When I was younger, I used to pick skills up fast, but now I struggle to learn anything new. Why is that?
Also, how can I improve my learning skills?
In: Biology
When we are young our brains are geared towards forming heaps of new connections quickly. It’s called neuroplasticity. Evolutionarily it would help babies and youths to adapt quickly to their environment without a lot of time and energy.
The years until 18 or 21 your brain just creates connections all over the shop so learning is quick.
As we age our brains become less plastic and focus more on pruning off any useless connections, which results in taking more time to learn new things. That’s not to say they don’t still form new connections, they do, it’s just not at the extremely accelerated rate of kids.
I think it has to do with efficiency of staying alive.
Brains take up a lot of energy so I guess from an evolutionary standpoint if you made it to 18ish years old you probably know what you need to know to survive so your body can stop wasting energy on learning new stuff and start trying to conserve it a bit more!
(Disclaimer it’s been a long time since I studied this stuff and my brain has pruned a lot of it)
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