

The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind - rmason
http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/the-older-mind-may-just-be-a-fuller-mind/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&emc=eta1&_r=1&

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Patrick_Devine
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.

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misterjangles
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.

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

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Patrick_Devine
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?

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xyzzy123
I wonder too, is your daughter more able to completely focus on the game?

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fauigerzigerk
_> 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.

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snogglethorpe
[http://www.granitenet.com.au/assets/images/Sjohnstone/my%20b...](http://www.granitenet.com.au/assets/images/Sjohnstone/my%20brain%20is%20full%20sm.jpg)

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ntoshev
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.

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AutoCorrect
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.

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com2kid
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?

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adventured
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.

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com2kid
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)

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

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yetanotherphd
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.

