Never too Old to Learn

If you thought that just because you’re old doesn’t mean you can’t learn. Apparently some people have the idea that age limits learning ability. New research has started to counter that myth, here’s a study that shows that people in their early 30s tend to have optimal facial recognition skills.

That conclusion is dramatically different from what researchers previously thought – that this ability peaked in adolescence, said Laura Germine, a graduate student in psychology at Harvard who specializes in this disorder.

In a study published in the online version of Cognition, Germine, Ken Nakayama, a psychology professor at Harvard, and Bradley Duchaine, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, detailed their results from a series of online experiments with about 60,000 participants.

They asked participants to take a series of tests involving face recognition of six young men. In another series of tests, they were also asked to learn and then recognize a series of women’s and children’s faces.

“People in their early 30s are best at this task,” said Germine in a phone interview with the Star. “Someone at age 16 and age 65 do about the same. Their face-recognition abilities are similar.”

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Keep Learning for a Good Life

For some reasons that I don;t understand people find learning to be dull. If you’re one of those people this post is for you!

Learning is a great way to keep your mind active and acquire new skills to improve your life and ways you don’t necessarily foresee. There’s always areas that you can expand your knowledge in and lucky for us someone has put these into a handy blog post.

Here’s a snippet:

Challenge Yourself
Finally, give yourself a challenge or two. Next time you say, “I can’t”, stop and think. Maybe you really can’t cook … yet. There’s nothing stopping you learning.
Sure, you might find that you just don’t enjoy cooking. But at least you’ll know that you could put together a meal if you had to.
We start at a zero skill level for everything in life. Just because you can’t currently play the piano doesn’t mean that you’ll never be able to. With the internet, there’s a huge amount of content on every topic you can think of – and loads of it will be aimed at beginners.

Keep reading and learning at the source.

Your Brain Enjoys Learning

Information is something that your brain genuinely craves and when it learns something new it gives us a little reward. New research as looked into why information is its own reward.

This preference for knowledge about the future was intimately linked to the monkeys’ desire for water. The same neurons in the middle of their brains signalled their expectations of both rewards – the watery prizes and knowledge about them.

All the neurons in question release the signalling chemical dopamine. While the monkeys were making their choices, Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka recorded the activity of 47 dopamine neurons in their midbrains. These neurons became very excited when the monkeys saw a symbol that predicted a large amount of water, while the symbol that cued a smaller drink inhibited the neurons. The same dopamine neurons were excited during trials where the monkey only saw the symbol that heralded forthcoming information, and they were inhibited if they monkey only saw the other non-informative symbol.

Collection of Talks for Inspirational Self-Improvement

Nobody is perfect and everybody can improve their life, the hard part is doing it. Lucky for us Select Courses has a list of 100 talks for self-improvement on topics like how to better respect the environment to relationships and society.

These days, it’s hard to get motivated enough for anything. The economy is down, your savings–if you had any to start with–have probably dwindled, and it’s still easy to get depressed about the housing market, the environment, foreign policy, and even the possibility of sending your kids to college. But that’s exactly why we need inspiration and mood boosters at any cost. Luckily for you, these are free.

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