Thoughts on aging's effect on learning and intelligence

[gobbomom]

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So basically our brain can still be coerced into developing throughout our lives based on usage patterns. This would seem to support the "possible, but hard" hypothesis to massive new learning past the 30s. And maybe just that extra effort needed is enough to keep one from coming up with a world-class genius moment.

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I think this could be accomplished by researching the electrical activity within the various lobes of the brain.

[microbet]

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So what can I do to keep my brain from atrophy?

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There have been some positive studies on reading and I think crossword puzzles and decreasing the risks and/or effects of alzheimer's.

[microbet]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

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I worked for Scientific Learning, which was started by Bill Jenkins, Michael Merzenich and a few other people not listed there (Paula Talaal, Bret Peterson, ..?)

[suzzer99]

From the wiki article, I thought this was pretty fascinating:

"One such experiment involved a group of eight Buddist monk adepts and ten volunteers who had been trained in meditation for one week in Davidson's lab. All the people tested were told to meditate on compassion and love. Two of the controls, and all of the monks, experienced an increase in the number of gamma waves in their brain during meditation. As soon as they stopped meditating, the volunteers' gamma wave production returned to normal, while the monks, who had meditated on compassion for more than 10,000 hours in order to attain the rank of adept, did not experience a decrease to normal in the gamma wave production after they stopped meditating. The synchronized gamma wave area of the monks' brains during meditation on love and compassion was found to be larger than that corresponding activation of the volunteers' brains."


Also they've done studies on London cabbies brains, who have to spend years memorizing all of London's streets before they're allowed to work. They found certain areas were more developed than control subjects, and others actually less. So it looks like all the memorization can actually push out other stuff.

[suzzer99]

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So what can I do to keep my brain from atrophy?

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I'm to take a guess, and honestly I've never thought of this before, that learning poker or new forms of poker can probably help. Also having a career that challenges you to keep learning. Barring those, any other intellectual hobby can probably help.

But I don't know if crossword puzzles count. While they require thought, I don't know they really stimulate any kind of learning.

[xPeru]

My 2c as a 44 year old ...

Most of my work colleagues in the past have had the opinion that I was some form of genius (not a brag, wait for it!). I have always had the ability to make complex things simple, and just sort of assumed that others could do it too. Memorably for me was one meeting with some fairly high powered investment bankers to discuss an asset backed security issue which I was proposing. Meeting chaired by a guy worth over £200 million, and he'd brought a top team to attack my proposal. One was a former professor of maths at Oxford University, and he promptly set out the mathematical logic for why my proposal was unworkable. I have a degree in Classics and English, but I dabble in maths,so I immediately retorted that he was wrong and had made several mistakes which I then proceeded to point out. His reply ... "Jesus, that's elegant."

Now,the truth is that I'm definitely not a genius, and I don't even think I'm that intelligent, but I read more than pretty much anyone I've ever met (average 500+ pages a day), I have a good memory for what I read, and *crunch* I think about it a lot. In short, I am an obsessive personality, and when I get interested in something I really kick the arse out of it until I truly understand it. And I move on to other subjects of obsession. I think in this way, I develop both breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding which feeds through to an ability to solve problems which looks like high intelligence, but isn't really. It's obsession, hard work,and a natural ability to absorb and retain information.

I think all elements are necessary for maintaining learning ability as you get older; breadth - opera to poker to motorcycle maintenance; depth - the obsessive desire to be able to understand the real professionals (sidebar, I also got a top 5 law firm to rewrite a legal opinion after I pointed out specific areas of the law they'd missed - obv I'm not a lawyer, but I'd obsessed enough about one tiny aspect of the law to know more about it that the best guys in one of the best law firms in the world); and relentlessness, this process needs to continue, not stop and start. I believe the brain continues to develop if you give it breadth, depth and relentless new things to learn. And thus you retain your learning capacity - er no, improve your learning capacity, at least up to my age.

[turnipmonster]

one thing I really like to do is take lessons. my wife is 29, and has picked up an amazing amount of spanish in 6 months by taking lessons once a week and speaking spanish with fluent friends.

[J.A.Sucker]

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Ok, that mathematics thing is something I read a while back. Let me ask you something though, since I know nothing about the state of modern mathematics. When I think of genius I don't just picture someone who solved a tough proof or made some kind of advancement that happens every few years. I mean someone who revolutionized some area of mathematics or science. Einstein, Newton, Descartes, Copernicus (helio-centric theory is believed to have been born in his 20s), Tesla, probably the guy who invented the wheel. All these guys had their big eureka moment in their 20s. Then many of them went on to postulate all kinds of wrong theories as they got older.

Are there any examples of people having the genesis of some idea that revolutionized their field while in their late 30s or beyond?

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I would suspect that most (if not all) people who have gotten the Nobel Prize in any experimental science over the past 40 years performed their initial work between the ages of 30-40.

Being intelligent is only one step into solving difficult problems. It's a start, but not necessary, either. What's more important is being able to connect between your varied experiences and what you have read/learned over the years to think about something in a new way. Maybe this is what intelligence is, but I think it's more like being CLEVER. No matter how smart you are, if you don't have experience, you can't draw from them. Also, going through the process of doing ANYTHING improves how you will approach another problem in the future. Great experimentalists have figured out how to plan, build, and flat-out do science - the ones that win the Nobel these days are the ones that figure out how to apply varied experiences to solve/invetigate established problems in a new way. These guys are almost never the pure whiz kids, BTW, contray to what many think.

[suzzer99]

JA, I agree with everything you're saying. What I'm interested in is remarkable genius. My point was that just like no one will ever set a world record the 100m dash at age 40, no one will ever come up with the special theory of relativity out of the blue, or helio-centric theory, or AC current, or the theory of gravity - at 40. Maybe this is wrong, but history seems to bear it out.

[garcia1000]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

Wason designed this when he was 42.

Maybe it is not as big a deal as special theory of relativity, but I think it's pretty big!