Never Stop Growing: Lifelong Learning and Cognitive Vitality

Introduction

Think back to the last time you learned something properly new. Not a new software update at work or a new compliance form, but something you chose: a chord progression, a phrase in another language, how to cut a dovetail joint, why the Roman Republic fell. Most of us can remember the particular pleasure of it. There is the frustration of not getting it, then the slow click of understanding, and finally the quiet pride of being able to do something you could not do before.

For much of adult life there is little room for that kind of learning. Careers reward depth in a narrow field, and evenings are taken up with commuting, cooking, children and recovery. Curiosity gets shelved for “one day”. Early retirement can make “one day” arrive decades sooner. It gives you back the one resource that learning really needs: unhurried time.

This chapter looks at what that time can do for the mind. The research on cognitive reserve suggests that the brain, like the body, benefits from being challenged throughout life. Well-designed studies show that older adults who take on demanding new skills can sharpen their memory. Learning in later life is also linked with greater wellbeing, especially informal, sociable learning such as music groups, evening classes and interest groups. The UK has a remarkable national network of more than a thousand such groups, the u3a, which anyone not in full-time work can join.

There is also a harder truth here, and this chapter will not hide it. Some of the best-known research on retirement and the brain comes with a warning. Economists have found that people who stop working, especially early, tend on average to show faster declines in memory. The term used is “mental retirement”. The message is not that early retirement is bad for your brain. It is that work, whatever its faults, provides a steady diet of mental challenge, social contact and problem-solving. If you leave it, you need to replace that diet on purpose. The early retirees you will meet here did exactly that. There is an engineer who took early retirement at fifty-six, earned a master’s and a doctorate, and published a prize-shortlisted debut novel at seventy. There is a couple who studied Mandarin, Spanish, guitar and oil painting on the road, a software engineer who set out to learn a new language every two years, and more.

What the research tells us

Cognitive reserve: a brain that can take a knock

Why do two people with similar amounts of age-related change in the brain function so differently? One influential answer is cognitive reserve. In a widely cited review in The Lancet Neurology, Stern (2012) describes reserve as the capacity that lets some people tolerate more brain ageing or Alzheimer’s-related pathology than others while still functioning well. He distinguishes brain reserve, meaning differences in the physical brain, from cognitive reserve, meaning differences in how people use their brains to perform tasks, which may make some more resilient to damage. Epidemiological studies suggest that lifelong experiences, including education, occupational attainment and leisure activities in later life, can build this reserve. For example, the risk of Alzheimer’s disease is lower among people with more education or more complex occupations (Stern, 2012).

This idea has shaped international thinking on dementia prevention. The 2024 report of the Lancet standing Commission on dementia identified fourteen modifiable risk factors across the life course. They include less education, hearing loss, depression, physical inactivity, social isolation, high blood pressure and smoking, and the Commission estimated that nearly half of dementia cases worldwide could in theory be prevented or delayed by addressing them (Livingston et al., 2024). Several of these factors, notably social isolation, depression and inactivity, are ones that an active, curious and connected retirement can help with.

Learning demanding new skills can sharpen memory: the Synapse Project

For years a popular slogan was “use it or lose it”. But does taking up a new mental challenge in later life actually improve thinking, or do sharper people simply choose more challenging hobbies? A carefully designed experiment from the University of Texas at Dallas, known as the Synapse Project, tested this directly (Park et al., 2014).

The researchers enrolled 259 adults aged 60 to 90, 221 of whom completed the programme, and randomly assigned them to different activities for about three months. Three “productive engagement” groups learned new, demanding skills: digital photography (taught by a professional photographer, including photo-editing software), quilting, or both. They spent an average of about sixteen and a half hours a week at it. Comparison groups did “receptive” activities, either a social club with cooking, games, films, reminiscing and field trips but no new skills to master, or a “placebo” set of structured tasks that drew on existing knowledge and are commonly thought of as mentally engaging but have not been reliably linked with cognitive improvement. After three months, episodic memory, the kind we use to recall events and details, had improved significantly in the productive-engagement groups compared with the receptive groups. The photography group showed the strongest gains.

Two findings stand out for early retirees. First, novelty and challenge mattered. The benefit came from learning something genuinely hard and unfamiliar, not from simply keeping busy. Second, and somewhat surprisingly, social activity alone did not produce the memory gains. Company is wonderful for many reasons, as other chapters show, but this study suggests that the cognitive boost came from the effort of learning. The authors were careful about the limits too. Benefits were concentrated in memory rather than processing speed or other abilities, the intervention lasted only three months, and they called for long-term follow-up (Park et al., 2014).

A major review of this whole field by Hertzog et al. (2008), in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, framed the question as one of “enrichment”: can intellectual, physical and social activities help preserve and even improve cognitive function in adulthood? The Synapse Project is one of the clearest experiments to give a partly positive answer.

