All I get from the article is that they gave some people psilocybin (20mg/kg) and then did some fMRIs. Lovely but I don't see any evidence for reversing mental age here.
I really hate that I get dumber and dumber with age and that the laws of my country do not let me stop this slow mental dulling. It feels like a group of people physically attacking and overpowering me and I am confused by why I should follow these obviously evil laws.
I like the way this article is written, with all the references plainly accessible.
You're right, slower is the right word. I'm very accurate and precise but feel like I am embarrassingly slow. Recollection in particular feels slower, and I don't know if that is because I have much more knowledge to draw upon or because of aging.
What is more definite is that the 'aha-moments' are much less rewarding and because of that I am less attentive in my intellectual pursuits. I have more effective learning strategies but less interest in applying them.
I had a funny experience recently. Gave math lesson to a 15yo. I could sense the higher thoughts frequency in his words and ideas. The kid couldn't think deep, got confused regularly on simple matter, but I could feel how vibrant his spirit was compared to mine. Strange feeling :)
I too feel that intellectual challenges are less rewarding. But average life amongst peers is so dull, I'd rather keep doing that rather than stop. Also I tend to blend this with more altruistic pragmatic goals. Getting old makes your ego less important and so this is a workable compromise.
I always wondered why kids could learn a handful of languages and adults struggle to learn anything past one.
Language is an interesting one. Maybe it’s my personal bias but it seems a lot easier to learn other things than language as an adult. Instruments, skills, etc.
Kids take years to learn a language. They do it almost all day long.
Emerge yourself in an environment with the language you want to learn. Boost some important words with spaced repetition. You will learn faster than any child.
Accents, on the other hand, that's a different story.
Children are nowhere close to fluent after 2-3 years. It takes children 10+ years to reach fluency. Just Google "myth of children language learning" for dozens of peer reviewed references. Here's just one example:
"Research comparing children to adults has consistently demonstrated that adolescents and adults perform better than young children under controlled conditions (e.g., Snow & Hoefnagel-Hoehle, 1978)."
I wonder about those "controlled conditions"... I know its anecdotical evidence, but this really contradicts everything I have ever seen after years ans years of interacting with immigrant families (and being a immigrant myself). Kids are usually perfectly fluent after a couple of years of school while parents are still struggling, even if they are also totally immersed. It really surprises me this is considered a "myth".
The fluency achieved in even four years is very very limited: very correct from the point of view of how well the grammar used by adults work (better than adults over that period), but the range of the things they can express is much smaller than adults learning the language over those four years (several hours per day).
To add to this, the vocabulary and the types of sentences that children will construct are much simpler. They may talk about animals, what they've done at school and what to play next. An adult reading a foreign newspaper, by contrast, has to be able to understand language around current affairs, politics and socio-economic events and structures. A very different side to any language.
Absolutely. I have lived in places where the main language is not in the family of those you speak and I have experienced two situations: a) you have to work every day and there is little to zero chance of being exposed to the language at work, plus, little over the weekends, no possibility of finding courses outside working hours, etc. and b) spending the first months six hours a day exclusively learning the language. Well, in my unscientific experience, with b), in months you get the fluency that adults typically get in about two years.
I can absolutely believe that. I'm a relatively recent transplant to a new country and though I fall into your category A and am nowhere near fluent, I could conduct basic daily affairs (ordering at restaurants, pay bills at a post office, make basic appointments) in about 2 months or so of being here. I think adults don't give themselves enough credit in language learning.
> I always wondered why kids could learn a handful of languages and adults struggle to learn anything past one.
> Maybe it’s my personal bias but it seems a lot easier to learn other things than language as an adult.
I started to speak properly when I was 4, I was a bit late. But imagine the following:
You'd go to a country that you don't know the language of for the next 5 years. You can assume that you don't need to worry about your survival as food, water and shelter are provided for you among some luxuries like internet. Basically, you achieved financial independence.
