Is it a myth that as one ages one tends to learn slower?

[timothy42b]

I don't know anything about this site, but they reference Carol Dweck who does impress me.

https://secondwindmovement.com/develop-growth-mindset/

[ego0720]

I also teach.  So being aware of how things affect others is par for the course.  You don't know me or how I work to know whether I am "self-limiting" - I assure you that I'm not.  I would not make any such statement about you, because I know nothing about your progress, achievements, or anything else.

What u are saying, you think about “me” or of the other person. The weight distribution, point of focus on where you direct what you see, what u want to see, what you argue.. is different as when I converse with others who express themselves without so much pointing. Strong emotion or view can be blinding to what more you could see from the conversation. I recall a comment you made, not necessarily with me, that I felt had the wrong speech. Maybe it was during your illness. That you can decide as to the intent but it came strong.

To reiterate, I’m of the mindset that I am in control of my thoughts and views.  I have a tough skin.  I learned to accept things and not let it bother me.  This was a skill I had to learn as I was a sensitive kid.  I learned that I had to change my view on things and that it was my responsibility. But it’s very nice that you are considerate of certain demographics.  I can respect it but my stance is just slightly different on the approach.

[ego0720]

I don't know anything about this site, but they reference Carol Dweck who does impress me.

https://secondwindmovement.com/develop-growth-mindset/

Probably captures how I feel. Growth mindset is changing one’s view, how we re-wrap the view and understanding in a way to allow ourselves to progress.

Neurogenesis is the cessation of neurons at 25ish. However it’s the neuro-link (9 ways to build our brains) that strengthens those mental muscles to avoid rapid decline.  People should engage in different ways their brain processes. When school ends, our quantum-level brain need exercise to be strong. We use maybe 10-25% of our potential.  Technology has been one cause of our mind not being utilized effectively.  That’s why since the days of Socrates each generation makes the claim how the next generation is less capable. They aren’t wrong as technology does grow at an exponential rate (until we build robots size of cells, that is the limit as of now of where technology goes).  But it doesn’t need to be this way. The problem is misuse, so it’s user error. Not the technology available.

I think when they use the term neuroplasticity they are talking about about how brain holds its shape. But it can also refer to the solid brain structure that prevents adaptation. How flexible the brain is can be affected by how much we “stretch” or exercise different types of learning.

[keypeg]

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[keypeg]

Meanwhile, I wrote about the topic and about learning.

[ego0720]

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If I offended u I am sorry. There were some comments at other users that made me feel unsettled when I read it and I had to observe from our engagement.  My only wish is to eliminate the any negative feelings to take the conversation into neutral zone. I’ll be mindful how I engage in the future.

[keypeg]

If I offended u I am sorry. There were some comments at other users that made me feel unsettled when I read it and I had to observe from our engagement.  My only wish is to eliminate the any negative feelings to take the conversation into neutral zone. I’ll be mindful how I engage in the future.

Thank you.  I just wrote privately.
It should be noted that we are from many countries and backgrounds, and communication is always iffy.  It is best to not try to interpret emotions and attitudes, because these are conveyed poorly at the best of times.  I take the attitude of "I don't know." and that what I pick up is approximate.  When it comes to "hidden feelings and attitudes" we'll go badly awry.  Not only are we from different cultures and backgrounds, but there is no tone of voice, no body language - only words.  I try to stay with factual things and ideas.

[keypeg]

Probably captures how I feel. Growth mindset is changing one’s view, how we re-wrap the view and understanding in a way to allow ourselves to progress. ......

I think when they use the term neuroplasticity they are talking about about how brain holds its shape. But it can also refer to the solid brain structure that prevents adaptation. How flexible the brain is can be affected by how much we “stretch” or exercise different types of learning.

Any of us here who are older and learning new skills in music - and music might be a new skill - are probably latched into this.

I was glad when the term "neuroplasticity" finally came in.  15 years ago I argued against the "hardened wax idea" - namely our minds are like warm soft wax and then by a certain age that wax is hardened into a permanent shape and we can't learn anymore.  I disagreed with that.  "neuroplasticity" argues against that - it says what I tried to say.  When something is "plastic" it means it can change its shape.

