Brains Work Best At Age of 39 267
Scientists at the University of California Los Angeles are reporting that while some people may think "life begins at 40," all it seems to do is slow down. According to recent research, at age 39 our brain reaches its peak speed, and it's all downhill after that. "The loss of a fatty skin that coats the nerve cells, called neurons, during middle age causes the slowdown, experts say. The coating acts as insulation, similar to the plastic covering on an electrical cable, and allows for fast bursts of signals around the body and brain. When the sheath deteriorates, signals passing along the neurons in the brain slow down. This means reaction times in the body are slower too."
Relates to neurological disease as well (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, AFAIK, myelin breakdown due to a malfunctioning immune system is very much related to diseases like MS and ALS, among others.
Which begs the question, if we could fix those disorders including restoring the myelin around the nerve fibers, could we keep people's brains working better for longer?
What about exercise? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is well known that regular intense exercise has a profound impact on aging and brain performance.
I can't take a report serious that doesn't take the effect of exercise into consideration and doesn't even mention it.
So does 39 apply to complete couch potatoes? Average Americans with little exercise? Athletes?
Re:Relates to neurological disease as well (Score:5, Interesting)
I expect this to suddenly be "news" in about five years.
Re:Ahem ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:...and they said.... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is No "one" point where the body stops working. Different systems age at different rates:
- the reproductive system peaks somewhere around age 16 or 17 (lowest risk of birth defects) ;-)
- the *desire* for sex peaks just prior to menopause for women (circa age 35) and apparently never ends for men
- flexibility (ala gymanasts and skaters) peaks at 15 and ends around 25
- reaction time peaks at 30
- and now it's revealed that the human brain peaks just prior to 40 - after which the neurons' tendrils start falling apart (like an old rubber hose).
Not mine. (Score:3, Interesting)
Brains Work Best At Age of 39
I was in a bad car wreck at age 24, dropped ten points on my IQ. Lucky for me it was 142 before the wreck.
It seems to have gotten progressively better since then, until a few years ago when it kind of reached a plateau; I don't think I'm as creative as I was a few years ago.
When the sheath deteriorates, signals passing along the neurons in the brain slow down. This means reaction times in the body are slower too.
That doesn't mean you're not as smart, it means your reflexes are slower. You're born as intelligent as you'll ever be; your capacity to learn is at its maximum. However, you are also as ignorant as you'll ever be, as you know absolutely nothing whatever.
A middle aged professor I once knew was fond of telling his students "I've forgotten more than you've ever learned".
FRAUD ALERT -- Slashdot pseudo-science (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe older people don't take finger-tapping seriously. Maybe younger people are far more likely to have played computer games.
I met a man who was 55 who told me that he didn't get a good score on a computer pinball game he had just begun playing because he was old. Two weeks later, when I saw him again, he said his score had tripled.
Quote from the article linked by Slashdot: "Significantly, the research suggests that the myelin breakdown process should also reduce all other brain functions for which performance speed is dependent on higher AP frequencies, including memory;
That's wild over-interpretation. There is no "should" in science. There is only theory, and it is necessary to emphasize that theories are only that, theories.
Re:Relates to neurological disease as well (Score:3, Interesting)
Can these substances be used to help restore lost motor function due to the immune system attacking the myelin sheath of motor neurons? If so it should basically fix things like ALS, MS, MMN... I assume not, as those diseases are (to the extent of my knowledge) treated with totally different approaches?
Noise (Score:4, Interesting)
Being 44 years old now, I have noticed that I'm not able to think as clearly as I did in my early thirties. In my self analysis, however, I find the biggest culprit is "brain noise." When I think about something, irrelevant associations will pop in with much greater frequency, distracting me from "pure" concentration. Which makes me wonder if it's simply a natural consequence of life: more and more detail is stored away in my head. A younger person with a relatively "empty" head isn't as distracted by all the useless dreck and is able to form thoughts more cleanly.
Even as I type this post, my lifetime of experience keep popping in with tangentially relevant information, not to mention songs triggered by phrases, movie quotes and other useless crapola. :D
I've actually wondered if there are mental exercises such as meditation that might help to quiet all the noise.
Re:Relates to neurological disease as well (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the research on the 'racetam family of bioactives has been done in Russia, and because of this there are both mistrusts and language barriers to overcome, but in doing so I discovered some pretty massively interesting studies all about specifically myelin sheath issues. So, since these substances are freely available in the US without any kind of prescription (unlike Russia, interestingly), I purchased a few and fed them to my mother, who is in the last couple of stages of post polio syndrome, which among other things (to put it in a nutshell) severely inhibits myelin effectiveness in nerve sheath maintenance. When she started the regimen a year ago, she couldn't walk at all and had great difficulty grasping things with her left hand, and was also in tremdous pain.
Just a week ago she and I walked about six blocks to a restaurant, and then back. She can grasp things in her left hand fairly well at this point, and is in very little pain.
I don't know myelin "helping" nootropics are the holy grail of neurological disorders, but they appear to have helped at least one person tremendously.
Re:Midlife crisis (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmmmm. Midlife crises? Jackass-ery? Do something?
I had my midlife crisis at 39. I decided to "go and do something." The thing I did was 17 years old, drop-dead gorgeous, and had enough "daddy issues" to last a lifetime.
It all worked out pretty well and we're still friends but I gotta say this: Realizing that you're 40 years old and you're agonizing over the choice of what present to get your girlfriend for her high school graduation is pretty much the *definition* of jackass.
