That's stupid, though. If you can explain 11% of the variance of some noisy phenomenon like cognitive and behavioral flexibility, that's noteworthy. They tested both linear and quadratic terms, and the quadratic one worked better in terms of prediction, and is also an expression of a meaningful theoretical model, rather than just throwing higher polynomials at it for the fun of it. Quadratic here also would coincide with some homogenizing mechanism at the two ends of the age distribution.

This. I could have produced a more insightful scatter plot with a barn door and a twelve gauge.

kinda, yeah. i noticed less dots in the middle parts of the graph right away.

i don't know what this study is (or what i'm doing), but it seems they have sampling issues maybe?

You have to surround the 2 with ^s:

R^2^ = 0.11

R^2^ = 0.11

Note that this'll bork if you put spaces between the carets: ^2 2^ gives you ^2 2^

That's how a standard error with normal-ish data works. The more data points for the estimation of a conditional mean you have, the fewer of the data point will be within it. For a normal distribution, the SE=SD/√N . Heck, you can even just calculate which proportion of the distribution you can expect to be within the 95% CI as a function of sample size. (Its a bit more complicated because of how probabilities factor into this, but for a large enough N it's fine)

For N=9, you'd expect 26% of data points within the 95% CI of the mean For N=16, 19% For 25, 16% For 100, 8% For 400, 4% Etc

Out of curiosity: What issue did you take with the error margin not including most data points?

Nuh-uh.

Some beliefs are more antifragile than others

Is this the guy who calls everyone imbeciles?

Taleb's mind just isn't antifragile enough. Or maybe too antifragile. Idk I didn't read his book

I have no scientific basis for this, but my suspicion is that what you do with your brain is more important to cognition than whatever raw intelligence you start with. the more languages you study, the more music you play, the more subjects you study and skills you develop and hobbies you tinker with and deep conversations you have... you learn to learn, you learn to think, it all gets wired up and cross-connected and you become more than the sum of your parts.

how much decline is truly biological vs. being stuck in a rut?

also there's nootropics that could be helpful for concussion recovery/etc. but they haven't been too well-studied, there's many different ones with different sketchiness and sources aren't always trustworthy... but piracetam (iirc) is actually prescribed in the EU for recovery from brain injury, and it's fairly safe and well-studied. I'm not recommending it either way though.

I've been there and all I can say is that the brain is a miraculous organ and can heal really well from a lot of trauma. You just have to stop damaging it, learn how to work with your brain rather than having your brain work for you, and exercise it. Challenge yourself to learn an easy skill, then another, then another.

Neuroplasticity does drop with age, but the drop is smaller than it was previously assumed to be, especially outside of early childhood (you may note that eg. this graph starts at 20 years old)

this is like saying you can't run after 30, yeah sure it generally becomes less trivial but if you actually try to do it and don't do it in the worst way possible it's absolutely doable without much struggle.

kids absorb language like a sponge, adults are like silica gel, just expose yourself to the target language often and you'll learn it. The problem is that many people are horrendously impatient and try to brute force language learning in like 2 months by memorizing individual sentences and shit, which isn't how our brains work..

It helps a lot that they're completely immersed in the language, by people who want to help them learn, and they desperately need to tell us things with no alternative.

For a fact, until it isn't for a fact. Unfortunately things may change like how majority of physics was disproven in the early 1900

Children absorb language like a spknge because they are forced to by necessity. Moved to a Spanish speaking country and in three years I could run linguistic circles around any three year old. (half joke but you get the point hopefully)