| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

You can't teach an old dog new tricks

Page history last edited by Ann Vipond 5 years, 3 months ago

 

It has been said forever that You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Actually since 1534 in John Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandry. “The dogge must lerne it, whan he is a whelpe, or els it will not be: for it is harde to make an olde dogge to stoupe.”.

 

The truth behind this is that people, and dogs, get set in their ways. In other words it is a motivational issue, like, I have learnt enough to get by, I don’t need to learn new things.

 

But actually as we get older we can still learn new things. For example, it is well known at university that mature students tend to do better in results than 18-21 year olds. It does not fall off with the over 60s. Why is this? It is said that we have a wider range of resources and tactics for learning, and better discipline in learning.

 

High level courses are not for all in Third Age. Learning in your older years keeps your brain active, and discussing ideas and socialising is an important part of courses. So Third Age study is an effective way for the over 60s to tackle isolation, limited stimulation and the mundane. But then if you start from isolation and the mundane then we are back to low motivation, “I get by”, the old dog has no stimulus for new tricks.

 

Just to stay with dogs and flexibility in learning for a moment, a dog psychology project in Vienna gave dogs a task which kept changing slightly, and concluded that the older dogs did better than the younger dogs in the inference or reasoning task. The older the dog, the better it performed, while younger dogs were unable to master an adapted task. This is probably due to the fact that older dogs more stubbornly insist on what they have learned before and are less flexible than younger animals.

 

In the worst case scenario of very elderly in Nursing Homes, we have all seen the common approach to motivation of opening up the wide resource of memories. “tell me about this photograph”, “what was it like?”, and physical memories of dance and movement can peel back a few layers of Altzheimers.

 

This gives a clue to how non-formal learning often proceeds in Third Age where there is the opportunity to discuss ideas and socialise. An input from a speaker can be stimulating when it can be evaluated in the light of things you already know or remember. Few would enjoy an isolated input from a book or website, adding a completely new concept, but most enjoy adapting their existing wisdom in the light of what someone else says.

 

So maybe that is it. Most of us like to keep our minds and sense of wellbeing healthy by becoming a little bit wiser day after day, but there are limits to how much we will engage with something completely new to us.

 

Professor Bill Hopkinson

vU3A Member December 2018

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.