Learning

Ok, so i was thinking about it. What happens when we hit our teenage years? why do we stop learning so fast?

It seems that when you're 5yrs old, you remember EVERYTHING. however, as you grow older and hit puberty it seems our brains shut down the learning process because we now 'know it all' and can just live. it seems that after this point one must force themselves to learn something new, perhaps by repeating something over and over and over again.

So if anyone knows any information about this, or has some thoughts i'd love to hear them...

I dont know about the "know it all" part. Because i am sure i dont know everything.
Actually i forget almost everything.

well, by that i mean the phrase "teenagers think they know it all"

its the ego that people get as they mature, i think it stunts learning because the person will reject things they cant understand under peer pressure.. obviously not everyone is like this, but i'm just curious to see if this is some kind of genetic or chemical reaction

I have seen my older brother sometimes think he knows everything. Then i showed him that i knew alot more than he did. I'v got more of a factual mind. Data comes in and then i remember it. (As best as i can. No jokes.) It may be hard but i know i dont know everything because you live your whole live learning. So how could know everything? Or even think you know everything.

Distraction, loss of focus.

You suddenly have new and powerful desires, very powerful. All insecurities are now hightened.

You are getting some of your first tastes of a new reality requiring you to start taking on new responsibilities.

Greater amounts of information with greater requirements of established knowledge bases can theoretically exponentially fill more memory space.

And indeed, hormonal changes wreak havoc on concentration.

Perhaps this too is when an instinct kicks in telling you that much is still just best guess speculation changing with each new edition of a text book.

A time when "innocence" is wearing thin due to exposure to life's cruel realities such as, lies, violence, the food chain, manipulation, plain old stupid people, etc.

Teenage rebellion = Lack of trust and or respect = Hard to care or take seriously much new information + Sex = Damn near impossible to focus and learn.

In other words, I'm fairly certain there is no singular answer.

Babies and young children , certainly still at age 5 are still growing. The brain continues to develop into the teenage years, and while the child's brain is still very plastic it is making new neural pathways (learning) constantly. Just like little sponges children and their developing brain soak everything up. The best time for anyone to learn a new language or a musical instrument is before age 5. I f you think about language, we all learn to speak our native tongue without even being aware of it, but an adult trying to learn a new language is quite a different matter. Children who have been neglected say feral children, if they have never learnt to talk before they are discovered by the world as teenagers, can never in fact learn to talk properly, because the neural pathways just didn't make the right connections early enough.

Yes we all continue to learn as we grow older but certainly not in the same way as a young child, the brain is less plastic. That's why children who have brain damage often do not suffer as an adult with the same amount of impairments as an adult with the same damage because a child's brain is so plastic it just grows and adjusts around the problem.

No matter how much the nuerons, no matter how big or powerful the brain... It's the will of the learner and the level of self comprehension that will boost his/her knowledge. To understand the environment before understanding oneself is taking two big steps without taking that one major small step.

Material knowledge is irrevelant. Think about it man has always tried

to learn more and more about the Universe, but always hit a dead end and always made more wrong than good. EX: preservetives (deteriation of DNA strands), creation of deadly diseases, pollution. We're barely out of the jungle.

2000 years ago the knowledge of the stars and magic is equivelant to today's space travel science.... Man will always find a way to hide from his/her fear of unknown from science, knowledge. What if we're wrong? What if we were not really meant to learn more and more. What if the only REAL way to increase our brain usage is to look at a flower and love the flower for what it is and not preplexuate. What if animals of nature are like that? (Comprehension beyond our understanding for they don't greed, they dont kill for pleasure, etc) Now you're probably saying that you cannot compare our intellegence to animals, that it's IMPOSSIBLE for there's proof that the human nervous system is more complex. BUT science tells you that, LOGIC tells you that. One perspective. Science is only imagination, imagination is perspective and perspective is reality. Now you're probably also saying imagination is childish, immaturity..But what is immaturity? Judgement? Part of the system of materialism and science thus logic? Yes... But... This is why man will never also move forth, for they do not know how to listen. We say grow up be mature, BUT look at ourselves. We dont know even know how to listen. Basically... in materialistic logically terms: We are children running around with scissors ready to fall and kill ourselves any moment.

Thus:

I think the real question is...... Why have people stopped openning their imagination?

thats awsome

I agree with the theory of increasing distraction making it harder to learn so fast as we get older, but I think the main reason we slow down with our ability to learn, is the fact that we only learn so fast as babies/children because it is absolutely necessary to do so, to learn how to survive on our own-a fight or flight type of thing. Another factor though could be the fact that when we're born our brains/minds are sort of a blank hard-drive, and as we all know, the more things we store on our hard-drives, the slower it runs!