The challenge becomes: in this new land you have to learn the local language within 5 years. There is, however, one caveat. You are only allowed to interact with the local population in their (spoken and body) language. You're not allowed to use any other educational resource. In other words, you have to learn a new language exactly like a baby does.
Could you do it in 5 years?
I bet if you set your mind to it, you really could.
Your 2 years estimate is way too conservative, I've seen people do it in a year, sometimes a few months if the languages are close enough (French-Italian-Spanish-Portuguese etc.)
Then there are all the really intensive courses/immersion programs where failure is basically forbidden (FSI, DLI, French Foreign Legion) and people reach B2-C1 very quickly, even for 'hard' languages (like Japanese or Arabic for a native English speaker, or French for a native Chinese speaker).
There's one more factor/advantage that should be accounted for: children and their parents/grandparents engage in a natural feedback loop. Parents try and teach the children words, once the child starts repeating the words the parents get excited and repeat it back, and so on and so forth.
It's like having extremely dedicated, enthusiastic tutors for those five years.
Kids have infinite time and dedicated one on one live-in tutors (parents).
As an adult you don't have either. Though dating someone is your only real approximation of the latter.
There are some cherries on top of that, like how a babbling kid doesn't care to make mistakes. But I would think all of them pale in comparison to the two big advantages above.
I tried to learn spanish as a kid in around middle school. It was an extracurricular class and it was the first thing I'd really ever failed at.
Now at 30ish, I find I can learn languages MUCH easier. I speak fluent french and am reasonably conversant in Spanish. (I can read it pretty well though.)
Okay, the real trick is to find a method that works for you. People love to shower everyone with advice, especially now that the edtech industry is bubbling with the soaring of Duolingo et al., but from experience only two things are really proven to actually work for everyone:
-Spaced repetition
-Lots of exposure
That's it. The rest is up to you. Some people swear by their specific app, some people religiously study their Assimil handbook, some people will argue that you should never ever learn grammar, some people swear by total immersion, and Nassim Taleb (who speaks like 7+ languages including like Ancient Greek) just reads a lot of books, but ultimately little of it matters insofar as it does one of the above two. There's an overabundance of learning materials out there for you to grab and use, just have your pick and find what's best for you.
Oh, and it goes without saying, but like with all learning, or indeed all cognitively demanding tasks, you have to actually want to learn. Ideally there should be an external motivator that pushes you and from which you can feel rewarded as you learn, this can range from 'watching anime without subtitles' to 'speaking with your SO in their language' but it has to be something.
We tend to focus on reading, oral understanding & writing. Those fit easily into "sit down and study for 45m" format. Speaking doesn't, and can feel uncomfortable or contrived in classroom settings. One of the big reasons "immersion" often leads to fast breakthroughs is because it comes with a lot of natural speaking. That's often the bottleneck.
You don't stop and think of the correct grammar, words or whatnot when speaking. You just try to make yourself understood as best as you can, with whatever language skills you have. Even 200 words is something. Engaging that intuitive improvisation can be really helpful.
I have a different take. I would say don't worry about speaking at all, at least not in the first several months. It will come when you are ready. Focus on understanding messages from comprehensible input (be it from books, movies, whatever). Speaking is hard, and the anxiety caused by forced speaking (for example, the type you find in a lot of high-school language classes) can be a barrier towards language acquisition. In a nutshell, I subscribe to the Input Hypothesis that Stephen Krashen writes a lot about on his site sdkrashen.com. (Under that hypothesis, the gains from immersion, when they arise, are because of the higher amount of interesting, comprehensible input that is directed at the learner, rather than an increase in the learner's output)
Yes, at some point you'll need to work on pronunciation but that is something different than the type of extemporaneous speaking we are discussing here.
But this probably only goes to show what another commenter pointed out, which is that there is a lot of conflicting advice out there.