In my other post yesterday I went into some ideas as to how that might be done.

[timothy42b]

Any of us here who are older and learning new skills in music - and music might be a new skill - are probably latched into this.

In my opinion, it is a mistake not to recognize that the aging process makes a number of things harder, sometimes much harder.

And equally a mistake to think that it makes those things impossible. 

[keypeg]

In my opinion, it is a mistake not to recognize that the aging process makes a number of things harder, sometimes much harder.

In my opinion it is a mistake and also harmful to state that any particular things become harder across the board for all people within a given age bracket.  We are individuals, each of us different.  If someone is working with us and has a preconception they will teach toward those preconceptions and that can be very detrimental.  It also simply is not true.  For example the memory thing - which I think you have cited a few times and may be your own experience.  It is not mine.

What is important is:
a) Where the student or musician is at.
b)  The optimum ways of learning and doing - finding out what those are and applying them.

[frodo4]

In my opinion it is a mistake and also harmful to state that any particular things become harder across the board for all people within a given age bracket.  We are individuals, each of us different.

It is harder for a healthy individual to learn gymnastics if they are starting to learn at age 90 compared to a healthy individual starting at age 5.  Is it harmful to tell the 90 year old this fact?  I understand this is an extreme example.

[ranjit]

"neuroplasticity" argues against that - it says what I tried to say.  When something is "plastic" it means it can change its shape.

Tbh, neuroplasticity doesn't seem to say what you want to say. "Your brain has peak neuroplasticity in critical periods up to adolescence, and then retains significant neuroplasticity until around the age of 25 (+-2 years). At that age, a qualitative shift in processes occurs, and neuroplasticity tends to be confined to refining existing processes rather than forming entirely new "highways" in the brain. Glial cells harden and make it harder to form connections (but not impossible). It declines significantly with age. Neurogenesis (birth of new neurons) basically only takes place during childhood (the adult brain does generate new neurons, but incredibly infrequent -- around 100 new neurons in a person's lifetime from 25 onwards)."

That is my current read of the neuroplasticity literature. And it seems to say that learning rate declines significantly with age.

Your argument is more along the lines: "If you can attain child-like ways of learning, or if you can retain certain abilities when older, your neuroplasticity, at least when it comes to certain domains, does NOT decline with age." I don't think this is entirely unsubstantiated, but it is not what the current consensus on neuroplasticity is by any stretch.

[frodo4]

That is my current read of the neuroplasticity literature. And it seems to say that learning rate declines significantly with age.

And we should also consider that there is physicality to be considered in many or most learning activities.  In the case of learning chess, math or a language: 99.9% is mental.  But in the case of gymnastics, I would guess that more than 80% of learning is physical.  The required flexibility, balance and strength needed for gymnastics will never be achieved to any significant level (except for self improvement purposes) for someone starting to learn gymnastics at age 90. Learning to play piano falls somewhere in between chess and gymnastics.

[themeandvariation]

Just throwing it out there --
Picasso said : "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

[frodo4]

Just throwing it out there --
Picasso said : "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

Beethoven's greatest works were written in his final years.  Cesar Franck would have been just a footnote in music history if he died before age 60, although he wrote a great piano quintet at age 57.

[keypeg]

Tbh, neuroplasticity doesn't seem to say what you want to say.

I couldn't care less about my Glial cells.  I am interested in learning to play music well on my instrument and doing those practical things that help me do so.  I have spent 15 - 16 years on this both working on my own playing, and working with a senior teacher with almost 60 years experience, and have interfaced with other teachers on the topic.  "Studies" do not involve people who teach, let alone for any such length of time.

I came up with an "anti-hardened wax" idea long before the term "neuroplasticity" came up.  The place the coincide is that we have not been hardened into one single way of doing by a given age - and that has significance in a practical sense. 

[lostinidlewonder]

The brain is by far one of the least understood parts of our body. Despite advancements in neuroscience the brain remains incredibly complex and mysterious. Scientists have made significant progress but there's still much to learn about its intricacies and functions.

