Advantage of Storing Youth

[StanLemon]

I find it interesting that, at least according to Sazed, the Keepers didn't notice one of the biggest advantages of Atium Feruchemy. Making themselves children in order to study and learn. 

Young brains, especially that of children are phenomenally better at learning and creating intuitive connections to develop skills than adult brains are. My only guess is that between Zinc and Copper they thought their memory and mental processing abilities were sufficient but there really is nothing like a child's brain to pick up information and skills

[offer]

During the final empire atium was very expensive. It is possible that the keepers did not have enough Atium to use it in such a way, at least not in a significant amount.

[MangoBoi101 he/him]

I dont think that would be faster then using copper to store memory, either way they can just read the text and memorize it they would not need to be a child to do that and as offer said it would be to expensive. It might work but I doubt it.

 

[StanLemon]

They clearly had enough Atium to use it as a disguise, plus WoB indicates a decent of youth can be stored in a bead. But I agree, threy probably never tested for real advantages. As far as having a memory in a Coppermind goes, while that is tremendously useful in itself, but nothing compares to developing a proper understanding of the material. Compare it to us having the internet, sure you can have access to all sorts of information but it will still be less useful than truly learning it.

[IlstrawberrySeed]

There are 2 problems with this.

• How do they get the required amount of youth to become a child? Sounds like fun to be 90 years for 3 days to become a 7 year old for a day as a 45 year old.
• How do they know that a child learns better? If they test the ability for people to learn at different ages, it might reveal their hand.

[Quantus he/him]

54 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

They clearly had enough Atium to use it as a disguise, plus WoB indicates a decent of youth can be stored in a bead. But I agree, threy probably never tested for real advantages. As far as having a memory in a Coppermind goes, while that is tremendously useful in itself, but nothing compares to developing a proper understanding of the material. Compare it to us having the internet, sure you can have access to all sorts of information but it will still be less useful than truly learning it.

"A Decent of Youth" can be stored via Compounding.  Otherwise you'd have to spend an equal amount of time as an old (and likely forgetful) person, so you likely arent going to be able to gain much ground compared to juicing with Zinc through your classes in your initial schooling years.

[StanLemon]

6 minutes ago, Quantus said:

"A Decent of Youth" can be stored via Compounding.  Otherwise you'd have to spend an equal amount of time as an old (and likely forgetful) person, so you likely arent going to be able to gain much ground compared to juicing with Zinc through your classes in your initial schooling years.

Nothing here changes my argument. Yes you could use Zinc during your initial schooling years, but how many times have you needed to learn new things after you left your childhood?

Let's say you are 30, spend a couple hours each day as a 60 year old while you rest rest and likely are storingother traits too. Make yourself a 10 year old a couple hours a day while you study. Kids often learn subjects by studying for a couple hours at a time too, and they often pick things up significantly faster than adults because their brains are practically hardwired to learn

[Quantus he/him]

1 minute ago, StanLemon said:

Nothing here changes my argument. Yes you could use Zinc during your initial schooling years, but how many times have you needed to learn new things after you left your childhood?

Let's say you are 30, spend a couple hours each day as a 60 year old while you rest rest and likely are storingother traits too. Make yourself a 10 year old a couple hours a day while you study. Kids often learn subjects by studying for a couple hours at a time too, and they often pick things up significantly faster than adults because their brains are practically hardwired to learn

My point is that time spent as a 60 yo will most likely increase your forgetfulness by roughly the same margin you gain by being a 10 yo (or rather a 2-7 yo age-range when that added mental plasticity is in play).  So you gain a slight advantage in learning as a child, and then forget slightly more of it while you "rest" as a geriatric.  

[StanLemon]

14 minutes ago, Ookla the Wandering said:

My point is that time spent as a 60 yo will most likely increase your forgetfulness by roughly the same margin you gain by being a 10 yo (or rather a 2-7 yo age-range when that added mental plasticity is in play).  So you gain a slight advantage in learning as a child, and then forget slightly more of it while you "rest" as a geriatric.  

