Mind over grey matter
Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Absolutely. As David Robson discovers, age does not necessarily wither our ability to learn
Some 36-year-olds choose to collect vintage wine, vinyl records or sports memorabilia. For Richard Simcott, it is languages. His itch to learn has led him to study more than 30 foreign tongues - and he's not ready to give up.
During our conversation, in a London restaurant, he reels off sentences in Spanish, Turkish and Icelandic as easily as I can name the pizza and pasta on our menu. He has learned Dutch on the streets of Rotterdam, Czech in Prague and Polish during a house share with some architects. At home, he talks to his wife in fluent Macedonian.
What's remarkable about Simcott isn't just the number and diversity of languages he has mastered. It's his age. Long before grey hairs appear and waistlines expand, the mind's cogs are meant to seize up, making it difficult to pick up any new skill, be it a language, the flute or archery. Even if Simcott had primed his mind for new languages while at school, he should have faced a steep decline in his abilities as the years went by - yet he still devours unfamiliar grammar and strange vocabularies to a high level. "My linguistic landscape is always changing," he says. "If you're school-aged, or middle-aged - I don't think there's a big difference."
A decade ago, few neuroscientists would have agreed that adults can rival the learning talents of children. But we needn't be so defeatist. The mature brain, it turns out, is more supple than anyone thought.
"The idea that there's a critical period for learning in childhood is overrated," says Gary Marcus, a psychologist at New York University, in the United States.
What's more, we now understand the best techniques to accelerate knowledge and skill acquisition in adults, so can perhaps unveil a few tricks of the trade of super-learners such as Simcott. Whatever you want to learn, it's never too late to charge those grey cells.
