Comment by throwaway713

I'm in my late twenties and increasingly worry about things like this. I sometimes wonder if my best "thinking days" are already behind me. Business sense and practicality (i.e. "wisdom") still seem to be increasing with time, yet I can't shake the feeling that understanding highly complex or novel topics is going to become vastly more difficult over the next few decades. For instance, if I wanted to learn homotopy type theory, would this have been easier five years ago, or will it be easier five years from now? It's well known that the number of neural synapses in the human brain decreases by almost an order of magnitude over a lifetime. I can accept that my body will degrade physically, but psychologically, I have a hard time stomaching the idea that my mental faculties are likely to erode as well. Hopefully exercise and eating well are enough to at least delay this as long as possible.