The Decision Strategist

It struck me recently that the life of a person can be related to the a complexity metaphor. In a human life there are distinct stages. When young we are actively forming connections, building emotional and reasoning abilities. As we become older, we reach a limit in the breadth of our complexity, but we continue to enhance the depth of our complexity. In other words, its hard to develop new capabilities, but we become better at the ones we already have. Then at some point, as we age, the complexity of our brains reaches a saturation point, and new information can only be added at the cost of losing old information.

I know this isn’t an exact fit. It is of course possible, as we are increasingly finding, to learn new skills and modes of behavior as an adult. But it is much more difficult.

The brain has a natural limitation in terms of it’s capacity, perhaps defined most literally as the number of possible connections between neurons. When we are young there are plenty of unused connections available to develop new capabilities.

But at some point, most of our neurons have been used in one way or another. We can still learn new things, but it is more difficult. It is easier to strengthen the connections already existing, and perhaps make new connections between existing groups of neurons.

Then, as we age, we reach the limits of our capacity and have to start re-wiring to make room for memory or any new skills we are still managing to learn.

I think its an interesting idea because it suggests that it is necessary that as we age we become forgetful and less mentally agile. Retaining the ‘youthful’ abilities of the brain would require giving up a set of previously made connections.

There is also the sense here of a neural network sagging under the weight of it’s own connections.

I mention all of this because, as an almost-thirty-undecided human, I am waiting to hear from the peace corps regarding an invitation and filling the time with thoughts of law school (and/or grad school) after the peace corps. But at what point does it make more sense to focus in on a subject I already know than to continue trying to learn completely new ones?

I like to think that we are free to pursue new avenues for as long as we like, but is there some natural limit in which the decreasing returns to scale yield increasingly small returns for my time? Or by learning new fields, am I keeping my brain agile and young just by virtue of exercising it?

I don’t know very much about neurology, so someone can probably correct some misconceptions I have here.

-zot.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 7:19 am and is filed under Ideas.