

What will happen to you as you grow older:  you will go "meta" - amichail

That's my guess anyway.  It's certainly the case with me.  As I have grown older, I have focused more on the "big picture", thinking about things at a meta level.<p>Any similar experiences?
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queensnake
There are two books on this, the better one was 'The Wisdom Paradox' (my bad!
correction from earlier version of this comment), the less good, slower, less
medical + informative was 'The Mature Mind'. IIRC from reviews (I only got 1/4
way through the first book), the theory is, that the right brain starts being
used more (and it's been fed longer, now) so that, as you age, while you're
maybe less 'whip smart', you have 10,000 shortcuts and indeed as you say, you
see the bigger picture better.

Ugh - actually I couldn't swear the one that impressed me as 'sharper' was the
first, I believe so though. I could use some of my old 'whip smarts', such as
they were :(.

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pg
I had a fair number of very general theories when I was young. They just
weren't very good. Maybe it would be more correct to say that one will think
more successfully about the big picture.

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mrtron
I find most of my general theories from when I was young were generally quite
good, but slightly naive. My father was a mechanic, and I always wondered why
cars didn't have generators used for braking. Regenerative braking became a
great idea for cars powered by an electric motor, not so useful for gasoline
powered cars. I thought about what it would be like to live forever, and I
figured you would go through every possibility of an ever growing world. This
is not so different from what I later learned about quantum physics.

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ratsbane
Yes. Good observation. I wonder how much of it is environmental? As I grow
older I'm thinking more about how to show other people how to do the things I
figured out when I was younger and how to organize groups of people to get
things done on a broader scale.

I don't want to stop thinking like I did when I was younger, though. It's
important to continue learning things, which probably means paying some
attention to lower-level topics.

Today is my birthday. [argh]

