Most aspects of mental processing slow down as we age. While we continue to accumulate knowledge of the world at a slower rate, we gain more experience that increases our wisdom.

Learning Slows Down with Age

Researchers disagree in their hypotheses about how our minds tend to get worse with age. What can be observed is the following:
<ul>
<li>Older individuals do struggle more with Stroop tasks, where an automatic habit needs to be overridden by instructions.</li>
<li>Older individuals have a harder time with multitasking.</li>
<li>Older people find it difficult to bind information that occurs in a combined context. It impacts their ability to remember life events.</li>
</ul>
However, older people seem to be better at emotional regulation.

Our minds tend to grow worse

Some people seem to age mostly with minds intact and others notice dramatic slowdowns. The brain appears to have a lot of redundancy built-in - known as cognitive reserve. 
Education seems to have a protective effect on aging, possibly because education contributes to cognitive reserve.

Cognitive Reserve

Some aspects of cognitive aging can be slowed down with training.
<ul>
<li>To prevent cognitive decline, exercise and eat well while you're younger. </li>
<li>Learn more in the early years, and continue learning throughout your lifetime.</li>
<li>Avoid multitasking or environments with distractors.</li>
<li>Be more strategic with cues and reminders for important information.</li>
<li>Be deliberate in organizing the information you want to learn.</li>
</ul>

Reducing the Impact of Cognitive Decline

<div>
As you get older, learning often feels harder than it used to. Why is that? What changes in the brain as we age that makes acquiring new information harder? Is there anything we can do to avoid our minds slowing down?
This is a topic I've been asked about a lot, but until recently one that I didn't know much about. Aging wasn't a topic I spent much time researching in my book, preferring to focus on principles of learning that are universal.
Recently, however, I decided to dig into some of the research on cognitive aging to see how our learning is impacted by getting older.
<h2>Learning Slows with Age</h2>
<figure><img src="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/graph-of-decline.png"></figure>
Interestingly, not all aspects of thinking get worse with age. Accumulated knowledge of the world increases until nearly the end of our lives, as you can see in the figure above with vocabulary size.
This is a trade-off between what researchers call fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Even if our minds slow down as we get older, we accumulate more experience. We know more as we age, even if we're slower at learning and processing new information. Wisdom increases even as wit declines.
<h2>What Gets Worse With Age?</h2>
Other researchers disagree, arguing that aging impacts some brain areas more severely than others, resulting in specific deficits of cognition rather than an overall decline.
Researchers Todd Braver and Robert West argue for a goal maintenance account of cognitive aging. Following the frontal aging hypothesis, this suggests that what is harder to do as you get older is to maintain and switch the goals associated with a task. This results in older individuals struggling more with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect">Stroop tasks</a>, where an automatic habit needs to be overridden by instructions:
<figure><img src="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/stroop.png"></figure>
<figure><img src="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/binding.png"></figure>
<h2>Do Different People Experience Decline Differently?</h2>
Do all people experience cognitive decline uniformly? Or do some people's minds slip while others stay sharp much longer? 
<figure><img src="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/graph-of-variability-of-decline-1024x790.png"><figcaption>The lefthand graphs show decline of cognitive function, while righthand graphs show the variability. At least according to this study, variability doesn't show dramatic increases with age.</figcaption></figure>
This review, in contrast, seems to differ. The authors argue that variance increases with age, which goes with our normal intuition that some people seem to experience large declines in thinking with time while others fair much better. This seems to match up with other evidence that most factors associated with aging experience <a href="https://youtu.be/0NM7cSc26bA?list=PLLbr-B8cNbo7qigzS2ZDbDVpvjX26tGJ4&amp;t=309">increasing variability over time</a>.
<h2>Redundancy and Cognitive Decline</h2>
One reason for the observation that some people seem to age mostly with minds intact and others notice dramatic slowdowns may be that the brain has a lot of redundancy built in. On a physical level, brain volume may be declining, but that this may not create noticeable difficulties for some time.
<figure><img src="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/cog-reserve.png"></figure>
<h2>How Can Older People Reduce the Impact of Cognitive Decline?</h2>
However, the situation doesn't seem to be completely without hope either. There do seem to be some things you can do to help your mental functioning.
The second is to strategically control your environment to minimize the specific difficulties associated with aging. In particular, you should:

<ol>
	<li>
Avoid multitasking or environments with likely distractors. Since goal maintenance seems to be a central problem of aging, it means the older you are the more you benefit from an environment that allows your mind to focus on the problem at hand.</li>
	<li>
Be more strategic with creating cues and reminders for important information. Proactive memory, where you set the intention to recall something later, given a specific prompt, is particularly affected by aging. This suggests engineering your environment to remind you of your goals and tasks is more important as one ages.</li>
	<li>
Be more explicit in organizing what you want to learn. Binding pieces of information together to be recalled as a single chunk can happen both automatically and deliberately. Since binding is harder with age, it may make more sense to be deliberate about organizing information you want to learn.</li>
</ol>

A third idea relates to how you might allocate your learning throughout your entire lifetime. Since fluid intelligence and complex working memory peak in early adulthood, this suggests that time might be the best for learning skills where those are more important, such as mathematics. 
In contrast, for subjects that require mostly accumulated knowledge and build off of past habits of thinking, age may be an asset rather than a liability. History and law, for instance, may benefit more from this accumulated wisdom and be more amenable to improvements later in life.
The idea that our minds change as we age, and thus change the relative ease of learning certain subjects shouldn't be viewed fatalistically. Obviously, learning history when you're fifteen or calculus when you're fifty are both great. But understanding how age selectively impacts cognition can also help us to minimize the downsides of decline.
</div>

As you get older, learning often feels harder than it used to. Why is that? What changes in the brain as we age that makes acquiring new information harder? Is there anything we can do to avoid our minds slowing down? This is a topic I've been asked about a lot, but until recently one ...

How Does Age Change How You Learn? | Scott H Young

Learning Slows Down with Age

Our minds tend to grow worse

Cognitive Reserve

Reducing the Impact of Cognitive Decline

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