The reward for being a good worker is more work.

There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm going to make some assertions based on the current science/psychology and my personal intuition. (Keep in mind I have an active role in neuroscientific research, so it's not completely baseless.) This is the a heavy reduction of the science, but I hope I get the point across.

Here is my personal way of thinking about it:

The brain is like a tree of connections. You have a constant barrage of sensory input. Whether sleeping or awake, it's hard to turn off sensory perception. This gets filtered through a network of neurons saying "fire" or "don't fire." The inhibitory processes do a great job of filtering unimportant stuff, or maybe we just have a limited "bandwidth" that necessitates this and "prioritizes the queue" if you will.

Based on the signaling patterns the connections between neurons strengthen or weaken. This could cause morphological changes at the dendritic spines (message receivers) or the receptors on certain cells get an increased sensitivity based on their rate of fire.

Here's where my personal opinion leaks in a little. I look at memories like shapes. It's not a storage, but a topology of the cascading effects of a series of neurons. Some shapes are more efficient. Others are hazy, but strengthen a certain way over time.

This strengthening is not permanent. It's not a slow "fading" of the strength of a connection either. There is a constant state of degradation thanks to immunological cells called microglia. The microglia function much like other immunological cells. They eat dead stuff and protect the brain. They also "prune" weak connections.

Synaptic pruning is a very important process in development. Microglia "eat" the connection or engulf it rendering it ineffective. Children have many more neuronal connections than adults. Microglia get fairly active and there is a massive pruning period in the developmental brain. This happens at different rates for different regions, but ultimately (maybe) as a side effect neurosignaling pathways become more efficient. I'd also argue this makes them more rigid and less adaptable. Most simply stated, the adult "tree" isn't making new branches that will grow into primary branches in the future.

So, even though people may think of adults having "less space" it probably doesn't have as much to do with that than new (substantial) branches are much harder to grow.

In your defense, nurture always has a lot to do with everything. (Epigenetics may have some strong impacts here as it can create generational change.) What you're exposed to in development creates branches that may become strong enough in the face of the dynamically changing winds of degradation mediated by microglia. There's less room for this to happen in the adult brain though, because the connections are less; therefore they are more strong. (Used more often etc.)

I'm currently working on so many things (while a student at the university), but one of the things I'm most excited about is developing my own experiment for studying this synaptic pruning and its effects on consciousness through a interdisciplinary approach with computation and biomedical science (through anesthesia).

I could throw some much crazier shit out there but this is one of the many threads in my life. Hence why I'm not writing on Hive. (I know, I suck.)

Hope you and the family are well!