Fair warning, ASL is the only foreign language I learned that isn't a romance language. I found it really easy and intuitive actually, but I've never tried to learn something REALLY different grammatically from English.
But here are my tips: Immediately start by thinking in the language, or at least in terms of grammer. If you think about it, recalling and using words to say stuff you want is one of two primary skills you actually want to develop, so you need to actually practice that. Even if you do this with incorrect grammar, it's still incredibly beneficial. (German is a bit harder grammar-wise, but that's ok, you need to learn to think in the German grammar pattern before you can speak German.)
What does that really mean though? A couple of things: When you think about something you want to say, think about it in terms of grammar. Instead of thinking "I want to go to the beach", think like this:
"[pronoun for me] [conjugation of verb "want"] [infinitive "to go"] [noun "the beach"]" Once that skill becomes a habit, speaking is trivial. It's just vocabulary. A note: I will think in terms of bastardized English grammar so that the grammar I'm thinking in conforms to the language I WANT to be speaking or understanding.
Here's an example: If I want to translate the phrase "I want to do it" to french, I'll think in the french grammatical pattern first. Then I just fill in french words if I know them, or english if I don't. Let's suppose I don't know ANY of the french words yet. I'll think; "{I [want]} [it] [to do]" because that's the correct order in french. "{Je [veux]} [le] [faire]".
To practice this, Learn a couple dozen words and a few phrases. Think about every possible combination and modification you can make with those and practice with imaginary conversations in your head. Then start to generate new things, and fill in the gaps with what you do know. This starts to practice the pattern of filling in words you do know. If you don't know them, guess. Look them up. Gesture. You're trying to communicate not do some abstract thing.
A side effect of this, is that it can be a real bitch to switch between languages if you're out of practice. I sometiems start thinking in the wrong grammatical pattern but filling in words from English. It can be pretty funny.
Are we to take this as an endorsement for psychedelics? :)
Although I do observe kids having superpowers when it comes to learning stuff, especially language, I find that the primary learning barrier for me is, as ever, time and interest.
also, people annoy me at how bad they are at teaching language. 'you slightly mispronounced that word in the sentence, we are not moving on until its perfect'. kids are able to move on mistakes and focus on big picture things, filling in the gaps later.
To be fair, native speakers often act like "you slightly mispronounced that word in the sentence, so I have literally zero idea what any of it meant and am doubting your intelligience"
It's very frustrating in Polish, for example, when I forget to roll my R's (difficult with my lisp!) and somehow I'm talking alien nonsense.
Agreed. The focus on error-free communication at the early stages is what I think turns off a lot of would-be language learners. I like the idea of only correcting learners when really needed (i.e. when their message can not be understood) but letting the other stuff go (used the wrong preposition? don't worry about it. he/she will pick it up as they progress)
Seeing how the vast majority of adults does in fact speak two languages and a huge chunk of them even more (e.g. most of Africa) I'd say your initial premise (adults struggle to learn anything past one) is misguided.
As an adult who speaks 3 languages, I don't think that premise is misguided. All the languages I'm fluent in today, I was already fluent in by the time I was 8. Learning a 4th language in my teens (compulsory in high school) was way harder - I can barely read that one and can't write, speak, or listen in it. Even now I grind through Duolingo lessons in that language and barely retain anything.
I assume that most bi-lingual or multi-lingual adults today picked up the fundamentals of all those languages as children. They didn't learn them after growing up.
Look at Steve Kaufmann as a counterexample - he's learned most of his languages after 40 (he was multilingual from a young age, but there is certainly a process that lets even older adults pick up languages quite straightforwardly)
American high school language programs are really bad. The teachers speak English mostly and there's no real incentive or reason to learn in or out of class because there's nobody you need to communicate with.
I’m not so sure. Again speaking only from my observations. Some people i know have migrated to another country in their early twenties, taken on their new host language as their core. E.g partner and kids with this new language.
Yet still after 40 years they are not as comfortable as with their original language.