Languages: a promising story with an honest twist

Few activities capture the imagination like learning a new language in later life. Some striking observational findings lie behind this. Bialystok, Craik and Freedman (2007) studied the records of 184 patients diagnosed with dementia at a memory clinic and found that those who had been bilingual throughout life showed symptoms about four years later than monolinguals, with other measures being equivalent. In Scotland, Bak et al. (2014) used the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, whose members first sat an intelligence test at age eleven in 1947 and were retested in 2008–2010. Bilingual participants performed better in later life than their childhood ability would have predicted, especially in general intelligence and reading. Importantly, this included people who had learned their second language as adults.

But lifelong bilingualism is not the same as taking a language course at sixty-five, and here the evidence is more sobering. In a randomised controlled trial in Sweden, Berggren et al. (2020) assigned 160 healthy adults aged 65–75 either to an eleven-week beginners’ Italian course or to relaxation training. The language learners did pick up basic Italian, but there were negligible differences between the groups in memory, working memory or intelligence. The authors concluded that a basic foreign language course in older age is likely to have little or no effect on general cognitive abilities, while noting that it may still expand what people can do.

The honest conclusion is that you should learn a language because you want to speak it: to read Neruda in Spanish, chat to your neighbours in the Dordogne, or understand your grandchildren’s other grandparents. Do not do it expecting a short course to make you cleverer. The richer rewards, such as travel, friendship, confidence and a whole new culture opening up, are well worth having on their own terms.

Learning and wellbeing: the joy of the evening class

Cognition is only part of the story. Jenkins and Mostafa (2015) used the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to examine whether learning was linked with wellbeing among older adults in England, using the CASP-19 quality-of-life measure. They used fixed-effects models, which compare people with themselves over time and so reduce the influence of fixed personal traits. Learning was associated with higher wellbeing. Interestingly, the benefit was linked with informal learning, such as membership of education, music or arts groups and evening classes, rather than formal education or training courses. There was no evidence that formal courses were associated with higher wellbeing.

This is good news for anyone who dreads exams. Much of the value of learning in later life seems to come from the sociable, self-chosen, low-pressure kind: the choir, the art group, the local history society, the book club with a serious reading list.

The u3a: a learning movement built for the freedom years

The UK has an unusual resource for exactly this kind of learning. The u3a movement (originally the University of the Third Age) describes itself as one of the largest membership organisations in the UK, with more than 435,000 active members in over 1,000 local u3as. Its national charity, the Third Age Trust, was formed in 1983. Everything is run by volunteers, and members take turns to share what they know. There are no formal teachers or examinations. Crucially for readers of this book, membership is open to everyone who is not in full-time employment, so you do not have to wait for state pension age (Third Age Trust, n.d.). An early retiree of fifty-two can join a u3a Italian conversation group, a geology field trip or a philosophy discussion group next week, and can offer to lead one.

The warning: “mental retirement”

Now for the evidence that every early retiree should know about. In a much-discussed paper titled “Mental retirement”, economists Rohwedder and Willis (2010) compared memory scores among people in their early sixties across the United States, England and eleven other European countries. They used a simple word-recall test scored from 0 to 20. Because retirement ages differ between countries mainly because of pension, tax and disability rules, those differences can be used to estimate the effect of retirement itself. Their headline estimate was large: not working for pay was associated with a drop of about 4.7 points on the 0–20 memory scale compared with continuing to work. They concluded that early retirement has a significant negative effect on the cognitive ability of people in their early sixties.

They offered two possible explanations. The first is an “unengaged lifestyle”: work provides more mental challenge than many people’s lives outside work. The second is that people who expect to retire early may reduce their mental effort while still on the job, a kind of “on-the-job retirement” (Rohwedder and Willis, 2010).

Other studies have found similar patterns. Using US data, Bonsang, Adam and Perelman (2012) also found a significant negative effect of retirement on cognitive functioning. In the UK, Xue et al. (2018) followed 3,433 civil servants in the Whitehall II study for up to fourteen years before and after retirement. Verbal memory declined 38% faster after retirement than before, allowing for normal ageing. However, there was no significant change in abstract reasoning or verbal fluency. People in higher employment grades had been partly protected while working, but that protection disappeared on retirement.

The picture is not uniform, though. Coe et al. (2012), using a different method based on employer early-retirement offers, found that the apparent harm of retirement may not be causal. They found no clear effect for white-collar workers and, if anything, a positive relationship between retirement and cognition for blue-collar workers. For people whose jobs were physically exhausting or mentally monotonous, leaving work may free up energy for more stimulating activities.

