I'm 53 and recently embarked on a complex self-guided mini-medical education to try to understand my son's rare condition.
I've pushed my way through a 400 page nursing textbook, dozens of scientific papers and a 900 page freshman neuroscience textbook (currently at page 90).
I never took any bioscience class after high school software chem.
There have been ups and downs. Mentally comparing myself to when I was in school and reading comparable material, I feel my ability to master it was at or above that - at its best. However the amount of time I spend "at my best" in general is MUCH lower than when I was that age.
Today I have trouble sleeping many nights. An old hip injury and also anxiety.
A night I don't sleep well is definitely not going to be followed by a day where I gain understanding of neuronal membrane chemistry.
Didn't have those issues when I was 17 - any time was study time.
So I guess this goes along with the thesis of the story. Mental powers are there, but other body systems aren't able to support the brain's demands at quite the same level.
One other difference here: a class forces you to keep moving when there's something you don't fully understand at the moment. And often that works pretty well --- you cover a bunch of ground imperfectly, and backfill the holes over time.
It's easy to get a little bogged down without a teacher-equivalent tracking the pace, at least for me. Which also means I spend more time subjectively experiencing struggle than I would otherwise, regardless of how it's going objectively.
Which I guess just maps to "increased decision-making caution" in the paper.
That is exactly the problem I have when self-teaching. Classroom learning gives me external feedback on my performance as well as pushes me along when I get stuck. I have a hard time deciding when I'm spinning my wheels on some unimportant point or if I'm genuinely taking the time to understand a new concept fully without such guidance.
I think a big factor is recovery time. When you’re young you can do some extreme activity and still be well rested the next day. Recovery time even for fit people just gets a bit slower when older. But if you’re not pushing yourself then you can usually recover fully by the next day.
Same here. Once over 50 I found my ability to learn anything is several orders of magnitude efficient and faster. Most college and graduate academic knowledge and works appeared suddenly rudimentary albeit I've never worked in academic field.
However meanwhile I found my ability to learn new language has dramatically diminished. Unless it's something naturally appealing to me, any hard memorization has become extremely challenging.
59 here, and with an autistic 16 year old who has great difficulty with communication. We're trying speech therapy, ABA therapy, but it seems to be both practical and parental to try to engage more deeply... with whatever is left of my fluid (vs. crystallized) intelligence.
Book is "Neuroscience, Exploring the Brain" by Mark Bear and I really like it. Thoroughgoing scientific approach but has a unique philosophy of explaining the needed underpinnings as it goes. For example the section on "how genes work" was like 5 pages long, easy to absorb and really leveled up my understanding.
Regarding your son - have you looked into sulforaphane at all? It's a tantalizing substance for my son's diagnosis (Kabuki Syndrome) and I noted this study as I was doing my research, which appears to show promise in 18+ autistic people ...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1416940111
I've pushed my way through a 400 page nursing textbook, dozens of scientific papers and a 900 page freshman neuroscience textbook (currently at page 90).
I never took any bioscience class after high school software chem.
There have been ups and downs. Mentally comparing myself to when I was in school and reading comparable material, I feel my ability to master it was at or above that - at its best. However the amount of time I spend "at my best" in general is MUCH lower than when I was that age.
Today I have trouble sleeping many nights. An old hip injury and also anxiety.
A night I don't sleep well is definitely not going to be followed by a day where I gain understanding of neuronal membrane chemistry.
Didn't have those issues when I was 17 - any time was study time.
So I guess this goes along with the thesis of the story. Mental powers are there, but other body systems aren't able to support the brain's demands at quite the same level.