I know plenty of 60 year olds with pretty decent memory, and if you are that worried there is your Coppermind to ofset it. The point I'm making is you can develop skills and build better comprehension as a child than just storing information in your Coppermind alone.

Edited November 29, 2022 by StanLemon

[Quantus he/him]

3 minutes ago, StanLemon said:

I know plenty of 60 year olds with pretty decent memory, and if you are that there is your Coppermind to ofset it. The point I'm making is you can develop skills and build better comprehension as a child than just storing information in your Coppermind alone.

I do too.  But I also know a lot of very cute and still very...slow children. 

I think my point is that I believe you are over-estimating how much gain's you'd be able to get cranking yourself back to the "undeveloped prefrontal cortex of an actual 2-7 year old child,  which is the age it would take (assuming, of course, that all the competing studies claiming the increased learning is to environmental differences with adults and not their grey-matter are incorrect). 

I do think it's questionable how much of it would survive the Increasing Old Age time you'd need to spend to keep reaching back that far into your lifespan.  Copperminds can help but Memory and Understanding are different things, and WOB says Copperminds cant hold skills or muscle memory or such things. 

We also have to question whether any of the gains would survive the realmic nature of the "Age" change, which already has an odd relationship to things like Health and Mental Speed that we typically associate with Age. It remains entirely possible changing your age would have Zero impact on your memory or your mental acuity precisely because those traits are affected by their own separate metals.  

The realmic question is very similar to the old debate of whether you could use F-Gold after your workouts to gain muscle mass faster. The (still unconfirmed, I believe) conclusion we came to was that you Cannot because Gold doesnt actually Increase your Biological Healing processes, and since it undoes the Damage and restores your body to how it previously was per your Spiritual Aspect, your body will not actually go through the damage & healing tissue cycles that build muscle over the course of an exercise regiment.  

[StanLemon]

So this is very interesting 

1 hour ago, Ookla the Wandering said:

I do too.  But I also know a lot of very cute and still very...slow children. 

I've also known "slow children" but short of an actual learning disability, they still in general learn faster than most adults. It's just that people are comparing them to other kids. Also most of the slower children I have personally known, it's often been more of an issue of retaining their interest in a subject than an actual difficulty learning. 

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I think my point is that I believe you are over-estimating how much gain's you'd be able to get cranking yourself back to the "undeveloped prefrontal cortex of an actual 2-7 year old child,  which is the age it would take (assuming, of course, that all the competing studies claiming the increased learning is to environmental differences with adults and not their grey-matter are incorrect). 

I don't think I am overestimating it, the amount of knowledge and skills children develop in a very short time frame. People if anything underestimate how much kids have to learn just to function in society. 

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I do think it's questionable how much of it would survive the Increasing Old Age time you'd need to spend to keep reaching back that far into your lifespan.  Copperminds can help but Memory and Understanding are different things, and WOB says Copperminds cant hold skills or muscle memory or such things. 

Skills and understanding don't leave as quickly as factiod based memory. I know a lot of people in their 70s and older, short of dementia and other things like that, most have not forgotten skills they developed unless they have been unused for a significant time but instead forget things more along the lines of names or dates or numbers. Factoids that can be stored in Copperminds basically 

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We also have to question whether any of the gains would survive the realmic nature of the "Age" change, which already has an odd relationship to things like Health and Mental Speed that we typically associate with Age. It remains entirely possible changing your age would have Zero impact on your memory or your mental acuity precisely because those traits are affected by their own separate metals.  

I can understand that, but I hard disagree with youth not affecting those. Your age is both a result of all those things and a determinator of them.

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The realmic question is very similar to the old debate of whether you could use F-Gold after your workouts to gain muscle mass faster. The (still unconfirmed, I believe) conclusion we came to was that you Cannot because Gold doesnt actually Increase your Biological Healing processes, and since it undoes the Damage and restores your body to how it previously was per your Spiritual Aspect, your body will not actually go through the damage & healing tissue cycles that build muscle over the course of an exercise regiment.  