Taken together, the lesson is not “don’t retire early”. It is “don’t retire from thinking”. What seems to matter is what replaces work. A retirement of passive leisure may well let memory slip. A retirement full of new skills, projects, reading, discussion and challenge is exactly what the enrichment research, from cognitive reserve to the Synapse Project, recommends.

Lives enriched: real stories

Anne Youngson — from chief engineer to novelist, via a doctorate

Anne Youngson spent about thirty years in the British motor industry, rising to chief engineer at Rover. After Ford took over Land Rover, she retired at fifty-six (Cocozza, 2021). By her own account she did not feel ready to stop. She worried about losing connections and not feeling fully engaged with the world. So she made a list of everything she might do, some of it, she admits, “really silly, like growing sweet peas” (Bellamy, 2024).

What followed was a second education. She enrolled on a creative writing course, then a master’s in creative writing at Oxford Brookes University, and then a PhD (Cocozza, 2021). During the doctorate her confidence finally grew enough for her to write Meet Me at the Museum. It was published when she was seventy and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award. More novels followed. She also took up horse riding and botanical painting, and said cheerfully that it did not matter that she was not good at either, because she simply enjoyed them (Cocozza, 2021).

Youngson describes the value of her courses with a writer’s precision: “Every time I did a course, I was really stimulated”. She adds that they did not so much teach her something new as help her “understand what I’m already doing and how I can do it better”. She also saw going back to school as a remedy for one of retirement’s quieter risks: “I thought the biggest danger of retirement is that you end up mixing with only the same people all the time” (Bellamy, 2024). Asked by The Guardian whether she wished she had started earlier, she was not sure. She believed a younger version of herself would not have had the courage to write such thoughtful novels, and declared: “Actually, I’m a big fan of old age” (Cocozza, 2021).

Jeremy Jacobson and Winnie Tseng (Go Curry Cracker) — students of the world

Jeremy Jacobson and his wife Winnie Tseng, who write the blog Go Curry Cracker, left work in October 2012. Jeremy was in his mid-thirties and Winnie five years younger. They set out to travel the world slowly (Jacobson, 2015; Go Curry Cracker, n.d.). Their blog describes Jeremy’s “love of learning and adventure” as what makes permanent travel suit him (Go Curry Cracker, n.d.).

In a guest post about two years into their retirement, Jeremy listed what they had done: six countries, whale sharks and baby turtles, volcanoes climbed. Alongside all this, they had “studied Spanish and Mandarin, guitar and flute, oil painting and jewelry making”. He wrote that for the past year he had been “studying Chinese 3 hours a day plus homework”, that his guitar solo on “Stairway to Heaven” had become “quite respectable”, and that he had become far more knowledgeable about investing and tax. What strikes him most is that none of it felt like discipline. In the words that open this chapter, it came from “the natural human desire to learn and create”, given the chance to happen naturally, with no profit motive (Jacobson, 2015). It is a vivid picture of the Synapse Project’s lesson in real life: novel, demanding, chosen challenges that fill a day with growth.

Ingrid (Second Half Travels) — a new language every two years

Ingrid, who uses only her first name publicly, spent more than a decade as a software engineer at a large Silicon Valley technology company before retiring early in 2016, at the age of forty-three. In retirement she founded Second Half Travels, a blog about travel built around language learning. As described in a 2021 podcast interview, her stated goal was to reach at least conversational fluency in a new language every two years through in-country immersion courses. By then she had done so in Spanish, Portuguese and French, studying at language schools in seven countries, with Russian next on her list (Chen, 2021).

Ingrid is clear about why learning matters to her. Endless sightseeing, she said, eventually starts to feel pointless and even alienating: “all the churches start to look the same”. Language study changed that: “I find language learning gives the trip a structure. It gives you a purpose.” It also brought community, through classmates, homestays with local families and schools whose social networks drew people back year after year (Chen, 2021). Her story shows learning doing several jobs at once: giving shape to days, meaning to travel and friends to a solo traveller.

The Mad Fientist — “an exciting world of things you can learn”

The writer and podcaster known as the Mad Fientist, Brandon, left his job as a software developer on 29 July 2016, in his thirties, after reaching financial independence (Mad Fientist, 2017). A year later he published a candid review of his first year of freedom. Some of it was hard: he found that constant travel made it difficult to focus and that he needed some normality and meaningful work. But much of the year was about learning. He and his wife took climbing lessons, and he thought, half-seriously, that he might become a rock climber or mountaineer. He went to a coffee tasting to understand a drink he had always consumed without thinking, and he began a coached weightlifting programme that changed his health.

He summed it up as a lesson: “There’s an exciting world of things you can learn about and explore and FI gives you the energy, freedom, and time to do it.” Another lesson was even bolder: “You can be anybody you want after FI” (Mad Fientist, 2017). In later interviews he described his passion for learning and developing new skills, which led him to pursue a long-held dream of becoming a musician and releasing an album (Carson, 2021).