That was a long time ago. I'm an old fart now and I've learned in the ensuing years that it's pretty easy to find stunningly attractive women of all ages who still have exploitable daddy issues. Thank heavens for divorce, broken homes, absent fathers, and the screwed-up daughters that those things produce. If not for them, I'd never get laid.
Re:Relates to neurological disease as well (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not dissing you or your mother, but that could have been the placebo effect. Without a control group, we'll never know. I'm happy for you in any case, and I would say that if nothing else we need more research here.
Interesting article [sciencenews.org]. This drug "reboots" the immune system, allowing myelin sheathes to reform. I'm waiting to see if these results can be duplicated; if so this stuff might actually be the holy grail you speak of.
Re:Noise (Score:3, Interesting)
When I think about something, irrelevant associations will pop in with much greater frequency, distracting me from "pure" concentration.
I've actually wondered if there are mental exercises such as meditation that might help to quiet all the noise.
I know the kind of noise you're talking about, and I would recommend a different approach - rather than learning a technique to "block it out", instead learn techniques for effective brain "multi-tasking". You can keep a very strong focus on the topic at hand, as well as let the useless dreck wander through without interrupting you (but if something useful floats by, you can grab it and run with it).
My recommendation for this would be to overly excite your brain for a bit with LOTS of useless extra information flooding through your mind. A strong dose of LSD (250 micrograms or so) combined with a lot of sensory input would do the trick (although, if you've not used LSD before, I'd recommend first taking that dose WITHOUT strong sensory input, then doing it with the sensory input a few weeks later). Once you get your head straight from that experience, you should find yourself better able to concentrate on a topic without the other things distracting you as much, despite them still actually being there.
Note: LSD is illegal pretty much everywhere, and this is only my own personal recommendation based on both personal experience and anecdotal evidence from associates. If you've got any problems with either the idea of taking a controlled substance, or the idea of self-medicating with a very potent psychedelic that (unfortunately) has not had the opportunity for much more than limited psychiatric testing, then this advise may not be suitable for you.
(of course, with the name "Reality Master", I really do recommend it if you haven't tried it - you might then get to understand your chosen name on many new and unexpected levels)
Response time does not mean everything... (Score:3, Interesting)
It might be slower, but I hope the experiences accumulated through the last 39 years still payoff after that.
It's like a higher latency link doesn't mean worse if bandwidth is high enough.
Another analogy is that the CPU clock rate is not the answer of everything. The cache, architecture and everything also play a role.
It's more like you should shift from NetBurst to something else at around 39.
Re:Relates to neurological disease as well (Score:4, Interesting)
The placebo effect on brain development/neurogenesis/related is huge. IIRC the research I read was comparing "you will get perfect again", both with and without some drug (Valium?) to "you might get better, but you won't be as good as before" with and without the drug.
No one ever got completely perfect again, but people who were told that they would fared better. These were reproduced a couple of times, and MRIs showed significant (yes, statistically significant) neurogenesis difference, although not by a wide margin.
Note: I'm now completely offtopic, talking about loss of blood supply and permanent brain damage while TFA is talking about myelination.
Re:Speed versus flexibility (Score:4, Interesting)
The New Yorker had an interesting article a few weeks back about young vs old geniuses, that your post made me think of. Let me see if I can find it....
Ah, here it is [newyorker.com]
From reading various things, I've come to the conclusion that brains are hard to generalize. Even assuming one of the million things that can go wrong with them doesn't, in fact, happen, they still develop differently from individual to individual, and that what we presume to be the normal way that people's brains "age" isn't necessarily so.
An illustrative tale (Score:3, Interesting)
Old guys can still get in their licks. Literally.
I'm an old fart. I was at a Renaissance Faire, getting a big kick out of watching 3 or 4 tough-acting, frat-boy types, half-drunk, trying to impress the little hotties in their posse. They were trying to ring the bell at that old carnival game where you hit a teeter-totter thing to launch a metal pellet upwards.
I don't think any of them had ever done any physical labor. Swinging a sledge isn't all that hard if you just relax and use the momentum instead of trying to muscle it through. These guys wore themselves out and most didn't get halfway up the scale.
I slid up to the lady selling the tickets, winked at her, and asked if she'd play along. She nodded yes, so I cut in line, grabbed a sledge, and, seemingly without much effort at all, took a nice slow swing completely through the target.
The bell rang like, well, a bell.
And then I heard, behind me, exactly what I knew I was going to hear. Some sweet-looking little college girl, drunk, blurts out "The old guy rang the bell!" I turned around and saw her with her mouth hanging open in amazement. Then I launched into a little blurb I do.
"Young lady, feel free to play with all these lean little boys for as long as you want. But when you get bored with their huffing and puffing and getting nothing done, when you want a man who knows how to get the job done - then you look for an old man. Mark my words, little girl..." (by this time, I was playing large, to the whole assembled crowd) "...It's an old man you want - when you want a man who knows how to Ring Your Bell!"
I swept the ticket girl off her feet and planted a big kiss on her, handed the sledge to the college girl (she dropped it), and walked away to the sound of all the old men in the area cheering. The ticket girl was laughing her ass off.
And the college kids were just standing there with a "WTF?" look on their faces.
Damn, that was fun. I had almost forgotten about that. Just goes to show you that, as you said, life is better when you slow down, relax, and think your way through it.