Of all the high achieving "oldies" that I've taught I can't remember a single one of them who ever talked about their age being a limitation (or talk about their age at all!!) they just got on with the work that excites and drives them onward. I much prefer this attitude myself too. We shouldnt simply ignore that aging does bring physiological changes that can impact cognitive abilities, its just that we don't stare at it as an issue, it's something that you can't change but staring at it exacerbates it.

Some as they age forget about what it is like to be a child and find no joy in the childish games and play kids do, ultimately disconnecting from what "play" is like from the perspective of children and more living in the mind. Personally I've never lost that and still today play with my friends children and my nieces and nephews silly children's games. Even my young students there is an element of play in our lessons and how I relate to them, it's a great joy to participate in it, but I know many adults just can't relate to that anymore.

So too as we grow old we forget about the playful nature of learning, to approach it childlike, that certainly is a great disadvantage, older people can tend to "look before they leap" far too much, this can have its advantages but certainly can add unnecessary barriers. The "look before you leap" allows one to avoid unnecessary risks and make more informed choices, but it certainly can take away the mystery and excitement of what might lie around the corner! This cautious approach might diminish the sense of spontaneity and thrill that often accompanies exploring unknown territories and also can stifle creativity and limit the possibility of discovering unexpected experiences. It can also add mental obstacles which can certainly hinder potential progress.

[keypeg]

Your argument is more along the lines: "If you can attain child-like ways of learning, or if you can retain certain abilities when older, your neuroplasticity, at least when it comes to certain domains, does NOT decline with age." I don't think this is entirely unsubstantiated, but it is not what the current consensus on neuroplasticity is by any stretch.

No, that is not my argument.  "child-like" sounds rather romanticized and can be misunderstood.  I'm talking of specific things.

Learning to play music on an instrument involves using the body, interacting with a physical instrument, and training the senses.  This is direct, non-intellectual, interactive.  It also takes time for neural pathways to form, through repeating actions while being present to what you are doing - to the physical realities around you.  The "adult way" is often to jump straight to ideas, concepts, intellectual things, and what I described gets circumvented.  So the adult never gets there because he zooms right past.  What I described is also how children learn and how they are taught.  Often how adults are taught caters to the intellect and abstractness.  If the learning style changes, the results will change.

I did not start with words like "neuroplasticity".  16 years ago I referred to the "hard wax theory" because we kept hearing how our mind gets its "final form" in the teen years, like wax which was soft and malleable but eventually hardens into some permanent form.  I was against this "hard wax" idea.  It was clumsy terminology, so when "neuroplasticity" came along I adopted it.  It seemed to reflect my prior ideas - i..e. that the mind has not "hardened into a final form" but is malleable - and that was close enough for me.

It began for me with language learning, where supposedly we'll speak with an accent if learning a language later.  I think I'm on my 7th language - lost count.  Our linguistics prof talked of the "crible phonologique" - the phonological filter.  Here we don't hear a foreign sound: we translate it into what we know by passing it through the "filter" of our mother tongue.  That's why a German might say "Venn ve valk" instead of "When we walk." even though "w" does not sound at all like "v" - but the written letter W is  pronounced V.  Or the American "R" when trying to speak French.  To get the foreign sound, we have to "listen without a filter" the way a baby does, and also experiment with our bodies to physically produce that sound.  We must lose the embarrassment of feeling silly and inadequate: babies don't - they blow bubbles, squeal and emit bronx cheers like there is no tomorrow.  "Play" itself is experimentation and learning.  I taught along those lines, a few individuals who wanted to learn a language minus accent.  I found rough equivalents in music study.  In fact, music applies backward into language.  In spoken language we have cadences, rhythms, pitch variation, stressed sounds - all of which can make us "sound foreign" - as well as the ability to hear what is there versus what we imagine is there.

In short, it came down to a different interaction with the matter at a very fundamental level.   That changed many things.  If we do things differently - fundamentally - we get different results.  Conversely, the results that are found may be due to how things are done.

