*neural pathways
Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
41–50 of 56 posts
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#42I'm always amazed how we don't look at our diets before resorting to drugs to treat conditions. What you eat has the largest effect on your brain chemistry.
I thoroughly agree with the second sentence but by putting it together with the first, it's as though you're claiming we can treat medical conditions just by changing diets (which I disagree with -- but I don't think you deserve the downvotes you seem to be getting). What you eat absolutely affects brain chemistry. Eg friends of mine in grad school were studying depression via tryptophan depletion. They'd give volunt…
>What you eat absolutely affects brain chemistry. Eg friends of mine in grad school were studying depression via tryptophan depletion. They'd give volunteers a homemade protein drink which would reliably knock down serotonin levels. In other words, a milkshake that made you depressed. No drugs required.
They tried to induce depression? That's prison camp science, do your friends study at the Josef Mengele memorial faculty of Medicine?
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm having a hard time sourcing either side of the argument, but kids learn a ton of shit. an adult learning a language has the benefit of both abstract and pragmatic knowledge of language, having spoken at least one for some time. they don't need to spend time learning, for example, how to move their tongue to make different noises. an adult learning a language also has the benefit of being able to read, or listen,…
On the other hand, children have little else to do but absorb new information and they take a good number of years doing it. Adults have a load of responsibilities that they have to occupy their minds with. Compared to the carefree oblivion of childhood I think it is remarkable that adults can learn anything new at all. There does seem to be a lack of research that attempts to correct for this, or at least I can't fi…
Do all kids really have such vast amounts of free time in their childhood, or is that heavily dependent on the culture? I can imagine that a lot of kids have had to work and take on responsibilities at a very young age (though I don't know if they had to do that at the so-called sponge brain age).
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thoroughly agree with the second sentence but by putting it together with the first, it's as though you're claiming we can treat medical conditions just by changing diets (which I disagree with -- but I don't think you deserve the downvotes you seem to be getting). What you eat absolutely affects brain chemistry. Eg friends of mine in grad school were studying depression via tryptophan depletion. They'd give volunt…
>What you eat absolutely affects brain chemistry. Eg friends of mine in grad school were studying depression via tryptophan depletion. They'd give volunteers a homemade protein drink which would reliably knock down serotonin levels. In other words, a milkshake that made you depressed. No drugs required. They tried to induce depression? That's prison camp science, do your friends study at the Josef Mengele memorial fa…
No, they're at the University of Cambridge, working with volunteers who've provided informed consent as part of an ethically approved study. An example of one of the papers is below [1]. The serotonin reduction I'm referring to is temporary.
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#45> children younger than about 7 can pick up new skills, like language and music, much faster than adults can. I don't think this is true. I think a determined adult learns faster.
Children absorb knowledge from their environment fast, adults do goal directed learning faster. Children's brains are just more plastic. They pick things up better than adults.
That said I'm not sure there are any cases besides languages where adults don't crush children. Their superiority is best illustrated by the incredible rarity of L2 speakers who won't be obvious after 10 minutes by grammar or syntax slips or the unicorns who can do that and have native accents.
My favourite data point on children's superiority over adults at language learning is the list with one member.
Adult Learners of English Who Wrote a Classic Work of Literature in it.[a]
Joseph Conrad
[a] Nabokov grew up with English governesses and could read it before he could read Russian.
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, children have little else to do but absorb new information and they take a good number of years doing it. Adults have a load of responsibilities that they have to occupy their minds with. Compared to the carefree oblivion of childhood I think it is remarkable that adults can learn anything new at all. There does seem to be a lack of research that attempts to correct for this, or at least I can't fi…
Do all kids really have such vast amounts of free time in their childhood, or is that heavily dependent on the culture? I can imagine that a lot of kids have had to work and take on responsibilities at a very young age (though I don't know if they had to do that at the so-called sponge brain age).
Unless you've found some telepaths all children learn language by constant massive exposure. Outside of multilingual societies it'll all be in the same language too. Modern hunyer-gatherers spend ~4 hours a day doing what we'd recognise as work and this is after agricultural civilisation took all the good land. Civilisation is evolutionarily very recent. And humans have extremely long childhood period to learn probably.
Don't confuse schooling with education/learning.
