Episode 33: Tania Rodriguez, Leah Ferguson study how to improve learning in older adults

How do you keep learning when you get old? Keep learning when you get old. It’s not a riddle, say Tania Rodriguez and Leah Ferguson (with the red streaks on the left, if you see the thumbnail) working at the Calla Lab at UC Riverside with their inspiring leader, Rachel Wu, PhD. (Stay to the end to hear how awesome Wu is.) 

Rodriguez is a first-year PhD student in the psychology program studying low-income minority older adults helping them to increase cognitive function and stave off cognitive decline in their later years. Ideally, she’d like her research to help us understand how older people can learn new skills and keep their brains healthier later in life. When you’re old and you want to learn something, you can, she argues. 

Ferguson is another first-year student in the program, and she’s studying “learning based off of necessity” to help other underserved communities, like people with disabilities or citizens returning to society after being institutionalized in prison. 

Our conversation rolls through neuroscience, how experiments are conducted (Calla Lab looks at brain waves and neuroscience evidence of learning, too), what learning looks like for older folks in tougher circumstances (like marginalized communities and people post-prison), and how they plant the question in everyone, even their own relatives: Why do you think you can’t learn things you want to learn when you’re old?  

Can an old dog learn new tricks? Rodriguez and Ferguson say, heck yeah (not literally). Let them sell you on it! 

This is the second in a three-part series on childhood, adolescence, and old age. Catch the adolescence episode here. 

Editor’s note: I had to frantically buy premium Zoom while this conversation went on because, with two awesome guests, free Zoom was going to boot me after 40 minutes. If you can’t tell when I had to mute my mic and frantically enter credit card data, praying my guests wouldn’t stop or ask me a question, I did my job. Why, Zoom? Why?