Learning hurts your brain

I've always felt there are two types of learning.<p>The first kind is where I'm learning how to do something completely new: ride a bike, multiply matrices, juggle, regular expressions, whatever. My brain must be building new algorithms--it's creating new brain software.<p>The second kind of learning is where I'm learning new facts and figures: the state capitals, the characters on Game of Thrones, the top fifty dirty jokes, etc. This is my brain filling in a database or hash table.<p>The first kind of learning definitely hurts a lot more than the second.

Assuming this is true ( I tend to doubt popular science articles by default at this stage) it seems that permanent damage is speculation and the response could be analogous to hypertrophy. Saying weight lifting damages your muscles is also true but its only part of the story.