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Old People Can Produce As Many New Brain Cells As Teenagers (independent.co.uk)
Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shares this article about a newly-published study which counters previous theories that neurons stop developing after adolescence:
Healthy men and women continue to produce new neurons throughout life, suggesting older people remain more cognitively and emotionally intact than previously believed, researchers found. For decades it was thought that adult brains were hard-wired and unable to form new cells. But a Columbia University study found older people continued to produce neurons in the hippocampus -- a part of the brain important for memory, emotion and cognition -- at a similar rate to young people....
However, the researchers also noted fewer blood vessels and connections between cells in the older brains, which Ms Boldrini said "may be linked to compromised cognitive-emotional resilience" in the elderly.
The article suggests these newest findings may be hotly debated.
"They come just a month after a University of California study suggested adults do not develop new neurons."
However, the researchers also noted fewer blood vessels and connections between cells in the older brains, which Ms Boldrini said "may be linked to compromised cognitive-emotional resilience" in the elderly.
The article suggests these newest findings may be hotly debated.
"They come just a month after a University of California study suggested adults do not develop new neurons."
Just don't want to.
Have gnu, will travel.
Of course we can produce new brain cells. We just forget where we placed them... Now get off my lawn!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We already know everything about the brain. That's why we have AI.
No one has said anything of the sort. Weak trolling is weak.
It won't even fit inside my skull! I call the external part of my brain "the internet". Seriously, we all use the internet as an extension of our brains. There's no need memorizing so much stuff when you have nearly the whole knowledge and wisdom of the world at your fingertips.
I prefer to use my "internal storage" for personal memories. That's nearly 66 years of friends, family, parties, relationships, neighbors, holidays, and the like. I still do math problems in my head just to keep the CPU in shape. Emotionally I'm about the same as I was long ago; just a little bit slower to anger, but that's all.
> Why can a child learn a new language easily while older brains can't?
Stephen Pinker hypothesizes in The Language Instinct that certain brain structures develop in childhood which are dedicated to learning language and understanding how to use it, and after the child internalizes his/her native language, these structures are repurposed for more abstract thinking.
I don't know if that's been supported by any science, though.
because it was soooo settled that nobody disagreed at all... yet here we are.
"His name was James Damore."
But, I thought "science is settled" and 97% of scientists agree?
Science never settles, it is only ever temporarily resident. That's why when the laws change it has to move.
I mean, how many old people do you know that can still produce teenagers? Unless they already have them chained up in their basement or something.
Why can a child learn a new language easily while older brains can't?
Because several stages of language acquisition (such a going from emitting a broad range of phonemes to just the "correct", and "correctly pronounced" phoneme set of the first language) seem to work by keeping the relevant neurons alive while the irrelevant ones die off.
Before the end of each "critical period" for some particular aspect of the language, a child's brain is a language learning engine. After, learning that aspect of some language is like recovering from a stroke. An exception is that people who learn TWO or more languages before the relevant critical periods end (along with how to keep them sorted out) seem able to acquire more in later life without the difficulties of those who learned (no more than) one.
Or at least that was the theory back in the early 1970s, when I took a "Psych of Language Acquisition" course as a distribution elective - in the same semester as a German class for the degree's language requirement - hoping to get some tips that might help with the language class. Instead I ended up sabotaging myself, having to go straight from the class claiming I couldn't possibly learn a new language (where I had to BELIEVE it to regurgitate what was wanted on tests in a timely fashion), directly to the class where I had to do the thing it was claimed was impossible. B-b
Presuming this model (or something like it) is true: "Bilingual Education" - i.e. teaching immigrant kids in their native language until they're past those critical periods, rather than throwing them into English immersion classes while they're still language-flexible - looks more like a way to make them into members of a lifelong underclass than to help them learn. It curses them with an accent that they can't get rid of and impedes their learning of the language necessary for success in higher education and employment.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The idea that a child can learn a new language faster than an adult or even old person: is just a myth.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Frankly, nobody has any evidence you're even from the US, you don't speak English particularly well
Why would anyone need such evidence? Has Slashdot suddenly become restricted to US citizens?
And I'm confused. Surely not speaking English particularly well would be evidence that a person is a US citizen.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The saying in biology is "use it or lose it". Older brains are just out of practice.
Because they have been thinking, learning and solving problems for over 50 years - is that your argument?
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Old people brains show signs of "compromised cognitive-emotional resilience", or as it's otherwise known "becoming immune to the world".
No doubt because they have learned enough about the world to understand how terrifying and irrational it can be.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Citation?
Science finds us something new every day.
There are thousands ... which one do you want, if you are so lazy to look for yourself?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
An interesting thing happened when AI researchers first developed neural nets. They were great at learning how to do new things, but if you let them learn for too long they'd become "set in their ways" and unable to adapt to slight deviations in the data they were receiving. So the trick became to pick a good time to freeze the neural net's learning. Too early and the neural net wasn't as effective as it could be. Too late and it was too inflexible and began excluding answers which were right but not quite exact. You had to freeze its learning and development at just the right moment to maximize effectiveness while minimizing inflexibility. Once frozen, it could be reproduced in hardware, like the Xbox's Kinect sensor. No more learning, but its effectiveness was pretty much optimal for the hardware.
Why can a child learn a new language easily while older brains can't?
Says who, exactly?
Of course you can. It may not be quite as easy but you can. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either a liar or a fool.
For instance too many people still believe that someone over, say, 40 years of age "can't build muscle" and "can't be physically fit" and "can't lose weight and will just get fat and stay fat" but that's all been disproven over and over again whether anyone wants to believe it or not -- it just requires you to be willing to do the work and suffer through the training to attain a level of fitness, lose excess weight, and so on. Furthermore this myth is perpetuated by older people who are inherently lazy to begin with, who use age as an excuse to not make the effort -- and in the process, become "crabs in a bucket" to their peers as often as not, not wanting others in their age group to better themselves, so making them look bad in the process.
