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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

> As adults, we can't progress at the same speed as kids,

This is definitely not true. Adults have more trouble learning some kinds of new motor skills up to expert level, and if the physical skill requires e.g. extreme flexibility kids sometimes have a less fixed bone structure, but adults are a lot faster at getting to basic competence in new physical tasks by building from past experience, and for any other kind of skill adults can learn much faster than kids.

The real problem adults have vs. kids is available time to spend thinking about things (because they have other responsibilities), not raw learning speed.

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But this is also true in the brain. A child's brain isn't limited by what it already knows.

Their brains are more flexible and don't have a "fixed [mental] structure", and this is why I think it's very important to promote and encourage creativity and passions from a young age.

There's a lot we can learn from kids, even if we need to filter some things through the wisdom that comes with age. Sometimes they have a tendency to have a machine-learning-esque approach to trying new things, which is fascinating to watch, and then how they take instructional guidance to alter their approach.

This might be an easy article to critique, but there's some good points to be gleamed.

“The real problem adults have vs. kids is available time to spend thinking about things (because they have other responsibilities), not raw learning speed.“

I think this is spot on. As adult you have a big pile of past experiences and responsibilities constantly keeping your mind busy. This makes learning new stuff hard. Lately I have been making an effort to approach things with less worries and baggage. I make an effort to not think “I should be able to do this faster” or “this is useless” but instead just do it without too much thinking.

True. Maybe we lose in the creative side of learning, but in the effectiveness and speed I would say we get better and better with years. It's hard learning when you basically don't know a lot. But when you have a large knowledge base and you are building on it - you can learn really fast, basically just linking the information you already know and adding some bits.

There's definitely less neuro-plasticity in adults. Compare an adult learning to site sing with a kid.

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