What do you think results from brain ageing? I don’t think what I mention results (mainly) from brain ageing (I’m not disputing it also affects it).
For example, when you learn something, you can learn the newest theory or an older one with more or less the same ease. Once you have learned it, updating it is hard. So people who have learned older/worse stuff, have to spend energy to update. That’s not related to brain ageing. Really engaging to a deep level with a new idea/theory when you already have one that is valid/working is something we are not inclined to do and usually we need to spend a lot of mental energy for that. Changing a routine is similarly difficult, one has to actively work on that. Our ability to do such things is limited. Almost nobody outside this community is constantly pushing to find out “the truth”. And, in addition, one must realise that a particular routine/habit/tradition/theory is outdated before trying to update it. Unless the rate of change is severely decreased (a much more “~conservative” society), this is very much a red queen race. Trying to keep the pace of change would be overwhelming.
Most people will have a hard time to learn a language at native-speaker level if they start to learn it after ~10; to fully learn the grammar it becomes harder after ~18. I don’t think that’s curable ([edit] in the context of brain ageing, increasing brain capacity would be something separate); I don’t think a society with teenager or pre-teenager brains would be successful. Our brains cannot be arbitrarily malleable and this implies some resistance to change once a valuable neuronal connection is made.
In addition, our brains are finite. So, one advantage of infinitely long lives, which could counter those effects, is finite. It could be argued that the limit is typically far away; I could not argue neither for or against it right now, I don’t have a sense of where this limit would be if we manage to keep our brains healthy. Is there any sound theory about this?
What you said is results of brain aging. I hope it will be cured.
What do you think results from brain ageing? I don’t think what I mention results (mainly) from brain ageing (I’m not disputing it also affects it).
For example, when you learn something, you can learn the newest theory or an older one with more or less the same ease. Once you have learned it, updating it is hard. So people who have learned older/worse stuff, have to spend energy to update. That’s not related to brain ageing. Really engaging to a deep level with a new idea/theory when you already have one that is valid/working is something we are not inclined to do and usually we need to spend a lot of mental energy for that. Changing a routine is similarly difficult, one has to actively work on that. Our ability to do such things is limited. Almost nobody outside this community is constantly pushing to find out “the truth”. And, in addition, one must realise that a particular routine/habit/tradition/theory is outdated before trying to update it. Unless the rate of change is severely decreased (a much more “~conservative” society), this is very much a red queen race. Trying to keep the pace of change would be overwhelming.
Most people will have a hard time to learn a language at native-speaker level if they start to learn it after ~10; to fully learn the grammar it becomes harder after ~18. I don’t think that’s curable ([edit] in the context of brain ageing, increasing brain capacity would be something separate); I don’t think a society with teenager or pre-teenager brains would be successful. Our brains cannot be arbitrarily malleable and this implies some resistance to change once a valuable neuronal connection is made.
In addition, our brains are finite. So, one advantage of infinitely long lives, which could counter those effects, is finite. It could be argued that the limit is typically far away; I could not argue neither for or against it right now, I don’t have a sense of where this limit would be if we manage to keep our brains healthy. Is there any sound theory about this?