At 25, you could learn a new app by poking at it for ten minutes.

At 45, you need the app, a YouTube tutorial, a notepad, and a quiet room — and you’ll still have to look it up again next week.

Or you sign up for Spanish, or pottery, or a certificate course, or the guitar that’s been leaning against the wall since 2019. And within three sessions, there’s a voice in your head:

Maybe this ship has sailed.

Here’s the honest answer, according to the research: some parts of learning do get harder with age. Other parts get better. And the feeling that it’s hard — that frustrating, clumsy, “why isn’t this sticking” feeling — is often a sign that real learning is happening.

Let’s look at what the evidence actually says.

The bad news first: some things really do slow down

It’s not your imagination.

In a 2015 study published in Psychological Science, researchers Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine analyzed cognitive test data from nearly 50,000 online participants, alongside existing standardized-test data, across the lifespan. They found that raw information-processing speed appeared to peak around age 18 or 19. Short-term memory kept improving until about 25, levelled off, and then began to decline starting around 35.

So if you feel like you’re holding fewer things in your head at once than you used to, or that new information takes longer to “click,” that tracks.

But that’s only one part of the picture.

The good news: different abilities peak at different times

The same research found that other abilities peak much later. The ability to read other people’s emotional states peaked in the 40s or 50s. And vocabulary — a measure of accumulated knowledge — peaked in the late 60s or early 70s in the new data.

As Hartshorne put it, there’s “probably not one age at which you’re peak on most things, much less all of them.”

That matters for learning. Adults bring something younger learners don’t: a huge store of existing knowledge to hang new information on. You may learn a new language’s vocabulary more slowly than a teenager, but you understand context, motivation, how to break a problem down and what you actually need to know. That counts for a lot.

Your brain can still physically change

For a long time, popular wisdom held that the adult brain was basically fixed. The research has moved on.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2008, researchers at the University of Hamburg taught adults aged 50 to 67 — none of whom could juggle — to juggle three balls over about three months. Brain scans showed grey matter increases in an area involved in processing visual motion, similar to changes previously seen in 20-year-olds learning the same skill.

Two important caveats keep this honest:

• The older learners were slower. Every participant in the younger group hit the 60-second juggling goal; fewer than a quarter of the older group did.
• The brain changes faded after people stopped practising.

So the takeaway isn’t “learning makes your brain grow forever.” It’s that the adult brain is still responsive to practice — and that it tends to keep what you keep using.

Challenge seems to matter more than comfort

One of the most quoted studies in this area is the Synapse Project, led by cognitive neuroscientist Denise Park at the University of Texas at Dallas and published in Psychological Science.

The study involved 221 adults aged 60 to 90, who committed to 15 hours a week of assigned activities for three months. Some learned demanding new skills like digital photography and quilting with computer-controlled sewing machines. Others joined a social group doing fun but not intellectually demanding things, like games and museum trips, or did low-demand tasks at home like listening to music.

The groups who took on the mentally challenging new skills improved their memory. The groups doing less demanding activities — even enjoyable, social ones — did not show the same gains.

Park’s summary: “it is important to get out and do something unfamiliar and mentally challenging.” And a line worth putting on a sticky note: “When you are inside your comfort zone you may be outside of the enhancement zone.”

Worth noting: this study involved older adults than most of our readers, and it measured specific outcomes over a few months. It doesn’t prove that a pottery class will protect your brain long-term. But it does point in an encouraging direction: new and demanding beats familiar and easy.

Why “harder” might mean “working”

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork at UCLA have spent decades studying what they call “desirable difficulties” — learning conditions that feel slower and less efficient in the moment, but produce learning that lasts longer.

Cramming, for example, can produce strong performance on an immediate test. But that knowledge fades quickly. Spacing practice out over time feels less productive, yet produces much more durable learning.

Which means that the frustrating, effortful, “I have to look this up again” feeling may not be evidence that you’re bad at this.

It may be evidence that you’re doing it right.

The study methods with the best evidence

In 2013, a team of cognitive and educational psychologists led by John Dunlosky reviewed the evidence on ten common learning techniques for the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Two stood out as having “high utility.” A few of the most popular habits did not.

1. Practice testing (retrieval practice)

Quizzing yourself — rather than rereading — is one of the most powerful learning tools researchers have found.

In a well-known experiment by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students who repeatedly reread a passage did better on a test five minutes later. But two days and a week later, the pattern flipped: the students who had practised recalling the material remembered more. The students themselves didn’t see it coming — repeated rereading made them more confident they’d remember.

How to use it: close the book and try to explain what you just learned. Use flashcards. Ask a friend — or even an AI assistant — to quiz you. (More on that in our guide to what AI is actually useful for.)

