[pitchka]

The research on young and successful isn't really showing any causation.

Maybe being young and concentrating on a single thing makes you more obsessed about it? So you end up spending a lot of time on just it.

Maybe the older you get the less obsessed you can be, having the interest spread around on family, work, and other thoughts?

Maybe accumulated knowledge makes you slower at learning and playing because you're more cautious due to the mistakes you made before?

The research showing the decline is really weird. As I've got older I felt I learned stuff much more quickly than when I started college. I know so much that this knowledge allows me to avoid traps. Far sooner I have a feeling of understanding and can demonstrate it to someone else.

If your whole life is oriented on learning and improvement it's weird to think that will slow down.

People, as they age, lose interest in learning and rarely become obsessed about something, for most it is right after highschool, for some after college. No wonder the performance drops and IQ too. No one is using that brain as hard as it was used before.

[EliRivers]

"As I've got older I felt I learned stuff much more quickly than when I started college."

Drifting into a personal monologue, I know I am a lot better at learning now than I was 15 years ago. Learning advanced mathematics now is much easier than it was then (measured in the rather subjective unit of "amount learned / time taken"). Languages also are much easier. The only difference is the amount of time I put in now compared to the amount of time I put in then. If I was in full-time education now (instead of a half hour to an hour a few times a week) I would be yomping through textbooks and courses.

I think some of it is that I just know so much more now, and I've got so much more experience of joining knowledge up and making use of the combined result. I've also got so much more confidence in my ability to learn, and I know that if I'm struggling, grinding through does get results. I don't get demoralised, I don't wonder if I'm ever going to be able to understand it; I just do it.

[jnbiche]

At around 40, I'm now learning things like math quicker, but then I forget them a year later, whereas the things I learned in college I still remember now.

Is this normal, I wonder?

You might say, well, if you're forgetting them a year later then you didn't really learn them, but I disagree. I feel more complete mastery of a subject matter more now than I did in my teens. No, I forget things I learn much more quickly now, and the only way to not forget them is to practice them at least each week, and that rapidly becomes a time sink.

[markism]

This might be as simple as the fact that you're spacing your learning out less. In college you learned things over a span of 15 weeks, giving you many opportunities for spaced repetition, which is one of the most effective methods to make material stick. Now I'm assuming you learn material in much less time than a semester, so there's less repetition and therefore less long term retention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

[jnbiche]

Thanks for this suggestion -- this may well be the cause. Perhaps I'll start trying spaced repetition learning.

[trbvm2]

This is an expected result of a storage system that has finite capacity being tasked with storing a lifetime of useful information.

Research on this topic points to the notion that the brain is pretty actively trying to ignore things and toss out information that is no longer useful. It seems that the heuristic the brain uses to determine what should be kept and what should be discarded is related to how well some new information fits with information already in memory and how often an area of memory is revisited.

If you were tasked with fitting a lifetime of useful information on a 100 petabyte hard drive, how would you go about it? When you inevitably run out of free space, how would you continue to store new information?

http://brainworldmagazine.com/learning-memory-how-do-we-reme... http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s4/chapter07.html

[jlgray]

I agree completely about learning math faster, or maybe easier. My thinking has been that now we have a much better scaffold to construct knowledge on. Calculus, linear algebra, proofs, thinking in arbitrary numbers of dimensions, etc. are all much more ingrained than they were in undergrad, and as a result you don't have to spend as much effort on the details.

I wish I could say I didn't forget things when I was was in university, but I still remember the frustration of coming back from summer vacation and having forgotten half of what we learned last semester.

[lordnacho]

Same here. Machine learning wasn't in vogue when I graduated, but now I'm actually able to help my younger brother through the last courses in college. Quite surprising, because I'd have sworn when I was that age it would take weeks to understand something like Random Forest.

I reckon part of the reason is that when there's no pressure on you, you can explore around a question (how do you classify this particular thing...) rather than try to steer right towards the answer as fast as possible. Which isn't actually as fast as when you read around.

[diogofranco]

That would mean that all the GM's very well documented decline after 35 has to with lack of obsession at that age, which seems a rather strong claim.

Maybe amateurs learning at different ages is a different phenomena than the top competitors decline, but the research showing the decline of professionals is certainly not weird, and probably not even research, since they are easy to lookup facts.

[chongli]

Not all GMs decline immediately after 35. Anand is 46 and still right at the top. His peak rating came at age 41 and he held on to his world champion title until age 43 (when he lost to Carlsen).

[ktRolster]

Viktor Korchnoi gave his expert opinion that most chess grandmasters hit their peak around age 40, maybe a little after. He also tried to analyze what gave various people the drive to work hard enough to become a grandmaster.

Also, Anand would arguably be world champion right now if he had the stamina. His knowledge of the game is probably the deepest of anyone, but he runs out of energy as th game progresses.

[chongli]

That's a fascinating insight about Anand. I wonder if he'd improve by hiring a personal trainer to increase his physical fitness?

[agarden]

Physical fitness is given a lot of attention by players at the very top of chess. Here is a quote from an article that talks a bit about it.

“Anand has been pretty active as well,” says the Bad Sodener Zeitung. “He bought a season ticket for the swimming pool in Bad Soden and swam about 1000 metres per day. He would also run 10km every day and has also been spotted on a bicycle in the beautiful hills around Bad Soden. He lost about six kilos this summer. Most of the time, though, Anand prepared for the match in the Chess Tigers Training Centre with his seconds.”

http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-viswanathan-anand-world...

[ktRolster]

I would really like to see that too. My hypothesis is that he would.

Currently I'm experimenting with my grandma, trying to get her to exercise to improve her cognition!

[danielvf]

Chess, and perhaps Go, might be outliers here, in that both are designed to exceed the human mind's possible ability.

But for everything else, I agree with you. I'm able to learn new skills considerably faster now than in my twenties. Part of that is practice learning, and part of that is having a lot of things to relate any new concept to.

[vkjv]

> ...and part of that is having a lot of things to relate any new concept to.

This is an interesting way to put it that I haven't thought about before. I have found it hard to explain that sometimes new things are easy to learn and sometimes hard.

I usually attribute this to the difficulty of the concept, but maybe it's that I'm not really learning the easy things but finding a very similar concept to relate it to that I already know.