Animal learning

Awhile back I did a blog on the long history of Reform Judaisms' century of indifference to the murder of fellow Jews and the nearly open hostility toward Israel to this day. My friend Lisa wrote to ask me why this happens. 

I know the answer but it has little to do with Reform Jews if has to do with all humans and probably all animals.

From my vantage point, human learning begins with a maximum potential at birth, let us say 100%, and declines steadily until it reaches nearly zero at roughly age 23.  This appears to me to be so strong and so universal that it may be biological.

What does this mean?  First, the slope of the curve can go from 100% down to zero in some humans in 4 years. Second, in nearly everyone else, we really never learn anything new after age 23.

I am at a computer typing but I can already hear a loud scream from my readers: 'nobody ever learns anything new after age 23, are you nuts?'  Maybe I am nuts but my observation is based on pure observation of trying to find new learning in anybody for half a century of looking. 

Now there is an important distinction to make here; the capacity to add or subtract data from our mind, memory or experience pool is wide open.  New data can be added to existing learning structures indefinitely.  If you can multiply every number from 1 to 10 by the time you are 23 you can learn to do the same for numbers 11 to 20.  But if real and imaginary numbers made no sense before 23, then they never will.

So for Lisa, people who learned about the world and their relation to other Jews (especially the weird ones who dress in black coats and fur hats) before age 23 from their Reform teachers, then they are uncomfortable that such weird Jews exist and that attitude never changes.  The same is true for all world views.

My friends on hearing this are usually stunned but when they regain their senses they always ask: 'what about you Michael?'

The observation, painful as it is, applies to me.  I had vast experiential learning before age 23, ranging from college at 15 to Kibbutz life, active campaign politics and professional research work for pay.  My learning mode, formed and never changed, was a very open empirical model.  I have the potential for vast amounts of new data, but no new learning modes. I admit it.  I can not learn new material from theological tracts or a guru. New languages and musical instruments are nearly inaccessible to me.

One friend asked the challenging question of whether people could even learn sex after 23.  My sample of women is large and my answer is, sadly, no!  Women who developed sexual attitudes in Catholic school, if they didn't bust out of that sexual mold early on, remained in that cool state after age 23.

The only strong proof of my thesis comes from the 100th monkey work in Japan.  When monkeys in one part of the country were first given potatoes, straight from the ground, they learned to wash potatoes in a river before eating. The technique spread throughout the island, rapidly.  Researchers went back years later, and checked the data. On second examination they found that only young monkeys had learned the new techniques, old monkeys ate the potatoes with dirt on them for the rest of their lives.

Summary: we start with a 100% opportunity to learn about the world but get completely closed by age 23.