So it logically follows that your brain, being just more protoplasm like the rest of your body, follows the "use it or lose it" rule: if you don't challenge your brain, keep learning new things, keep thinking, and just let it sit there being useless, of course it'll just rot away to nothing.
Also: since the rest of the systems of your body are in essence the support system for your brain, keeping the rest of your body physically fit as a lifestyle will enable your brain to function at a higher level of efficiency -- much as the featured article alludes to:
However, the researchers also noted fewer blood vessels and connections between cells in the older brains, which Ms Boldrini said "may be linked to compromised cognitive-emotional resilience" in the elderly.
Keep the support mechanisms in good working order, and your brain will likely be in better shape as you age.
;-)
Better get on that treadmill, or bike, and get into the weight room a few days a week, folks.
The day before Dad died of the effects of dementia, he was very lucid and philosophical even though he could barely control his motor functions to speak, move his head, could move one hand only slightly or any other body control. It was difficult to hear what he said, but not for his lack of trying.
Go well
The purpose of the citation is to see what you choose, so we can laugh at you when it says something else.
A person who independently checks will just find out you're full of shit; children do learn languages faster. Much faster.
I don't doubt you read about a study, and that the study says what the study says. The part that is obvious bullshit is your broad phrasing.
The closest you'll get to something that supports your claim is stuff based on brain scans, rather than actual learning, that suggests that the reasons children are better at learning language are not based on the traditional ideas about brain structure. It could still be caused by other differences in the brain, by hormonal differences that don't change the brain scan but do affect learning, or environmental factors.
But your claim is so completely opposite to the results of studies that it stands out as a potential source of humor if we can get you to attempt to cite the study that you thought said what you said.
Children only learn faster. Your mistake is in making a false dichotomy between "can ... easy" and "can't."
People of any age can learn a new language; if learning a new language was easy when you were a teenager, it will still be easy when you're middle aged. It will just take you longer. OTOH, your life experience will enrich your enjoyment of your new language skills, so it shouldn't actually seem that much harder to you.
Adults who have a really hard time learning a new language probably suck at language generally; they probably have poor grammatical skills in their native language, and struggled in language-related classes in school.
But definitely, if you're educating children in a different language than they'll need to have financial success as an adult, they will have reduced financial success as an adult.
The age difference is in speed, not ability.
Because they haven't been, they've just been saying that they have been. Really, they just spew whatever words they think they remember, or whatever colloquialism their social group considers a Virtuous response to the situation.
Just find out what they have strong feeling about, where they claim to have some "ideas," and take the exact same situation but with the labels removed, and where the subject and object are reversed compared to their bias, and most people will consistently spew the same pattern of speech that they used when the subject matched the reference scenario that their social group uses.
It is rather uncommon to encounter an adult that actually thinks about anything; more often they merely reminisce and virtual signal. Children are more likely to actually think about something, because they get less value from reminiscing, and they're less likely to know what the Virtuous answer is.
The question was not if a child learns a language faster (which it actually does not, it takes about 3 years to be considered fluent, and the first year they barely speak) but the claim that older people learn slower.
Language learning in school is slow because (at last when I was in school) the teaching methods are wrong.
If you use a modern language teaching method, you are half fluent in 3 month and fluent in 6 ... even if you learn japanese or chinese with their pictogram characters, you easy learn about 800 pictograms in 6 month, and a highschool graduate in japan is supposed to know about 1100.
Perhaps you want to cite a study first that supports your claim :D then we can laugh at the date of the study ... The idea that children learn faster "for some reason" is outdated since 30 years, if not longer.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Few adult learners of languages are fluent, and almost none get to the same level in a language that native speakers of that language do, regardless of the teaching method. It's also the case that children learn their first (and sometimes second, if they grow up in a bilingual environment) almost automatically, without being taught; whereas very few adults can learn a language (well or otherwise) that way.
BTW, I'm talking about spoken languages. Learning to read--whether it's Chinese writing or otherwise--is not "language learning" per se, although it may have some resemblance.
Yes, you reiterate the "common knowledge".
That does not make it true.
If you crash land in China, and get picked up by natives: three years later you speak chinese. There are thousands of documented cases of that. Albeit, always in medieval times, when language learning was so much easier :D
In historic times it was common for travelers/traders to speak half a dozen languages. They picked them up traveling ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You want evidence? Try this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
I'm assuming your para about thousands of people learning Chinese in three years is a joke. I believe there are also documented cases in medieval times of Krakens and Griffins and Basilisks, oh my...
And yes, people can pick up a half dozen languages. If you add together the languages I've learned (and mostly forgotten), you could come up with a number like that: Spanish, German, Tzeltal, Shuar, French, Italian (plus of course English). (It helps that all but two are related, and three are closely related.) I suppose if I put them to use on a frequent basis, I might not have forgotten so much. But I would never have passed for a native speaker in any but English.
As I said before: this is just a "stupid" reiteration of "common knowledge", which is wrong.
Just like the "common knowledge" that brain cells don't regrow or other neurons.
That the later "fact" is wrong is quite often a topic on /.
The former fact is quite often in news sites, too. Language learning is easy, there is no special skill yo have a s child that gets lost when you grow up. A no brainier actually. How and why would that evolutionary work? Or biologically work? Some dead switch switching off a primary skill of every intelligent species (yes, I count dogs, ravens etc.) at a random young age? What purpose would that have in evolution?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.