Fritz Gilbert (The Retirement Manifesto) — a woodworker at heart

Fritz Gilbert and his wife retired early in June 2018, when he was fifty-five, after a long corporate career, and moved to a cabin in the North Georgia mountains (Gilbert, n.d.). In retirement he taught himself woodworking, building the workbenches and stations in his own workshop and then using those skills to build dog houses for a charity project. He wrote that he had been “having fun learning woodworking” as he built out the shop (Gilbert, 2021).

In a later post setting out his “secrets” to a good retirement, “Never Stop Learning” is one of the seven. He writes that he loves the challenge of working out new woodworking projects as he goes, and gets “a great sense of accomplishment” when he completes one. He also recommends residential craft schools to readers who want to learn a new skill (Gilbert, 2023). His story is a reminder that learning in retirement does not have to mean degrees or languages. Learning to make things well with your hands, for a purpose you care about, is just as much a form of lifelong learning.

A balanced view

This chapter is optimistic, but the evidence needs careful handling.

First, the “mental retirement” findings are real and should be taken seriously. Several large studies using different methods and countries suggest that, on average, memory declines faster after people stop working (Rohwedder and Willis, 2010; Bonsang, Adam and Perelman, 2012; Xue et al., 2018). Early retirees are not immune. If anything, leaving work at fifty-five or forty means there are more years in which to keep the mind active by choice.

Second, the effect is not universal. Coe et al. (2012) found no clear causal harm for white-collar workers and possibly benefits for blue-collar workers, and Xue et al. (2018) found changes in verbal memory but not in reasoning or fluency. The outcome seems to depend on what kind of work you are leaving and, above all, what you do next.

Third, not all learning is equal for the brain. The Synapse Project found memory gains from demanding, novel skills, not from socialising or easy tasks (Park et al., 2014). A short beginners’ language course did not improve general cognition in a well-run trial (Berggren et al., 2020). Brain-training promises and headlines about particular hobbies should be treated with caution. The most defensible advice is to keep taking on things that are genuinely hard for you.

Fourth, much of the evidence is observational. People who stay curious may differ in many ways from those who do not. Cognitive reserve studies show associations, and the Lancet Commission’s estimate that nearly half of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed is a theoretical calculation based on risk factors, not a promise to any individual (Livingston et al., 2024).

Finally, learning’s value is not only cognitive. Jenkins and Mostafa (2015) linked informal learning with better wellbeing, and the stories in this chapter are full of friendship, confidence, purpose and fun. Even if a new skill does nothing measurable for your memory, it may still greatly enrich your life, and that is reason enough.

Putting it into practice

• Replace the mental workout that work provided. Before you leave, list the ways your job stretches your mind (problem-solving, learning new systems, explaining things to others), and plan how you will replace each one.
• Choose something genuinely hard and new. In the spirit of the Synapse Project, pick a skill that is unfamiliar and demanding for you, such as photography, an instrument, coding, carpentry or a science, and give it several hours a week.
• Mix the social with the stretching. Social groups alone may not sharpen memory, but they bring many other benefits. Combine challenge and company: a choir that sings in four-part harmony, an advanced conversation class, a challenging reading group.
• Join or start a u3a group. Membership is open to anyone not in full-time work, so you do not need to wait for state pension age. If the subject you want does not exist, offer to convene it.
• Consider formal study if it inspires you. The Open University, local colleges and university continuing-education departments offer everything from short courses to doctorates. Anne Youngson’s route from evening class to PhD is proof it can be done.
• Learn languages for joy and connection. Immersion courses abroad, as Ingrid found, can give travel structure and friendship. Go for the love of it, not for a guaranteed brain boost.
• Teach what you know. Explaining your expertise to others, whether through mentoring, u3a groups or volunteering, is one of the most demanding and rewarding forms of learning.
• Protect the basics. Get your hearing and eyesight checked, stay physically active, look after your mood and stay connected. These are some of the dementia risk factors identified by the Lancet Commission that you can do something about (Livingston et al., 2024).
• Keep a learning log. Each month, note one thing you learned that you could not do before. Over the years it becomes a record of a mind still growing.

Questions for reflection

1. What did you love learning as a child or young adult that you set aside for work and family?
2. Which parts of your current job keep your mind sharpest, and how might you replace them after you leave?
3. What skill would you most like to have in ten years’ time, and what would it take to start this month?
4. Are you more drawn to formal learning (courses, qualifications) or informal learning (groups, projects, self-teaching), and why?
5. How do you feel about being a beginner again, and how might you make peace with being “rubbish at it”, as Anne Youngson did with riding and painting?
6. Who could you learn alongside, and who could you teach?
7. How will you know, a year into early retirement, whether you are still stretching your mind?

References