I've made it into a mantra to never accept this kind of sentiment (even if it were to be scientifically proven some day). It's dangerous and only serves to undermine motivation. Sure there is an overrepresentation of old people who are tired., but that doesn't mean you have to be.

This is only if you let it. The human brain has something called neuroplasticity. If you exercise your brain, regularly and with variety, you can slow/prevent a degradation of neuroplasticity. Some example activities include doing coding in new programming language, learning a new spoken language, doing sudoku and other puzzles, doing painting if you are right brain dominant (or logic puzzles if left brain dominant).

The OP's statement also is one of the key reasons touted for ageism within our industry, and ageism is a major problem. The benefit of vast experience drastically outweighs the minor (or no) degradation in neuroplasticity if they've kept their brain active.

But as I kept learning, I saw that a certain set of people decided that they were just done learning new stuff the second they were done with college, and resisted any change that wasn't taught to them by their professors. This affected young and old people at roughly the same rate (at least from what I observed), but it's more apparent for the older people just because they've been half-assing the learning for longer (and because what they learned in college is probably more out of date).

This is also why I make it a point to attend conferences where I am the "dumbest guy in the room" like ICFP. These things are a bit intimidating (I do not like feeling dumb), but work as exceptional ways of highlighting gaps in my knowledge, and giving me a "path to google later".

To be clear, this isn't about IQ or number-of-wrinkles-in-brain or anything like that. If I were to talk to a carpenter about carpentry or Taco Bell worker about food preparation I would feel stupid since I know basically nothing about either of those subjects.

Just be careful as there’s no such thing as left/right brained people. It’s an old idea.

The positive side is that I'm in the second year and things have improved. I suffer less from stress and many maths are now "restored" in my mind. So it gets better. But the price is high :-)

I guess that by the end of the thesis, which is less about emorizing an dmuch more about understanding, I'll feel much better and self confidence will be boosted...

There's also a use/abuse aspect. My older body creaks not necessarily because it's old, but because I have used (maybe abused - I started Jiu-Jitsu at 40) it physically for 40+ years. I suspect the mind is similar. If it's been abused through stress and/or drugs or let go out of shape by watching TV all day, then yes it's less sharp. But age isn't the driving factor in that case.

I started my master's at 50 and finished it 2 1/2 years later.

> Your brain has slowed down by a factor of at least 2.

My brain has never been better. I had decades of experience to lean on, and was an unofficial TA in most classes. It was fun and challenging, and only one course gave me any problems due to my lifelong math disability (I love it, it hates me).

It was my third time going to school. The first one was to take a undergrad+grad in CS when I was 18. I did not even know why I was there. The second one was I was 29 for grad school in quantitative finance, why? Because everybody in my professional environment was doing it. I definitely did not enjoy that either and did not learn much. My third time, well I clearly knew I wanted to learn becase I truly enjoyed the matter, no professional need but I simply liked it. And I knew about the math part.

Now I am almost 40 and I know almost for sure I am in the same shape or even better to go to school again and enjoy it. To me is just to do something because you like it, not because of social pressure, professional reasons or hype. Also, I think to have a good time while doing it you have to be aware of your personal situation. Mine was totally favorable.

Of course it's also true one's younger self had other distractions, so it can be hard to compare.

As a young er student, I had tons of "side projects" (like coding games) :-) So I was definitely not studying all the time. Nowadays I'm 100% focus so it means I work about 8-10 hours a day on my courses. I have very good sleeping habits, I eat well (vegetables but just too much chocolate), I walk 45 minutes 5 days per week and practice taichi about 20 minutes a day.

I tend to outperform students (about 2 standard dev above mean) in practicals but for examinations, where I have to memorize the whole course, that's another story, I perform just as the average BUT I pass half the exams so it means I'm really underperforming... The stress is a big issue but the memorization is the biggest one. It just doesn't work like when I was 20. It's super frustrating.

I have a master im compsci + 2 years phd preparation. But after 20 years, data science is totally foreign to me. It's just math math math, I don't recognize anything I know (so it's super interesting, but I'm really lost :-))

Also I chose data sciences because I was scared to see some COBOL programmers who didn't jump into the web/java/you name it track and who are now old and can't make the effort to switch). So I felt, business intelligence is moving outside the realm of application developpers (because many companies now know how to to business processes with IT) to the realm of data sciences (because that's where there is more room for improvements). I hope I was not too wrong :-)

On the practical side it makes total sense that you're better, because young people generally have not practiced long term productivity.

Like many on here, I think I had a high potential - low discipline brain. I was never setting the world on fire, and even if as I age the potential ceiling of my cognitive capacity has come down, it was never an ceiling I was in danger of hitting, and now with a little more willpower I'm getting more out of the (possibly diminishing) total mental horsepower I have, than I ever did as a younger me.

After that I can understand more complex stuff: GAN's, GLM's, SVM's, PCA, you name it... Things that were totally alien to me 1.5 years ago.

But well, just do it, in any case you'll be better! And proud of yourself!

So if someone says their brain is slower, they may be talking about how much harder it seems to be at learning new topics. I’d bet dollars to donuts they’re as fast a thinker on things they’ve been doing for 30 years as ever.

Work is full of ambiguities and complexities whereas academic work has straightforward success criteria and you're always starting from a blank slate. I enjoyed it, but I was also lucky to have the support of my family to spend my time that way.

How do you even quantify that?

For example, I went to school for a video game programming/design B.Sc. First couple of years were super basic programming to get non-programmers up to level, so to any of us who programmed since gradeschool it meant no studying/effort for a year while we breezed through simple loops/conditionals/Java stuff.

Obviously, things cranked up a notch when we finally got to new material.

I note the older students (40+/50+-year-olds, with families, etc) getting their work in way ahead of schedule whilst actively participating in discourse, moreso (dare I say) than the significantly younger ones in our cohort.