We actually have multiple examples in the books of Gold increasing biological healing rather than just undoing damage. Kar is left with scars from Vin's attack, I believe Sazed had scars from Marsh Pushing rings into him (though those scars might be from the surgery to remove them), and Wayne when tapping slowly to preserve his Health developed scabs and fresh skin like someone healing naturally. Based on examples from the books it would look like when tapping slowly that you heal naturally if at an accelerated rate but that there is a threshold where it goes into full Investiture healing 

Edit because I didn't notice this

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There are 2 problems with this.

• How do they get the required amount of youth to become a child? Sounds like fun to be 90 years for 3 days to become a 7 year old for a day as a 45 year old.

I think your math might be off on this. If you're 45 and make yourself 90 for 3 days then you have 3 days of 45 years of age stored up. Not 1 day of of 38 years

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• How do they know that a child learns better? If they test the ability for people to learn at different ages, it might reveal their hand.

Like I said in the initial post, the Keepers never seemed to have known about the advantage

Edited November 29, 2022 by StanLemon

[IlstrawberrySeed]

From my understanding, when you tap more than you filled, it isn't additive but multiplicative, so 3 days at double age is equal to 3 days at half age (22.5), 1.5 at 1/4 age (11.5), etc. brining 1.5 to 1 would bring it to 7.5 years old. As far as I know, there is no defined formula for compounding yet, and this is just how I understand it/believes it works.

[Returned he/him]

It doesn't strike me as that great of an advantage. Even if we agree that a child can learn, in a generic sense, more quickly than an older person, is that increased study efficiency enough to overcome the amount of time you have to dedicate to storing the youth? Like, if it cuts the amount of time you need to learn some concept from 10 hours' study to 5, but you have to spend several days storing youth to gain that advantage, it might be strictly better to spend the extra 5 hours studying over those days and not deal with atium Feruchemy at all. A recurring thing in the Mistborn books is that, while Feruchemist characters tend to have enough stored attributes to do what they need to do in the story, those needs are relatively rare and require a huge amount of time storing attributes to be able to meet them. If the effective rate of youth storage required to service one practical study session is low, it may not be practical to take advantage of such a trick even if it would work well.

And all of the other concerns still apply, too: atium is expensive and rare, Keepers were a secretive group focused on staying alive and undetected more than developing neat Feruchemical tricks, they had other methods of working with knowledge, Keepers may not have had the opportunity to observe learning rate differences by age, zinc and copper may simply be superior in this application, obvious Feruchemy was incredibly dangerous to Keepers individually and as a group, and more.

We also don't know a whole lot about the specific mechanisms, magical and otherwise, of Feruchemy like this. Atium Feruchemy might work just as you suggest, however beneficial or not it ends up being, or it might not work that way at all. "Kids learn faster" might not apply to Feruchemy any more than "sufficiently increased weight from tapping iron should crush a Feruchemist's own body" does. The reasoning is clear, but the presence of magic can arbitrarily preclude it.

[MangoBoi101 he/him]

I was reading this and I have a question, what if you compounded youth, I dont know a lot about compounding but what would that look like? Just say your a twinborn could you learn faster? 

[offer]

13 hours ago, MangoBoi101 said:

I was reading this and I have a question, what if you compounded youth, I dont know a lot about compounding but what would that look like? Just say your a twinborn could you learn faster? 

You could stay young for longer periods of time without needing to fill the metalmind by behind old.

[MangoBoi101 he/him]

4 hours ago, offer said:

You could stay young for longer periods of time without needing to fill the metalmind by behind old.

so would that benifit your learning, like in the orriganal question but compound it so you can learn for longer periods of time? how benifitial would that be?

[StanLemon]

31 minutes ago, MangoBoi101 said:

so would that benifit your learning, like in the orriganal question but compound it so you can learn for longer periods of time? how benifitial would that be?

Compounding in most cases is an advantage. For the learning part of it, it would mean you aren't just limited to whatever youth you can scrape by meaning whatever time you do dedicate to building skills you wouldn’t be constrained by a time limit. Young brains are better at being able to forming connections, it's one of the reasons children learn so fast. Potentially you could make yourself young without ever having the risks that come with age. Potentially you could shave weeks if not months off of anything you are trying learn or skill you are trying to develop 

Edited December 19, 2022 by StanLemon