I don't know how to write this in less words.

[ravelfan07]

It is harder for a healthy individual to learn gymnastics if they are starting to learn at age 90 compared to a healthy individual starting at age 5.  Is it harmful to tell the 90 year old this fact?  I understand this is an extreme example.

That was my point in the beginning

[lostinidlewonder]

Why not a 90 year old become an MMA fighter? lol. I mean it is too physically extreme of an example, playing the piano as a beginner 90 year old (and I have once taught this age before) is totally possible and there can be joy and progress found in it. I have never taught a super talented 90 year old who just starts out piano but the 90 year old I did teach wasn't that bad at all. I have taught a super talented 60ish year old who progressed extremely fast in a matter of a couple years to the upper levels of piano playing which is way faster than probably 99% of people younger than her who have tried.

[timothy42b]

That was my point in the beginning

When I was in grad school my wife babysat for the gymnastics coach at a Big Ten university.  So I asked him if I could learn any at my age.  (probably late 20s at the time) 
He said no, for two reasons. 

1), I was too big for a spotter.  It's really easy for an adult to guide a 5 year old through a motion insuring they don't land on their head, and are making the correct rotations.  Not so easy when you weight 150 and up.
2), and maybe more important.    An adult's brain has a lifetime of accumulated fear.  It's not going to be so easy for you to let go enough to trust some motions. 

Not all that relevant to piano, I suppose, but I thought it was interesting.  He'd obviously been asked before and given it some thought.

There is a contrary example, sort of, described in a book called Gnar Country by Steven Kotler.  He tries to learn terrain park skiing when a bit older (but with a lifetime of athletic activity.)    He succeeds, but his medical bills...............  It's worth reading, though. 

I ended up asking one of the gymnasts if I could at least learn to kip up from a lying position.  We worked on it a bit, and she ended up saying my thoracic spine flexibility was too limited. 

[ranjit]

He said no, for two reasons. 

1), I was too big for a spotter.  It's really easy for an adult to guide a 5 year old through a motion insuring they don't land on their head, and are making the correct rotations.  Not so easy when you weight 150 and up.
2), and maybe more important.    An adult's brain has a lifetime of accumulated fear.  It's not going to be so easy for you to let go enough to trust some motions.

See, people usually come up with these kinds of reasons, which don't seem convincing at all to me. I would respect them more if they said that they just didn't think adults have the same learning abilities as kids.

Here, for example:
1. Are only 5 year olds being taught gymnastics? What about 11 year olds? What if you are short and weigh 110 pounds? What if you have incredibly good sponge or something on the floor which prevents injury and allows you to fall on your head? What if your instructor is unusually strong?

2. Accumulated fear - What if you personally don't have that? It seems like a real generalization. Plenty of adults I've seen aren't really afraid of the water, for instance, when they learn swimming, and go right for it. Many people might be able to let go of that fear. On one extreme, you have someone like David Goggins who doesn't seem to be afraid of dying if he can meet certain goals.

I've heard many such reasons why adults can't learn piano, from teachers I have taken lessons with.
1. Adults can't develop the same hand/bone/muscle structure of the hand that children would.
2. Adults will never have the same time to practice that a child does.
3. Adults will never be able to get a stable knuckle bridge.

And so on... But these are ground in misconceptions. Adults don't do these things, but that's not saying that they can't. I think people conflate those things. I have seen adults develop that hand musculature, as it is a matter of conditioning/strength, and can develop in a few years if you practice it. I have seen several adults who practice the piano multiple hours a day, especially in their 20s and 30s. And so on.

[ranjit]

No, that is not my argument.  "child-like" sounds rather romanticized and can be misunderstood.

Yes, what I mean is using similar, more direct processes of attention as children do. I notice a certain childlike quality in the most able learners, and children seem to naturally use better methods to learn. I couldn't think of a better word.

It also takes time for neural pathways to form, through repeating actions while being present to what you are doing - to the physical realities around you.  The "adult way" is often to jump straight to ideas, concepts, intellectual things, and what I described gets circumvented... If the learning style changes, the results will change.

