(please, no comments about Trump)
Maybe only a very small fraction of Dopers can answer this, but I am curious how much of a 7-year old child’s personality, mind, and way of thinking is still retained by a 70-year old person. (**Excluding **factors such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, or deterioration conditions.)
Given the saying that people don’t actually grow up, they simply learn more and more how to behave outwardly like adults, do 70-year olds ever think things like, “I want ice cream and I want it NOW, give me ice cream now?” Do they feel inwardly like stamping their feet or throwing a tantrum at times? Do they want to draw pictures, finger paintings, build sand castles on the beach, etc., or think, “Why doesn’t he/she like me?”
Most regular people grow out of tantrums, building sandcastles and other stuff at a much earlier age. We learn to temper our desires and apart from being with the kids/grandkids, sandcastles are shoved onto the backburner in favour of other more pleasurable things.
How much of old Theseus’ mind is child Theseus’ mind?
Trying to take a best stab at it, overall personality, as characterized by features of temperament, seems to have significant stability across the lifecycle.
And plenty of past work that demonstrates that major personality traits show great stability through adult life.
The impulses, the id if you will, ever goes away. It is just constrained by our executive function skills and our having internalized social expectations. You’ve exempted various conditions, like frontal lobe dementia, but in fact they are the natural experiment of removing those constraints and revealing the impulses that are there all the time.
I’m not 70, but I can’t imagine ever losing some of the personality traits that were established at a young age (in particular, curiosity and verbosity). I don’t know if that counts as the ‘same mind’ or just my current mind doing the same things as it did before. I’m not sure how we would define that even in terms of neurons etc - if I open the same door twice on different days, is that the same action, or two actions that just happen to look the same?
Well, coming out of her husband’s funeral, my great-grandmother declared, “I want ice cream. We’re getting ice cream.”
“Mother, it might” “the only man who could give me orders just died. We are going for ice cream RIGHT NOW.”
They went for ice cream.
Stuff such as your taste in food change; we also learn better ways to deal with frustration (although, and IANAPsychologist, it seems to me like the basic mechanisms I’m using at almost-50 were already there by 5). But personality traits (analytical or not, impulsive or not, etc.) don’t really change that much after age 6; many are evident earlier, but a toddler is easier to mold than a teenager. Adult remarks or behaviors that a teenager would ignore can be huge for a kid who’s three feet tall if that.
Are you thinking of a return to form when we’re elderly sort of thing? If not, why would a 70-year-old who “still” feels these desires feel differently then than at 20 or 40 or 60 years old? Do you feel like stamping your feet and throwing a tantrum or finger painting now, at presumably younger than 70?
I’m 72, and I have evolved quite a bit over the decades, and continue to do so.
But I remember being seven. I remember how I felt about things and people, and the little idiosyncrasies and tastes that I had at that age. In these respects, I really haven’t changed much. It’s the subconscious that’s constant, in spite of how much the conscious thoughts and choices have evolved.
I remember my father yelling at me for mixing all my food together, and for eating a piece of pie crust-end first; I still do. I remember my teacher withholding lunch until I finished my morning’s work; I’m still slow and meticulous. I remember being close to one boy, yet in general getting along with girls better; I still do. And I remember the tall, skinny kid on my street who I was strangely attracted to; my husband is tall and skinny.
I haven’t in any way recently “reverted” to my 7-year-old self. Rather, there are certain emotional qualities and quirks that have remained unchanged throughout my life. I am, in so many ways, the same person I always was.
I’m the same person I was as a young child but things have happened to me in the mean time, I’ve had long thoughts that led to conclusions that I’ve subsequently counted on to shape my further understandings and behavior.
None of those changes make me not the same person; I can understand my 5 year old thought processes and they make sense given what was available to me at the time.
I have little conscious memory of my youth. (Or my teens. Or two weeks ago.) But various accounts of me as a child suggest that the vast majority of changes in me come from an alteration in restraints - I now have money, I now have a car, I now get threats from my doctor. But various aspects of my mind and personality - intelligent, analytical, lazy - remain consistent between the present and historical accounts.
Of course, I’m only 41. I might spontaneously turn into a different person any day now. Any day now…
Yes. I’m 79 and still need to rationalize desire suppression, but it has just become more systematic and a part of my natural lifestyle. I eat ice cream every other night, alternating with cake. Because I’m grown up now and I can. If there isn’t any, I blame my wife for shopping failure. But I suppress the tantrum and don’t tell her that.
I think the key is that adults have learned, until it become second nature, to substitute logical and rational behaviors for those that might have risen more readily to immediate consciousness when 7.
