Happy New Year: Pick Up a New Skill

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.

• 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.
• 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.