I think we're looking at this from different angles. I know several teachers who teach adults, and most who I know aren't nearly as bad as many you talk about. They don't treat their adult students fundamentally differently, and might believe that hard work is what brings results and not age. However, the vast majority of their adult students still really struggle. So even when the learning style changes, I have very often not seen good results.

I was against this "hard wax" idea.  It was clumsy terminology, so when "neuroplasticity" came along I adopted it.  It seemed to reflect my prior ideas - i..e. that the mind has not "hardened into a final form" but is malleable - and that was close enough for me.

Neuroplasticity is absolutely the right term for it. The extent of adult neuroplasticity is hotly debated. I see nowadays that the term has caught on to the point where everyone acknowledges its existence, so the interesting question is how much neuroplasticity adults have, not whether they do.

It began for me with language learning, where supposedly we'll speak with an accent if learning a language later.  I think I'm on my 7th language - lost count.  Our linguistics prof talked of the "crible phonologique" - the phonological filter.  Here we don't hear a foreign sound: we translate it into what we know by passing it through the "filter" of our mother tongue.  That's why a German might say "Venn ve valk" instead of "When we walk." even though "w" does not sound at all like "v" - but the written letter W is  pronounced V.  Or the American "R" when trying to speak French.  To get the foreign sound, we have to "listen without a filter" the way a baby does, and also experiment with our bodies to physically produce that sound.

I guess what I keep wondering is whether it's possible to completely learn an accent this way, as opposed to partially learning it and picking up features. I know this can be done, but I don't know how good you can get with it, especially as an adult. I speak multiple languages, and have done similar things. However, I have an (subtle) accent in each of the languages I speak, even those learned early in childhood. That's what I think about quite often. Somehow it was always rather obvious to me to listen carefully to a language to imitate the sounds. But with a good ear, you can usually tell who is "trying to learn new sounds" vs who is "a native speaker who grew up entirely in a certain place". It's not so surface level -- I'm sure East Asian speakers can learn to differentiate l's and r's, and German speakers can pronounce their w's and so on, and I've seen many do it. But to get the entire contour and lilt, and accurate sound bank of new sounds, and to make that very natural is not something I've really seen people succeed at. Otoh acquiring individual sounds and making certain changes can absolutely be done. Does that make sense? Perhaps your experience is different.

This article looks interesting: https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/41/5/787/5530705?login=false

In short, it came down to a different interaction with the matter at a very fundamental level.   That changed many things.  If we do things differently - fundamentally - we get different results.  Conversely, the results that are found may be due to how things are done.

I think often when we disagree, it's because you keep saying that doing things differently produces different results, while describing something which I think many good teachers do, and which many students do as well. Like you're talking about many things I've taken for granted for years now, despite which I haven't been able to succeed -- which is what I try to point out.

I don't know how to write this in less words.

On the contrary, I would be interested to hear you write in more depth. Here, you are repeating many things you have said before, and it might be interesting to go into more detail.

[ravelfan07]

When I was in grad school my wife babysat for the gymnastics coach at a Big Ten university.  So I asked him if I could learn any at my age.  (probably late 20s at the time) 
He said no, for two reasons. 

1), I was too big for a spotter.  It's really easy for an adult to guide a 5 year old through a motion insuring they don't land on their head, and are making the correct rotations.  Not so easy when you weight 150 and up.
2), and maybe more important.    An adult's brain has a lifetime of accumulated fear.  It's not going to be so easy for you to let go enough to trust some motions. 

Not all that relevant to piano, I suppose, but I thought it was interesting.  He'd obviously been asked before and given it some thought.

There is a contrary example, sort of, described in a book called Gnar Country by Steven Kotler.  He tries to learn terrain park skiing when a bit older (but with a lifetime of athletic activity.)    He succeeds, but his medical bills...............  It's worth reading, though. 

I ended up asking one of the gymnasts if I could at least learn to kip up from a lying position.  We worked on it a bit, and she ended up saying my thoracic spine flexibility was too limited.

Huh, I think it varies from topic to topic