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#47> children younger than about 7 can pick up new skills, like language and music, much faster than adults can. I don't think this is true. I think a determined adult learns faster.
Children are phenomenal and unparalleled Multi-tasked learners. Kids learn more things than most of us even comprehend need to be learned.
However the reason I doubt the long term effectiveness of trying to recreate this state of learning - it would likely be highly effective if your boss said "we've got an opening in Japan, want it?" Being able to learn language like a child would be advantageous, body language for instance being from the UK living in North America my first reaction when someone says "peace out" and gives me the V I get an adrenaline surge because to me they just gave me a bigger insult than flipping me the bird. However I remember very little of my childhood or the things I learnt.
I remember a lot >10ya but very little <10. I have no problem with learning as an adult, I can learn a large amount of information on diverse subjects and not really try to retain it. There is no issue with learning, it's an issue with focus because the things I'm learning aren't as easy and it's easier to just not do it and no one but myself is going to punish me for not learning.
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
My counter hypothesis is that children can't possibly conceive the amount of information an adult has to keep track of day to day. What if we distinguish first language acquisition as a special process? If you don't acquire a language in the first place then you have no framework for formal learning. A better comparison might be second language acquisition in children and adults (see my post about FLA/SLA above). May…
The difference between kids' learning and adult learning is the timeframe of the events that can be stored into long-term memory. Kids can learn very short term things, adults cannot.
Our brains work by modelling the future, then picking a desirable choice of actions to change that future. What changes when we get older is how far out we model the future. In babies it's tenths of a second up to less than half a minute (in foetuses it's a few milliseconds up to dozens of milliseconds). In adults it's a few minutes to a few months. Everything that gets bypassed by the short time horizon is frozen in place (and is critical for survival, e.g. making your heart beat is one such frozen circuit)
For example, walking (and especially running) requires very short feedback loops in your brain. If you don't learn how to do it as a kid (yes, sadly that does happen) you will never be able to do it well. Language is another example where you need to learn short feedback loops. This means that language learning in kids is fundamentally different from adult language learning.
Kids learn a language. Meaning they learn to express their thoughts in that language. There is no level below that language, and they start thinking like that language thinks. Adults learn how to express one language by using another language and express their thoughts and thinking in the original language, and then translate. This can become really fast, but for example you notice the difference in the number of nuances someone can express if they learnt a language as kids versus if they learnt the language as an adult. For example, what is the difference in certainty of "I think I heard him say that X" versus "I thought I heard him say that X". You will notice that native speakers are sure to have an opinion on the matter.
This has reverse consequences as well. Kids' brains only take a very limited future time frame into account, meaning they will never really understand why you do something that will take weeks or months to produce a reward, or why you avoid doing something because it means bad things will happen in a months time. A kid will have a very tough time getting a feel for why buildings don't collapse, or generally to work on long term efforts.
In short you can switch expertise to longer term things (e.g. music -> painting is probably fine, but the reverse would be VERY hard indeed).
It also means that you will very likely blow up your life if you ever manage to reset this particular ageing process. If you're married, for example, that will mean nothing to you any more if you manage to reset your time horizon back to minutes to hours. I would expect you to have problems maintaining a bank account balance similar to when you were 6 years old.
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't give up - there is help. Reach out to your local chapter of Sesquipedalians Anonymous.
Out of curiosity, what simpler term would you instead use for 'acetylcholinesterase inhibitor'?
I don't have one. In fact, I appreciate the precise technical explanation. I guess I just needed to be reminded that humor is wasted on HN.
Re: Toward a Pill That Helps Us Learn as Fast as Kids
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
My counter hypothesis is that children can't possibly conceive the amount of information an adult has to keep track of day to day. What if we distinguish first language acquisition as a special process? If you don't acquire a language in the first place then you have no framework for formal learning. A better comparison might be second language acquisition in children and adults (see my post about FLA/SLA above). May…
The difference between kids' learning and adult learning is the timeframe of the events that can be stored into long-term memory. Kids can learn very short term things, adults cannot. Our brains work by modelling the future, then picking a desirable choice of actions to change that future. What changes when we get older is how far out we model the future. In babies it's tenths of a second up to less than half a minut…
This is very interesting. Do you have any links for further reading?