[sebastianconcpt]

It's a great question but things have a price. You might hack and win that raised plasticity but you might compromise your memory.

Natural Selection put there a decay in brain's plasticity for a really good and time proven reason.

This is just an hypothesis: the decay in brain plasticity diminishes neophilia and raises neophobia to preserve culture's identity. The new generation attacks the current one with tides of its own new cool and the old resists with conservative trenches of realism. Over and over.

[ugexe]

Its a stretch to say natural selection put decay in the brain for a good reason. Not every trait was the result of positive or negative selection. Traits can occur as side effects of another trait (of another trait etc etc) that was positive or negatively selected.

If a new, sub optimal trait does not negatively affect the specimens ability to reproduce then there is no reason to try and select against it. Such a circumstance would not imply the trait was positively selected for.

[meowface]

It's a major fallacy to assume that evolution is somehow perfect. You might be right, but there could be hundreds of potential causes for the reduction in plasticity which do not actually involve protecting you from impairment.

As for your hypothesis, I think acceptance of norms and political beliefs is a process independent of neuroplasticity, which usually involves acquiring specific skills and talents; I might be wrong, but I think even a very "neuroplastic" elderly person may still have great difficulty changing political or cultural views.

[ivanca]

Natural selection favors _survival_, not _well being_, for example many of us will die of aging but is also arguably one of worst ways to die. So maybe the lack of plasticity is just another form of progressive decay.