
Ask HN: Why is it harder to learn new things the older you get? - bsvalley
The older I get the harder it is for me to focus and to learn new things. It’s almost painful. I still learn a lot but it is not as seemless as it used to be. Why is that?
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__float
I think the issue here is not _learning_ new things, but having the time to
sit down and focus on them. As a child and young adult, you usually have fewer
distractions -- whether a significant other, a mentally or physically
exhausting job, bills to pay, etc. -- and spending hours on a single task is
not so difficult.

I have found a lot of success in waking up earlier to do the "learn a new
thing" part of my routine, before the hectic work day begins.

~~~
moneil971
In addition to the time factor, focus can get harder as you age
[https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-memory-
and-...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-memory-and-thinking-
ability-change-with-age). Early am seems to be the best time for optimal
concentration/focus, so your suggestion is a good one. It also heads off
decision fatigue, which makes it harder to focus later in the day:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-
fr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-
decision-fatigue.html)

------
evo_9
It that true? I'm 51 and I feel it's easier to learn new things now, I have a
much larger base of knowledge and experience to draw from.

I'm genuinely curious if this a proven fact or something that just assumed to
be the case.

I do recognize that most people I know have stopped really trying to learn new
things; seemed like most of my friends got stuck around 35-40.

~~~
superasn
Yes I too think this is just something we've been hearing all our lives, like
boys don't cry and girls don't climb trees, that we start fearing the same
even though it may be untrue.

I too find learning a lot easier (but it could also be because learning now is
actually easier thanks to videos). Regardless if you put the time and energy
into it I think adults learn a lot faster.

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axelrosen
Used to be really into language learning, this topic comes up a lot there. I'm
of the opinion that while the intrinsic ability to learn does drop in some
ways [0], a larger part of the difference is simply the fact that we don't put
in the same effort. In first language acquisition this is pretty obvious. The
incentives are all there. And I'd argue, in a much subtler way, similar
mechanics persist in many fields of learning.

Diminishing returns, lower tolerance for messing up, a lot of other going
concerns, I could go on and on. The point is you're probably not putting in
the same effort.

[0] say as we age our hearing ability predictably diminishes, accounting for
some of the difficulty in learning accents etc. But the majority opinion, I
believe, over-attributes the difference to reduced plasticity and the likes.

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amerkhalid
Someone told me it is because what we learn basically creates patterns in the
brain (New connections between neurons, perhaps).

Later in life, we have well established patterns. When we learn something new,
brain tries to match it against existing patterns, either consciously or
subconsciously. That's why we see blog posts like "React for PHP programmers"
etc.

The problem is when brain get stuck in matching new concepts to existing
patterns even when they are completely different.

I had the hardest time learning React & functional programming because I was
looking at it from OO perspective. It took some effort but my learning
accelerated when I stopped comparing it with OO & PHP.

~~~
karmakaze
Totally agree. It's not the learning itseft that's hard, it's the unlearning
when it's different. In cases where there are beneficial similarities it can
also be easier. I've gotten so much from multithreaded OS/2 gui programming
that transferred pretty readily to various mvc-ish frameworks and eased into
distributed services. The sooner you can recognize the limits of similarities
it's usually ok. I did have a hard time getting git the fist time out having
used many scs's before, it finally clicked when I related it to a journaling
fs rather than a prev scs.

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gamechangr
It isn't.

In my case, it's been much easier to learn the older i get. I have a vast
amount of previous knowledge to draw from, better routines, motivation, and
overall a stronger focus.

Maybe one size doesn't fit all?

Maybe it's easy to confuse priorities with capacity?

Maybe I wasn't as good at focusing as I could have been in my 20's, it would
be hard to measure that.

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DrNuke
Shallow learning in the form of a quick, correct grasp of almost anything new
(and interesting) is easier to me now than 25 years ago because of good
foundational skills and broad industrial experience. On the other hand, deep
focus on something alien for a long and sustained period is a no go: I have
not the time, not the patience, not the need to find my place in life at this
stage, so I can just take what helps me directly and move on.

