On Learning

I have learned a few things about learning over the years, and I thought I should write them down. Here are some of them:

1. You can learn anything at any age. This is almost a tautology for a human being. Our brains stay plastic until we die and we can always learn new things. In fact in this fast-changing world of ours, staying alive is almost proof that you are learning!
2. Anyone can get better at anything - on a relative scale. In other words, if you focus on something, you can get better at it tomorrow than you are today. On an absolute scale, however, there are limits on how good a particular individual can get at a particular skill. Not all of us can make it to the level of a concert pianist - even if they were to spend all their waking energy on it.
3. Learning is easier when you want to learn. I can say this from my personal experience. All through college I put a lot of work into stuff I was interested in and learned a lot. I stayed away from stuff that was forced on me and did not learn much. From what I have seen of most humans, this is how the world works for most part. Our psychic energy and time are our most precious resource and we instinctively allocate them in the direction of our interests.
4. Learning is easier when there is a context to it. This is related to the previous one. The context (e.g. doing something because your child is interested in it) directs your psychic
   energy.
5. Use it or lose it. I grew up in Pune in a Marathi-speaking household. All my neighorhood friends spoke Bengali, and so I became fluent in it. So much so that I spoke it better than I did Marathi. Then we moved away when I was five and pretty soon I lost all of Bengali. Later I learned to speak some Tamil from a couple of friends in college (I was probably 20), and also to read/write some Tamil as well. Most of it is forgotten by now, from lack of practice. Ditto for most stuff from school and college.
6. There seem to be a few specific areas where learning stays with you. For example, gross-motor skills (hooping, swimming, bicycle riding etc.) seem to last for decades. (I don't know if fine-motor skills follow a similar pattern.) There is also evidence that you cannot develop a native accent in a second language once you are past puberty (note that this is only about the native accent and not about learning the language itself).

I have yet to come across any research showing that if a child does not learn a specific skill by a certain age, he/she will never be able to learn it later. Please send me info if you come across related research.