I think he is referring to brain plasticity differences between adults and children. Also, your rebuttal does not consider the fraction of those adults who learned those languages when they were young. I would guess that adults who already know more than one language can learn another more quickly than adults who only know one language.
Yeah people love to go on about brain plasticity but few people actually know much about it (for instance how you can re-induce said plasticity in adults), let alone how it relates to language learning as an adult.
>Also, your rebuttal does not consider the fraction of those adults who learned those languages when they were young.
That still includes:
-Pretty much all immigrants
-All populations using a regional lingua franca (Modern Standard Arabic, Swahili, Indonesian, French, English, Russian, Portuguese)
-Everyone who learned English as a requirement for their job (that's everyone in business, research, the tourism industry, the software industry and probably a few others I'm missing)
-Everyone who learned another language as part of their higher education (usually English, but can also include languages like French, German or Russian)
Of course the language acquisition is usually far from perfect. You probably won't get rid of your accent as an adult, and your writing may be rife with mistakes. But as a communication tool, most adults manage just fine, because communication is part of being human and humans are naturally good at communicating.
I see it the other way, that these other things have 'a language' of their own. There's vocabulary and higher structures and usages that emerge from it. I've seen this time and again. Branches of math or science, music, and even complex games (Go, Starcraft2, etc) have many layers. I can't clearly differentiate what's needed to learn one kind and not the other. A game of Go has even been called a conversation between two people.
Edit: I'm (re)learning to play Starcraft2 at a higher level and loving those 'elevated plateaus' feeling of learning which does get rare.
Kids can watch cartoons all day, they talk with other native speakers all day without worrying they'll make a mistake and just talking about stuff, etc (Also they're usually at school)
Adults are judged more and have less time to learn, even passive learning (listening intently, etc). They also are understandably more focused on work.
I've learned other languages when adult and it was more a matter of time than "not being able to". Sure, it is harder and I'm not going to deny brain plasticity, but I learned more when I was less able to depend on English.
I think you you put your finger onto the right place: language.
Kids can learn one or multiple languages extremely fast, and they can do it without formal, strict or even intentional instruction... at a very young age.
There's obviously something different, and for this purpose superior, about a child's brain. There are probably a lot of more subtle examples, language is something that's easily comparable.
Naturally, that's interesting to study. There may be ways of replicating some of the child brain's abilities in adults. But for immediate and practical purposes, it makes sense to just take advantage of this window while it exists. Multilingual childcare seems like an awesome choice, for example.
We should also identify other aspects of learning that are like this, and create the environment for them to engage. I've heard that navigation skills are similar... very easy to develop at a young age... even down to a constant awareness of cardinal directions.
> Kids can learn one or multiple languages extremely fast
Can they really, though? I have a three-year old nephew who can speak, but not particularly well.
I feel like if you dropped me into another country where I didn't speak the language, and had someone to look after me and respond to me whenever I tried to communicate my frustrations or desires, and I had no other responsibilities other than to exist, I could get to the vocabulary of a three-year old in less than a year.
Well... a lot of the bottleneck with kids is how much language their minds can handle at that point.
The analogy isn't perfect and it is open to interpretation. That said, watch your nephew develop over the next three years. Note that there is very little deliberate training or discipline involved. Keep in mind that he could do this for several languages in parallel.
By 5 or 6, his language skills will have progressed much faster than most adults' in a similar period. At 4-6, a few months of immersion (say summer with grandparents) will yield some mind-blowing progress. Again, not impossible for an adult... but rare in practice.
I grew up in a multilingual house. My father was an english speaker. We lived in Israel. He did speak the local language (hebrew), but I spoke it better by 6. I could also handle thick accents (irish) that my mother couldn't understand.
This isn't unusual. Kids translating for parents is a very common phenomenon for immigrant families. It happens because kids learn faster. Adults can make up the difference with discipline, but it's a tough contest.
