working a highly demanding job my memory and mind was slightly affected. Just from sustained pressure over time.

Almost 1.5 years after quitting my mind feels just like it did when I was 20. Only difference is now just a different personality from being older I'd say. I'll be soon beginning a new job though so wish me luck!

It's interesting how what we believe about our brains can actually influence how we end up using them. I subscribe to the neuroplasticity theory -- that your brain adapts to whatever you're doing the most. So some pathways become super-familiar (and harder to break out of) -- but you can start a new pattern with consistency. (One way people do this is with a carefully-chosen new routine.)

As far as aging goes, its impacts are more diverse than I thought, according to a really interesting book called "The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind." Aging brains really haven't been studied until recently, and newer research (cited in the book) suggests that in some ways the brain improves at certain kinds of thinking during aging. (A rough model is that you spend your youth acquiring a raw mass of experience, and as you age it gets consolidated into actionable chunks.) So while you may have trouble recalling specific facts, aging brains also out-perform when it comes to synthesizing existing information and extrapolating solutions.

That's just one example from the book. Basically, aging brains are a lot more interesting than we give them credit for.

Pick things you’re passionate about.

There is a physiological change that occurs in the brain as you age. It is more difficult to learn as you get older.

Lots of people never stop learning until they die. It's just not as easy. Some people do better than others.

30 is not that age.

You ever consider you may be burnt out?

Let me answer with a passage from the biography of Federico Fellini ("Federico") written by Tullio Kezich, which has become a ray of light for me.

"He [Fellini] lived inside things with indomitable curiosity and perpetual openness, surrendering himself to what Dostoevsky calls "the river of life," in the serene understanding that it always takes you somewhere."

From 30-47 I have only found it easier to learn new skills. I’m 47 now and even in the last 10 years, I learned a lot. Like, how to build a full stack web app which I’ve used with our customers for a few years, to deliver millions per year in sales. I became an expert on at least a dozen programming tech acronyms to get that done. Also, I learned 2D/3D mechanical CAD design, I learned circuit design and PCB layout (fusion 360/solid works/eagle, etc), and I became fairly fluent in Mandarin including some literacy with hundreds of characters. I was naturally interested in those areas because it helped my business and directly improved my life to learn them, but I still had to force myself to continue and I think everyone does at some point. Of course, this is all anecdotal, but I don’t expect age related decline should be happening for most people at age 30 unless there’s some underlying physical health issues.

Yes and no, depending on what you are learning.

I'm 50, and finding it easier than ever to learn. (Mostly.) For most new topics, and in particular new tech skills, there is some similarity to something I've learned before. I just need to adapt my perspective and learn some new details.

Sometimes I end up wanting to learn something truly new that does not match any prior knowledge. That can be hard. And I can sometimes feel like I don't want to bother. But such a scenario is the exception.

When I was in my 20s, I would learn something about everything. Now at 30 I can learn everything about something.

I think the easiest way to learn new things are two simple steps:

1. Always be reading. 2. Teach yourself how to learn

There’s many great books on the latter topic. Once you get the basics and understand the different modes of your brain and the importance of rest, anything is possible.

Biologically, maybe, but only a little and it won't explain the feeling that it's a lot. I don't think it has much to do with any age related cognitive decline and mostly to do with more responsibilities, more things competing for your time and an objectivity that causes you to have different priorities.

As I've gotten older I've only had more and more things competing for my time. I have a family, a home, hobbies, etc. I just can't devote hours and hours of uninterrupted time. With experience there's a lot of "ain't gunna need it" and if I do I'll learn it then. I've got plenty of stuff that I sank tons of time into in my younger years that only faded into memories and didn't turn out to be very useful.

As far as tech goes you'll see enough stuff come and go that sinking that much time into it will feel like a waste. Remember SOAP, SOA, XML, XSLT, EJB, CORBA, MapReduce, Mesos, Java Applets, etc? A lot of what you're doing now is going on that list.

