Teacher and students in a U.S. Indian school from the 1950s.
Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Ba ba da da goo goo! After months of babbling, infants learn their mother tongue. Their brains wire themselves to meet the enormous challenges of language.
Courtesy Missouri Department of Social Services

Ever since neuroscientists began using that clunky moniker, they have put out this grim word: you grow older, you learn less. Your brain loses its delightful flexibility and becomes ossified. Calcified. Petrified. New connections aren't made, and dying neurons die are not replaced. As millions of adults have learned to their dismay, you can only recover a certain amount of movement after a stroke.

What me learn?
But a strange fate apparently befell neuroscientists. They aged, they read their writings, and were horrified to think that it applied to them.

In this edition, we aging Whyfilers are happy to report some good news from the neurological front. Aging brains may be capable of remarkable feats -- if they are trained properly. Sure, it's easier to learn Mongolian as an infant, but even for tough learning tasks, there's newfound hope.

As we'll see, the dismal dogma of neuroscience is yielding -- grudgingly -- to a more complex -- and infinitely more encouraging -- reality.

Let's take a toughie. Could we teach adult Japanese speakers to distinguish the English R and L?