~~~
parallel_item
> "not the need to find my place in life at this stage,"

I appreciated this perspective. My primary motivation for pursuing deep work
is due to an insecurity with my current ability to be useful to the economy.
If this was validated or I solved the mental part of it, I suspect the anxiety
would lessen a bit.

~~~
DrNuke
Personal circumstances and social pressure vary a lot around the globe, but I
dare to suggest that the hardest validation to be won is very often from
ourselves, so the latter to me. Take care.

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pixelperfect
Are you sure it's because you are getting older, and not because of another
factor like technology? There is growing evidence that the constant
consumption of information e.g. on social media and mobile devices is
negatively affecting people's ability to focus. In my opinion the only way to
rule out that possibility would be to go several months without it, pretending
like you live in 2005.

I know a psychiatrist who works at a university who said she has had many
students tell her that they can't focus as well as they used to in high
school. Since these students are in their late teens and early twenties, I
doubt it is due to their age.

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Isamu
Focus is a thing you can lose, or regain by active cultivation. Your muscles
don't stay the same after you stop running every day. Likewise if you haven't
"hit the books" in years, your ability to do so will be affected.

You won't have the mental plasticity of your younger self but you can improve
your ability to focus by training on it. Like you wouldn't expect to run a few
miles after not doing so for years, you can't expect to focus for long periods
right off the bat either.

Train your ability to focus. Start small and don't expect to improve quickly.
Do some meditation as well. Get away from high-distraction things for a while,
like the smart phone, the laptop and the tv.

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sixhobbits
The science is still very young, but it's often called "fluid" and
"crystallised" intelligence. Fluid is thought to peak at around 25 years old
by some people.

It's a really controversial topic that provokes super emotional reactions and
a lot of bad debate but it's worth reading about the terminology and studies
that have been done.

This article[0] has a header image that summarises the answer to your question

[0] [https://examinedexistence.com/the-difference-between-
fluid-i...](https://examinedexistence.com/the-difference-between-fluid-
intelligence-and-crystallized-intelligence/)

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segmondy
Sorry that you fell into that set, it's easier for me to focus and learn new
things as I get older. The only challenge is free time due to more
responsibilities.

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JohnHaugeland
I'm not convinced that it actually is.

Here's the thing. You see this, a lot, in people. But you also don't see it, a
lot.

I suspect that

1) you're seeing fatigue

2) you're seeing focusing on work instead of school

3) you're seeing not-George-Dantzigs, who aren't aware they're supposed to
struggle, and therefore do not

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ummonk
Personally I just don’t have the mental energy for it, unless I’m between
jobs. Software engineering is a mentally taxing career.

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milesvp
So there's a couple of things going on here. There basic biology, which is
that we've evolved to have a really long childhood. We're 24 before
myelination has mostly taken over our brain, greatly reducing it's plasticity.
You can think of myelination as the brain spending energy to cement synaptic
pathways that have so far proven to be useful. Now, new synaptic connections
need to compete with existing connections, which I suspect actually takes more
energy to form, and thus feels more effortful when learning.

Aside from biology, I suspect we have a hard time learning new things as we
get older for similar reasons that other computer learning gets harder with
age. At some point each new piece of data represents a smaller percentage of
the total data gathered. Which is to say, that if you're trying to generalize
something each new data point can only move the average/median by a smaller
and smaller amount. As such you need to spend more and more time feeding in
variants of this new data to have any hope of it having an effect on your
model. This can be seen most painfully, if you take something like a neural
net and try to train it to do something other than what it was initially
trained to do. You're not going to find a chess playing NN, that will be able
to then learn to play go any time soon. And if it did learn to play go to any
decent degree, it would probably no longer be able to play chess nearly as
well.

But, aside from all that, that doesn't mean you can't learn as you get older.
Brains are far more plastic, even into old age than we once believed. "You
can't teach an old dog new tricks" has been empirically shown to be false,
time and time again, especially as we get more and more FMRI data from older
people.

I will say, that what others have talked about in this thread, is that there
are obstacles other than biology that get in our way for learning. Sleep is a
big one. Sleep is key for long term memory formation. If you're not getting
enough full REM cycles every day, learning is going to suffer greatly. Also
things like adult obligations can really get in the way. There seems to be
some growing evidence that people's achievements severely dip in their 30's
and 40's, which coincides with raising kids, or caring for aging parents. But
mostly, in my experience, seems to be sort of a peak for social obligations
that can't easily be blown off. There are times when I'd like to stay home on
a sunday night, and make time and space to do something new and difficult, but
instead have to go to the inlaw's for dinner to maintain that relationship.
And as cliche as that sounds, I like my inlaws, so I make that a priority.
Eventually, people die, or move away, and maybe you can work fewer hours, and
learning can get easier again, largely because you have more large
uninterrupted chunks of time. I hear many anecdotes that musical instruments,
of all things, are something that retired people get really good at,
relatively quickly, because of the time they have to practice.!