More prosaically: Having kids makes learning many things difficult from a time perspective — and they tend to show up exactly when people imagine they are suffering from age related declines.

On a positive note, they do give you other perspectives. So it’s not all bad.

Your interests change over time, which can dramatically impact what you learn. It thought from 20-30 I'd be focused on tech forever, but now I'm 40 I gravitate towards the nuance of conversation. I suspect further changes and by the time I'm 70 I won't shut up about grandfather clocks from the 18th century.

So it goes.

40. Yeah gonna be more difficult when you have kids. I guess one trick is to limit what I'm learning e.g. never learn two things simultaneously. Another thing not to overlook is the decay time of one learning session: I have to keep the sessions close enough so that I don't lose everything I learned from the previous one.

I find I just learn differently than when I was younger. At college I could just sit there listen to the teacher and absorb everything. It made doing tests which just require knowing stuff without needing to apply that knowledge easy.

These days I'd fail miserably at that but now I can read something and figure out how to apply that knowledge to something pretty easily. Which I think is the better option.

Try changing how you try learning new things, if you used to read things try videos or working through examples.

Remember why it was that it was easier to learn new things when you were younger, yes there is a certain biology for it. (Side note: I'm pretty sure I heard Andrew Huberman talk about this and he recommended Choline as a supplement to help get your levels to similar to someone younger, no idea how correct this is, i've made a note to read more into it myself)

But I would say, it is that sense of wonder and imagination that you lose when you are older, you've seen stuff, even interesting stuff becomes 'oh just another interesting thing, much like this other thing i saw before'.

What you need to do is optimise things for novelty, interest, excitement and challenge rather than for outcome. As you get older, you likely have things you want, these will become goals, but these will be based on what you already know and your supposed path to them will also be best on your current knowledge. The problem is, that won't even get you to anywhere interesting, it might not even get you to that 'goal' because the world is way more complex than you think and you begin to think you know as you get set in your ways.

When you did interesting things, when you learned the most, it was when you didn't know any better, you didn't know what you were doing, you need to get rid of that idea that you know, you need to accept you don't get out of your comfort zone and do things, try things, optimise for that novelty rather than an outcome and you might find something interesting and that is where you will learn the most.

If you really want to learn, change your goal from achieving things and outcomes, to seeking out novelty, things that interesting/excite you and anything that is a little bit challenging for you. It will put you back in that space again, or at least as much as you can be.

I found this talk interesting on this subject: It talks about lessons learned from AI and machine learning that show this to be a valid path. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI&t=1s

I was better at unpracticed memorization and recall when I was younger. Some decades later, I feel worse at that but better at identifying implicit patterns and synthesizing novel insight across domains.

So no, I wouldn’t say I’ve found learning more difficult. I just recognize there are different things to learn.

My suggestion would be to reassess what you think “learning” means, because you’re probably already doing a better job of it than you’re giving yourself credit for.

It sounds like you want to learn explicit material like a student might. That’s fine, but at some point I would imagine your head will get a bit overcrowded with disjoint, received details. If you’ve emphasized that sort of learning in the past, you might just be sort of topped up and need to change gears to a more sophisticated kind of learning.

No. If anything, I find it to be much easier to learn anything that extends what I already know, and being older you (hopefully) just know more. You have a much more solid base to build upon quickly and easily.

I’m 67 and don’t have any trouble learning new things. My priorities change. I’m not willing to waste time on certain topics now but will spend hours on others. The claim that “old people” can’t learn effectively is a myth and has been shown as such by numerous studies.

I have found that with age it became easier to learn and just as easier to forget details of what you have learned.

I'm 30 as well. But I feel the opposite. I have much more context about what I'm learning and generally know related things as well. I feel because of this I can learn things much more quickly then when I was 20. Maybe if I need to learn something completely outside of my knowledge sphere I would struggle more then before. But I have no reason to believe that.

Of course you're not going to be as quick as you were at 20 for the rest of your life, but you will get wiser. [Edit: Or maybe just more opinionated? I think I was pretty opinionated when I was young, though]

As you get older, you learn metapatterns about the world. You see the things you thought were unique new wisdom, were actually just a fashion. So you get more selective about where you apply the limited resources you've got.

