./ notes.txt / the myth of adult learning

do children really learn faster than adults?

you may have heard:

"children learn faster than adults. children's brains are more flexible and have higher neuroplasticity"

most of us take this for granted, but it doesn't tell the whole story

children are fast learners, but adults are more effective learners overall

🗣 research shows that adults learn languages to fluency nearly as well as children , given the same amount of practice 1 . it's less common to learn a language from age 20 to 40 -- but those who do reach similar fluency to those who learn from age 5 to 25. children usually spend much more time immersed & learning.

📚 reading speed & comprehension — a direct measure of learning ability — steadily increases with age 2

🃏 spaced repetition , a learning technique designed to optimize our brains time to learn, doesn't work as well for young children 3 e.g. Anki, which is used mostly by med-school students & adults learning languages

😤 kids can be stubborn or rebellious , undergo hormonal changes , among many other variables, which interfere with their ability & desire to learn

🔬 there are limited scientific studies comparing children and adults learning performance on the same task. what I could find showed adults had similar overall performance4, 5 the benefit children have is minor in most cases (a few percentage points, not a factor of 2) and that advantage is often outweighed by other factors

imagine these two:

[1] a child who just began reading books at a 3rd grade level .

[2] a college-graduate adult who has studied higher level english, math, and sciences in university.

it should be obvious, if you compared these two in many learning tasks,

like reading an article, understanding a new formula, or learning quantum physics.

the adult would outperform the child and learn faster, with less time spent on the basics.

🍎 you usually can't compare kids learning apples-to-apples with adults . children focus on learning basic skills like how to write & read, which is a more fundamental learning, albeit less advanced, than understanding a complex math concept.

🏃 kids do learn fast. but they usually have further to go from their starting point

📊 new information for children is a higher percent of their overall knowledge . changes are a much bigger difference and require more flexibility

🤔 adults, on the other hand, have more pre-existing knowledge and a more developed brain to easily integrate new information

an opsimath (greek roots opsi → late, and math → study) is a term for someone who learns later in life.

once a negative term, the discouraging bias against adult learning doesn't make make sense when analyzed

adults are, overall, better learners than children.

consider learning something new, you can become better than almost anyone else in an area with enough time