New Year's Eve is a time for reflection about the last year and a time for considering goals for the future. Taking on new challenges is easy when you're young: learn Spanish, learn to paint.
However, even older people can take up learning a new skill. The premise that there is a critical period in life after which you can't do certain things, such as learning a language or an instrument, is far weaker than first suspected.

Anyone can learn a new skill

<ul><li>Barns owls have been evidence of critical periods. Young owls could quickly adapt when their perception of the world was distorted with a prism. Older owls couldn't. Years later, a neuroscientist found that you could indeed teach an older owl by breaking up the task into small pieces.</li><li>In another human study, the visual disorder Amblyopia, called "lazy eye" were used. The advice was that you could only treat a child by wearing an eye patch over the good eye to strengthen the weak one. However, a later study showed that the method also worked on subjects as old as sixty-one.</li></ul>

The myth of critical periods keep people from trying

Learning about music can help you advance in other things, like language skills and improved hearing, and in ways that can last for decades. Music training can help the brain to notice the elements of sound and increase verbal intelligence. A New Year's resolution shouldn't be at becoming great at something but at becoming better or happier.

Unexpected benefits

<picture class="ResponsiveImagePicture-jIKgcS fArnhQ ContentHeaderContributorImage-fUiPmb dXPcEf responsive-image"><source media="(max-width: 767px)" srcset="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097b861c7a8e33fb39021e/1:1/w_120, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-gary.png 120w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097b861c7a8e33fb39021e/1:1/w_240, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-gary.png 240w" sizes="66px"><source media="(min-width: 768px)" srcset="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097b861c7a8e33fb39021e/1:1/w_120, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-gary.png 120w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097b861c7a8e33fb39021e/1:1/w_240, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-gary.png 240w" sizes="66px"><img alt="" src="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59097b861c7a8e33fb39021e/1:1/w_270%2Cc_limit/marcus-gary.png" width="48" height="48"></picture><div><time data-testid="ContentHeaderPublishDate">December 20, 2012</time></div><figure><picture class="ResponsiveImagePicture-jIKgcS fJlKfN AssetEmbedResponsiveAsset-eqsnW ehcXJi asset-embed__responsive-asset responsive-image responsive-image--expandable" style=""><img alt="Happy New Year Pick Up a New Skill" src="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg" srcset="https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_120, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 120w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_240, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 240w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_320, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 320w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_640, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 640w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_960, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 960w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_1280, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 1280w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_1600, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 1600w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_1920, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 1920w, https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095288019dfc3494e9df31/master/w_2240, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/c_limit/marcus-new-things.jpg 2240w" width="169" height="112"></picture></figure>New Year’s Eve is a time for reflection about the year that passed and a time to set goals for the future. Should we keep doing what are we doing, or should we tackle new challenges? If you’re seven, or twelve, or twenty, it’s easy to think about new ambitions: learn Spanish, learn to paint, do a flip off your skateboard. But what if you’re older?For me, much of the past year revolved around discussions prompted by a book of mine that was published in January, called “Guitar Zero,” about the science of learning and my own adventures in learning guitar at the age of forty. The basic premise was that the scientific evidence for a widespread view called the “critical-period effect” was far weaker than widely supposed.The critical-period effect is the idea that you can’t do certain things—like learn a language, or learn an instrument—unless you start early in life. It’s a discouraging thought for anyone past adolescence. But, recently, the evidence for this idea had started to unwind. Barn owls have, for years, been a model illustration of critical periods. Young barn owls could readily adapt to a kind of virtual-reality experiment in which a prism distorted their perception of the world; older owls couldn’t. Or so the textbooks all say. But Brian Knudsen, a neuroscientist at Stanford, kept probing and found that there was, in fact, a simple way of teaching old owls new tricks: by breaking up a difficult job into small, bite-size pieces. Old owls couldn’t learn as fast as young owls, but they could come a long way if <a data-offer-url="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v419/n6904/abs/nature01002.html" data-event-click="{&quot;element&quot;:&quot;ExternalLink&quot;,&quot;outgoingURL&quot;:&quot;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v419/n6904/abs/nature01002.html&quot;}" href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v419/n6904/abs/nature01002.html" rel="nofollow noopener" dir="ltr">they took things incrementally</a>, rather than all in one bite. I fancied myself as an adult owl and did the best I could to tackle the guitar bit-a-bit, keeping my expectations low and my persistence high.While I was writing, I imagined that I was alone in my quest; the conceit was that I was going to practice for ten thousand hours, because nobody else my age would ever be willing to invest that kind of time. But in the past year, I’ve been deluged with e-mails from other adult learners. A journalist wrote to say that her seventy-six-year-old father had learned the guitar late in life, and had just told her that he was starting a band with his friends called “The Three Grandfathers.” In Portland I met (and jammed with) Rick King, an engineer who was keeping an Excel spreadsheet tracking every hour of his practice, having returned to the guitar in his sixties after surviving a heart attack. Looking back, it was silly to think that there was anything unique about what I was doing.The central premise, however, turned out to be more right than I imagined: the suggestive evidence that I saw from the studies on barn owls was taken to a new level in human studies. Consider, for example, amblyopia, another long-standing example in the literature on critical periods. Amblyopia is a visual disorder in which the two eyes don’t properly align; sometimes it’s called “lazy eye.” The standard medical advice is to treat your child early, by getting them to wear an eye patch over the good eye (in order to strengthen the weak one). If you don’t treat the problem early, you can just forget about ever fixing it. Just after my book went to press, however, Dennis Levi, the dean of the School of Optometry at Berkeley, conducted a brilliantly simple study that was easy to conduct, yet would have seemed like a waste of time to anybody steeped in critical-period dogma. Levi and his collaborator stuck eye patches on the good eye of adult amblyopics, aged fifteen to sixty-one, whom everyone else had written off on the presumption that they could not learn anything new. He then set his subjects down at a video game—a first person shooter called Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, to be exact—and told them to have fun. Levi found that his subjects got better at virtually every aspect of visual perception he could measure. It wasn’t that it was too late for adults to overcome amblyopia, it was that the myth of critical periods had kept people from trying.Video From The New Yorker