I'll definitely keep a close watch over the next few years! They actually do have a somewhat multi-lingual household already, so he speaks kind of a mix: English for most things, Japanese for words such as breakfast or lunch.
I've been wondering if it would actually hamper his skills to have to learn more than one language at a time, but your experience at least seems to say the opposite.
Kids vary. The median ability seems to be 3 languages.
That said, I think there are hidden abilities. My younger brother would only speak one language. He understood both, and we both had a smattering of other languages (russian, arabic, polish, tunisian) too.
Seemingly, he wasn't bilingual (2-4yo). But, after a week of immersion (grandparents) he would fully switch language and stop speaking the first one. The ability was there, but he didn't like switching in real time.
If Your nephews get a week or two in Japan, they'll probably unlock another level of language ability very quickly.
The bonus is accent. On this, even a disciplined and talented adult can rarely come near children's innate ability. Accents are usually carried by adults decades after fluency is achieved. Kids don't have this problem. Again, immigrant families give us a wide sample group to observe.
Yes, this is true. My argument is that I think I could learn faster than a child at a given task if you stripped me of any adult responsibilities. The fact that children are having to learn to navigate the world at the same time they're learning to speak is precisely what would allow me to beat them.
We're seeing a lot of articles starting to praise the use of psychedelics. This seems a bit dangerous - these are serious drugs that can potentially mess you up - I'm not saying that they shouldn't be used, but it would be nice if interested people (people who are going to try them anyway) could go somewhere and have some medical/therapeutic guidance through their experience. It would be so much safer.
I don’t feel that it should be required to have “authoritative” guidance in order to have psychedelic experiences. I feel that’s better served by a more shamanistic role, as medical settings are the last place I’d ever want to trip. People need to be taught about tolerance, and about the paramount important of mindset (and to a slightly lesser extent setting) when it comes to psychedelics.
This can be done only once its fully legal to consume it (and all related legality ie for certified business to obtain and dispense it, growers to produce it etc) - fix this part, and apart from desperate dirtbags folks will go that way.
I wholly agree with you - its an extremely powerful tool, can do a lot of good and bad, with no certain prior indication which way it will happen.
It looks like one of these "let's show how cool psychedelics are" study, or study proposal.
I have nothing against psychedelics, and I am sure that they helped many people, but I am also sure they wrecked many others. They are very unstable drugs, and unless we find some way to tame them, I don't expect any kind of progress in therapeutic use of psychedelics.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem the proposed study will do anything to help here. Basically, they are going to give adults a shroom trip, have them watch a cartoon, and scan their brain using a fMRI machine to see if their brain look more like infants or more like sober adults doing the same thing.
It is just a way to confirm if what everyone who at some point has been in contact with psychedelics noticed, that is that tripping makes you feel like a child, also shows on fMRI scans. But the thing is: so what if it does? How will it help turn a notoriously unstable drug into something that a doctor can prescribe? Not only that but fMRI scans are notoriously hard to interpret. There is a famous igNobel study that analyzed the thoughts of a dead salmon.
I am not saying I am not interested in the potential results of such a study, but if the goal is to find medical use for psychedelics (and therefore get them out of Schedule I), I don't know how it will help.
"Some people who've taken a lot of psychedelics tend to all too easily believe in conspiracy theories and to reject mainstream science. Thus I know too many people who believe in chemtrails, 9/11 as a conspiracy, are anti-vaccination, anti-fluoridation, etc." [1]
Coincedence that some people who took a lot of psychedelics end up as gullible as children?
I for the contrary can say otherwise: most of people I've met who's taken a lot of beer and religion tend to believe more in conspiracy theories and reject science - psychedelic users are the contrary.
I think the key words in the quote from Scully are "some people" and "a lot of psychedelics".
Of course it's also purely anecdotal, but within the Psychedelic Trance scene I see far more people than I am comfortable with who took a lot of acid and end up deep in the rabbit hole of conspiracy nonsense.
