Learning New Things Just Gets Harder and Harder

 I'm sure you've noticed it.  Learning new things gets harder as we age. Whether it's learning a new language, learning a new program on the computer, understanding a difficult concept, or remembering the many numbers and names we have stored in our brain, it all becomes more difficult as we age.

Part of the reason is brain and biologic changes.  Your brain forms new connections more slowly than it did in your youth.  While the brain still grows new cells, the speed to synaptic turnover drops and more repetition is required.  Life and mental habits also make learning harder.  Fear of failure may prevent older adults from even trying to learn new thing.  

Aging causes structural, chemical and cellular shifts that make processing and storing new information harder.  The prefrontal cortex shrinks, the hippocampus (memory center) loses volume, and the protective myelin coating or nerve fibers degrades, which slows down communication speeds between different brain regions.

There are many more chemical and cellular changes that contribute to our difficulty in learning new things, but you get the picture.  It's best to recognize that there are many things that we cannot change that are happening throughout the body (gravity, for instance), and accept that learning will be harder.  That by no means means that we should give up on learning.  I will write later about strategies to help seniors learn new things without feeling like a failure.

I've always said that I want to learn at least one new thing each day.  It might be a new word or just a new computer tip, or it could be something more complicated, like a new bridge convention.  The latter is harder for me than it used to be, it takes more repetition and practice, but I can still do it.  I will write about tips for senior learning soon.