I recommend you read the entire thing. And I am eager for your
thoughts on this.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/11/symptoms-of-
ageing.html
On the thesis that deliberate forgetting may be desirable to preserve
reaction time:
For humans as individuals, I don't buy it. (Can anyone here closer
to, or on the far side of, 50 back Stross up?)
I'm 7 or 8 years closer to 50 than when I first discovered "Sheep Dash":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/sheep/reaction_version5.swf
yet my performance is not any worse. (despite having learned many
things, and having a richer set of associations to draw upon ... in
the appropriate circumstances)
Ian Millar picked up an Olympic medal at 61, and is still
competitive. Mariano Aguerre is still this side of 50, but he's near
the top of a contact sport which is normally a much younger man's
game. Admittedly, they're both using someone else's lungs and knees,
but they still rely on their own reflexes and responsiveness*.
Of course, anticipation is a confounding variable: I don't mind being
theoretically 40ms slower than a 20-year old on raw twitch when the
extra experience practically yields a 250-500 ms lead in reading the
game. The best advice for sport, if not for life, I've ever
received: "if you know where to be, you can let the young guys run".
For humans as social animals, it's a true, but not necessarily novel,
observation about culture. (which raises a question: is a short-term
culture essential, or an accident of limited transmission bandwidth?)
Look at computers: software trends are largely hemlines, which mostly
follow a brownian progress (and tend to make qualitative jumps only
insofar as the underlying quantitative hardware progress permits),
changing vocabulary (both spoken and visual) every few years so we
have plenty of work to do, filling up the equilibria between jumps.
Someone with less parochial interests than mine might even go so far
as to apply this observation to societies as a whole:
GK Chesterton, early XX
... what really happens in history is this: the old man is always
wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong
with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old
man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks
it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
(although having more of a progessive than a conservative
disposition, I would globally insert "almost"s before his "always")
-Dave
* I haven't been in the salle in ages, but in our fencing club we
have an octogenarian beginner. Legwise, he has no mobility, but he's
still pretty sharp with the hand -- and more importantly, he has an
analytic mind, and hence fixes holes in his game much more readily
than some of our teenagers and young adults do.
Some support for 50 as a cutoff age comes from Mochida Moriji, but he
talks about using increased responsiveness to compensate for
declining physical ability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XHSZ-sLG3I