If you've seen the hype cycle play out in your life once, you're going to be slower to invest in the next wave. That's natural. I've seen the idea of making things portable by implementing things in a Virtual Machine play out more than once in my life... the UCSD Pascal P Machine, then Java, and Flash, and now WASM.

However, I've also learned why each failed, so I still have a strong interest in WASM, despite it seeming to be the latest in a pattern. It's because of the unique nature of its security guarantees that I hold out hope for it. Like I said, you get more selective, not just stubborn.

I'm 58, and grumpy as heck about some things, and experimenting in direct manipulation of Abstract Syntax Trees for fun as a diversion for now. Once I get my new glasses, and can get about the world again, it's back to learning C and working on MSTOICAL a typed forth variant.

It's not that it's harder, exactly. It's that your priorities shift quite a lot as you move along. Technical mastery in the sense of "look at this extremely complicated, high effort piece" tends to be the provenance of young people. Young people need to prove themselves and work the chip off their shoulder. They want to keep up with the new, and so they'll try to master whatever looks like the new thing.

But then you get to a place where you've done some of that keeping up, and most of the time, it's not going to consume you for the rest of your life. A new thing eventually becomes old, and while learning another new thing can set up a career, you hesitate a little more to bother when you already have things you want to go deeper on. Which means the kind of learning you do is different, less focused on the grind of established courses and more in the space of independent study, integrating a bunch of disparate things into a whole. It shows up in people's brains, too: the current thought is that "crystallized" intelligence peaks much later in life. Young people are fast, old people are wise.

I realize now that something I really didn't understand, even as I started my 30's, was how to study things really well. I could be a fan about them, and learn interesting facts, and follow steps, but the really essential thing was to not gloss over it, and to turn the learning into a workout, a thing that engages you while simultaneously being relatively simple and monotonous, just copying things, memorizing things, repeating processes to master them. And part of your repulsion may well be the same kind of feeling that many get at the idea of "working out" - your brain knows that's what needs to be done, your emotions say, why do that, it's so much effort. As a baby it's no issue, you'll do anything if pointed the right direction, and just expend all the energy you have on hand and then sleep it off. But somewhere along the way you both gain desire to save energy, and also to protect an identity of being "the kind of person who...", and other various beliefs. You can't just turn on baby mode and follow along with the nursery rhymes or practice tracing the alphabet. No, you have to say to yourself, "I'm going to turn this into reps and do 30 reps today." It takes some creativity even to start down that path because often the material you want to study is all packaged up in a form that doesn't aid your mastery.

But it's hardly as simple as old people suddenly becoming unable to operate a computer. The old can still discuss technical matters, but they aren't self-evidently interesting to know or discuss. Most of them are things to eliminate from life in order to make room for something else.

Imagine someone spending 40 hours a week training to be fit. They might be 18, 30 or 40 years old.

Now another person only has 4 hours a week.

Who is going to be fitter? Who is going to find it easier to, for example, take up a new sport, like rowing for example.

Now replace fitness with learning.

And note that 18-21 year olds at university are learning 40+ hours a week.

And typically by 30 you are working and applying 40+ hours a week, but hard studying much fewer hours. (Unless actively studying, say for a leet code type interview or something).

I'm 40. I'm not sure if I have to try harder to learn. I was never bright in the first place.

I'm way more motivated to learn now. I only really watch Netflix etc on Friday and Saturday nights. Other evenings I try to get an hour to myself to do self learning. (Difficult with a child,!)

My main problem is I prefer learning programming related things not directly related to my programming job. Currently doing a course on network programming in c (I don't have a com sci degree).

What I really want is to learn maths to the point we're I can do a bit of calculus.

Just listened to John carmack on lex Fridman podcast. Very inspiring. He's switched in to AI research , never seems to stop teaching himself. (Though he has the advantage of being genius).