2. Spaced (distributed) practice

Spreading your learning out over days and weeks beats packing it into one long session. A large 2006 review of distributed-practice research by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues, in Psychological Bulletin, found that the best gap between study sessions depends on how long you want to remember something — the longer you need to retain it, the longer the ideal spacing.

How to use it: twenty minutes, four times a week, will likely serve you better than one heroic Sunday afternoon.

3. What to do less of: rereading and highlighting

In the same 2013 review, rereading and highlighting were rated low utility. They feel productive — the page looks busy, the material looks familiar — but familiarity isn’t the same as remembering. As Dunlosky put it, “By just replacing rereading with delayed retrieval practice, students would benefit.”

Don’t skip sleep (yes, really)

Sleep plays a role in consolidation — the process of turning new short-term memories into longer-lasting ones and linking them with what you already know. A Sleep Research Society explainer written by Stanford researchers puts it plainly: “Short-term memories can become long-term memories during sleep.”

For midlife women whose sleep is already under siege, this is one more reason to treat rest as part of the learning plan, not a reward for finishing it.

Making it work in an actual adult life

The research is encouraging. The calendar is less so. A few practical ways to fit learning into a life that’s already full:

• Pick something genuinely new. Based on the research above, novelty and challenge seem to matter. Doing more of what you’re already good at is pleasant; it’s not the same thing.
• Go small and frequent. Short, spaced sessions fit real schedules — and work better anyway.
• Test, don’t just review. End each session by recalling what you learned without notes.
• Expect the awkward phase. The beginner stage feels uncomfortable at any age. At 45, you just notice it more because you’re used to being competent.
• Connect it to what you know. Your existing knowledge is an asset. Use analogies from your work, hobbies and life.
• Find people. A class, a group, a learning buddy. Accountability helps, and so does company.

And if what you’re learning is tied to your career — a new tool, a new field, a pivot — it’s worth reading our piece on the career advice women got in their 20s that doesn’t work anymore.

If you’d like a structured place to start on a practical skill, Moda Academy offers self-paced courses in digital marketing and starting an online business. Moda Academy is a sister company of Muddy Stilettos.

The Curious One’s take

There’s a particular kind of embarrassment that comes with being a beginner after 40.

You’ve spent two decades getting good at things. You run households, teams, budgets, crises. And then you’re in a beginner’s class, fumbling with the basics, next to someone half your age who seems to absorb everything by osmosis.

It’s humbling. It’s also kind of thrilling.

The science doesn’t say learning is easy at this stage. It says it’s possible — and that the struggle itself is part of how it works. Some of your mental hardware is slower than it used to be. Some of it is better than it has ever been.

So sign up for the class. Pick up the guitar. Learn the thing.

And if you need something to read between practice sessions, we’ve rounded up the books, shows and rabbit holes worth your limited free time.

More on curiosity, culture and what we’re learning next on our Growth & Culture desk.

ASK MUDDY

What’s the thing you’ve always wanted to learn but keep telling yourself it’s too late for?

JOIN THE MUDDY COMMUNITY

Life gets messy. We talk about it. Join the free Muddy community at muddystilettos.ca for new stories each week on the ideas, books and questions keeping us curious.

ABOUT THE MUDDY GROWTH & CULTURE DESK

The Muddy Growth & Culture Desk covers books, shows, AI, culture and the internet rabbit holes worth falling into — and connects them to the bigger questions in women’s lives. We separate reporting from opinion and go back to the original sources.

Featuring The Curious One: books, Netflix, AI, culture and internet rabbit holes. Curious, reflective, sharp.

This article is educational and informational. It is not medical advice. If you have concerns about memory or cognitive changes, speak with a healthcare professional.

Sources

• Hartshorne, J. K., & Germine, L. T. (2015). "When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the life span." Psychological Science, 26(4), 433–443
• Boyke, J., Driemeyer, J., Gaser, C., Büchel, C., & May, A. (2008). "Training-induced brain structure changes in the elderly." Journal of Neuroscience, 28(28), 7031–7035
• "Mentally Challenging Activities Improve Memory as Baby Boomers Age" — UT Dallas News Center (Oct. 22, 2013), on Park, D. C., et al. (2014), "The impact of sustained engagement on cognitive function in older adults: The Synapse Project," Psychological Science
• "Desirable Difficulties" — Association for Psychological Science, Observer; and Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011), "Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning."
• "Which Study Strategies Make the Grade?" — Association for Psychological Science press release (Jan. 10, 2013), on Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013), Psychological Science in the Public Interest
• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). "Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention." Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). "Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis." Psychological Bulletin, 132, 354–380
• Heller, H. C., & Pittaras, E. C. "Why Sleep Is Important for Optimizing Learning and Memory" — Sleep Research Society