[dluan]

I feel like now that I'm older, my brain just can't fully understand it say as quickly if I were younger. Makes me wonder if younger more plastic brains can adjust to having to juggle more dimensions than crochety old ones like mine with very rigid 3D grooves baked in. Or brains from other animals.

I guess taken to the logical extreme, what does the brain of someone/thing that's good at playing this (or any game of N dimensions) look like?

[ConceptJunkie]

I feel the opposite. I'm 61 and I feel like I understand ideas more quickly than I ever did before, so much so that I'm surprised at how shallowly I thought about some things in the past.

While there is definitely something to the plasticity of young brains, for example in language acquisition, or the fact that the Fields Medal eligibility ages out at 40, I believe it's not a linear thing and not a one-way thing.

[fredrikholm]

If you don't mind me asking, how old are you, and how did this progress? I'm in my mid thirties and am noticing some minor deterioration, but I'm writing it off to loss of sleep due to having small kids.

My curiosity is if this is like you suggest, ingrained patterns, or if there is actual slow down with age. I hear different opinions and am finding it difficult to navigate as I deal with my own, albeit mild, aging.

[dluan]

Mid 30s, also have kid and sleep loss but not as bad as before.

I actually noticed serious mental decline when I was burned out in my late 20s. There were real physical symptoms like not being able to look at a text editor for more than 2 minutes. Post recovery of that, I actually feel like my brain recovered a lot once I started learning languages very seriously (mandarin and japanese), starting a few years ago. Brain feels healthy now but I'm acutely aware of where it's not as sharp as before. Playing around with this felt a little like when my brain is trying to build a new grammar dictionary.