Lifetime Education Gives You Life
By
Your body has a use-by date. Once you have no goals to fight towards, your body decides that you have passed the use-by date. Ongoing lifetime education will convince your body that it had better get to work to keep you fit enough for your plans. Until recently it was believed that brain cells couldn't grow. So when we lost our brain cells as we became older, that was that. We couldn't improve our brain again.
Then they tried subjecting rats to every new experience imaginable. Their brains rapidly gained weight, showing that there were more brain-cells, but what was more important was that the connections between brain cells multiplied exponentially. The researchers, can't start dissecting our brains so they are hampered, but they can deduce from different bits of research that our brains respond in the same manner as the rat brains.
Another startling discovery was that seniors can memorize lists of nonsense syllables better than teenagers. That's because both groups are equally bored. When everything is new to a youngster, they remember better, but nothing is new to us...unless we deliberately put ourselves into new situations.
And that's where adult learning comes in. I used to puzzle over the motivation of retired people who paid to take a university degree, then went on to take another degree. Now that I'm retired I can understand it. I come alive when I have to cope with new learning experiences.
New concepts or just new ways of putting them together are very interesting indeed.
Does television excite me? I like writing articles, so I can see how the journalist has taken a tiny shred of truth and wrapped an enormous edifice of lies around it to make it more dramatic. I can see how the same picture sequence is used over and over again. There is nothing new. I might even be able to write better fiction than they do.
There are no new concepts on TV, and very rarely is there a new way of stringing concepts together. I am entertained sometimes by particularly blatant and ingenious lies, but mostly it is just a bore.
However, I would like to learn Italian, so that I can eavesdrop in the bus and the building sites. A certificate in commercial art and sculpture would be really interesting because I can't draw just now, and sculpture looks like magic to me. It doesn't even have to be a formal university course.
I would really like to get a job looking after camels and conducting tours across the Australian desert... at least until I had learned enough to start getting bored with that stage of my lifetime education.
More on Travel and Leisure for Baby Boomers
Travel Tips : Use Google Earth