Whether your dream is to play piano, cook steak sous-vide, or finally learn to speak French, the lesson from all this new research is clear: there is no …

Stashed ideas

New Year’s Eve is a time for reflection about the year that passed and a time to set goals for the future. Should we keep doing what are we doing, or should we tackle new challenges? If you’re seven, or twelve, or twenty, it’s easy to think about new ambitions: learn Spanish, learn to paint, do a flip off your skateboard. But what if you’re older?

For me, much of the past year revolved around discussions prompted by a book of mine that was published in January, called “Guitar Zero,” about the science of learning and my own adventures in learning guitar at the age of forty. The basic premise was that the scientific evidence for a widespread view called the “critical-period effect” was far weaker than widely supposed.

The critical-period effect is the idea that you can’t do certain things—like learn a language, or learn an instrument—unless you start early in life. It’s a discouraging thought for anyone past adolescence. But, recently, the evidence for this idea had started to unwind. Barn owls have, for years, been a model illustration of critical periods. Young barn owls could readily adapt to a kind of virtual-reality experiment in which a prism distorted their perception of the world; older owls couldn’t. Or so the textbooks all say. But Brian Knudsen, a neuroscientist at Stanford, kept probing and found that there was, in fact, a simple way of teaching old owls new tricks: by breaking up a difficult job into small, bite-size pieces. Old owls couldn’t learn as fast as young owls, but they could come a long way if <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v419/n6904/abs/nature01002.html">they took things incrementally </a>, rather than all in one bite. I fancied myself as an adult owl and did the best I could to tackle the guitar bit-a-bit, keeping my expectations low and my persistence high.

While I was writing, I imagined that I was alone in my quest; the conceit was that I was going to practice for ten thousand hours, because nobody else my age would ever be willing to invest that kind of time. But in the past year, I’ve been deluged with e-mails from other adult learners. A journalist wrote to say that her seventy-six-year-old father had learned the guitar late in life, and had just told her that he was starting a band with his friends called “The Three Grandfathers.” In Portland I met (and jammed with) Rick King, an engineer who was keeping an Excel spreadsheet tracking every hour of his practice, having returned to the guitar in his sixties after surviving a heart attack. Looking back, it was silly to think that there was anything unique about what I was doing.

The central premise, however, turned out to be more right than I imagined: the suggestive evidence that I saw from the studies on barn owls was taken to a new level in human studies. Consider, for example, amblyopia, another long-standing example in the literature on critical periods. Amblyopia is a visual disorder in which the two eyes don’t properly align; sometimes it’s called “lazy eye.” The standard medical advice is to treat your child early, by getting them to wear an eye patch over the good eye (in order to strengthen the weak one). If you don’t treat the problem early, you can just forget about ever fixing it. Just after my book went to press, however, Dennis Levi, the dean of the School of Optometry at Berkeley, conducted a brilliantly simple study that was easy to conduct, yet would have seemed like a waste of time to anybody steeped in critical-period dogma. Levi and his collaborator stuck eye patches on the good eye of adult amblyopics, aged fifteen to sixty-one, whom everyone else had written off on the presumption that they could not learn anything new. He then set his subjects down at a video game —a first person shooter called Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, to be exact—and told them to have fun. Levi found that his subjects got better at virtually every aspect of visual perception he could measure. It wasn’t that it was too late for adults to overcome amblyopia, it was that the myth of critical periods had kept people from trying.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Happy New Year: Pick Up a New Skill

Anyone can learn a new skill

The myth of critical periods keep people from trying

Unexpected benefits

IDEAS ABOUT

MORE LIKE THIS

At What Age Does Our Ability to Learn a New Language Like a Native Speaker Disappear?

How to start making music | Psyche Guides

How to Learn Anything: A real-world guide to mastering any new skill

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Happy New Year: Pick Up a New Skill

Anyone can learn a new skill

The myth of critical periods keep people from trying

Unexpected benefits

IDEAS ABOUT

MORE LIKE THIS

At What Age Does Our Ability to Learn a New Language Like a Native Speaker Disappear?

How to start making music | Psyche Guides

How to Learn Anything: A real-world guide to mastering any new skill

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career