Brain Decline Begins At Age 27 381
krou writes "The BBC is reporting that a new study suggests that our mental abilities start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, and 27 could be seen as the 'start of old age.' The seven-year study, by Professor Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia, looked at 2,000 healthy people aged 18-60, and used a number of mental agility tests already used to spot signs of dementia. 'The first age at which there was any marked decline was at 27 in tests of brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability. Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.'"
or maybe people get tired of stupid tests (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, maybe by their late 20s, people have had enough of stupid tests -- they're done with school and the day when success was measured by testing rather than real accomplishments are over. Being less interested and excited by tests, they score lower.
If old age begins at 27, then I can say that from over a decade in, it's not so bad. I can still kick 20-somethings butts. I just wish those darn kids would stay off my lawn. (True -- I live near a middle school and the bastards keep cutting through yards to walk to school...)
Abstract (Score:3, Interesting)
When does age-related cognitive decline begin? [neurobiologyofaging.org]
Timothy A. Salthouse
Received 17 April 2008; received in revised form 20 August 2008; accepted 12 September 2008. published online 24 February 2009.
Abstract
Cross-sectional comparisons have consistently revealed that increased age is associated with lower levels of cognitive performance, even in the range from 18 to 60 years of age. However, the validity of cross-sectional comparisons of cognitive functioning in young and middle-aged adults has been questioned because of the discrepant age trends found in longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses. The results of the current project suggest that a major factor contributing to the discrepancy is the masking of age-related declines in longitudinal comparisons by large positive effects associated with prior test experience. Results from three methods of estimating retest effects in this project, together with results from studies comparing non-human animals raised in constant environments and from studies examining neurobiological variables not susceptible to retest effects, converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s.
My comment:
Speaking as one of those aging boomers, age profiling is OK. So is racial, gender, sexual preference and religious profiling. We operating in a mysterious and complex world while suffering from a poverty of information. It's all about getting all the data you can, baby... its all about the data...
correlationisnotcausation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the people I know in their late 20's (including myself) are done with college (including grad school), have homes, have or are planning to have kids, more concerned with paying bills and beginning to save for retirement than they are with being a super genius.
So my question, is this hard biological evidence or psychology/sociology? I find it hard to believe that, at 27 (give or take) a switch is flicked that starts a downward spiral.
YMMV (Score:5, Interesting)
My mental abilities declined severely in 1976 when I was in a terrible auto accident. They improved markedly over the next ten years.
Knowledge, practice, and experience more than make up for the so-called "decline". Why is it that slashdot's geezers know the difference between "lose" and "loose", and between their, they're, and there? Maybe because they've had more time to read more books and figure out the context of those words' uses?
I used to be fast, I could catch a fly in mid flight with my bare hand. Now I can only catch the old flies.
As to your question, see my sig.
It's happened to me and it sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
Chemo did a number on me too.
But just getting older I can feel myself slipping away. A little less snap. A little slower reactions. The memory is also not that great (wasn't to start with).
It ruins some of my hobbies like Ultimate and Boardgaming because there are no age/skill brackets for those activities like there are for softball.
Ultimate is particularly bad because there has been a big push to get ultimate down to 13 year olds. So now you have people with 18 year old bodies and 5 years experience coming out to play "pickup". This leads to long periods of watching them run around like gazelles tossing the disk back and forth to each other. The only thing they can't do is fake well.
Boardgaming- perhaps because of BSW or perhaps because of boardgamegeek has gone the other way- along the brain axis. Where boardgamers used to be a mix of average folks, increasingly you have certifiable genius's. Likewise, the games have gone away from dice to pure logic/player interaction over the past 8 years and these brainiacs can see almost to the end of the game from the first turn. And the bad part is that 10 minutes in, I can see if I've lost and now i have to sit through another 45 minutes until the actual loss. No handicapping, no dividing into different play classes.
I find the lack of handicapping to be an expression of our "winner take all" society. I guess I need to either start a group with handicapping or move on to other activities.
---
Other things you lose are sense of smell, sense of touch, and sense of taste.
So don't give up your life from 18 to 30 so you can "have a good life" because you are giving up your best years.
Definitely have some fun along the way.
Re:Confounding Variable (Score:3, Interesting)
The peak is probably around 24 (Score:4, Interesting)
But the difference being insignificant between 22-26.
Anyway. It's just old enough to see your offspring grow to adulthood/sexual maturity and therefore make you largely irrelevant to your genes.
Re:President of the USA (Score:3, Interesting)
For President I'll take age and experience over fast firing neurons any day. Up to a point...
Not surprising at all... (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering that at 22 most people are fresh out of college and their brain still well exercised.
After that they join the corporate slavery, where 5 years in cubes destroys their mind and numbs them down to the obedience level demanded by their PHBs, and corporate masters.
A few more decades of that and they will be completely senile.
Those who stay in academia on the other hand make their biggest achievements in late thirties (most at about 38).
http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~limchuwe/articles/youth.html [nus.edu.sg]
Re:YMMV (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is it that slashdot's geezers know the difference between "lose" and "loose", and between their, they're, and there? Maybe because they've had more time to read more books and figure out the context of those words' uses?
Apparently, slashdot's geezers also like to make bad assumptions. Last time I checked, there is no age attached to a slashdot user ID. How would you know that old people are using correct grammar while the hatchlings are not? Second of all, how would you know that if someone does use poor grammar, that they are using poor grammar because they actually don't know the difference or because they don't care?
I think your brain is failing you, old man! :)
(So tempted to use "you're" just to get on your nerves.)
Re:Confounding Variable (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't agree. You're using far too much rationalisation to justify that viewpoint. You can't possibly know the supposedly relevant time-availability versus intelligence situation of the entire sample base.
I've done an IQ test every couple of years since I was 20 (I'm now 31) and I have to say that despite doing goddamn stupid things at that age in my life, my IQ hasn't changed. As well you'd expect. But then, experience is a factor of crystallised intelligence and IQ tests relate more strongly to fluid intelligence.
That said, I'm prepared to believe the study but make allowances for people who are still learning and using their goddamn heads on a regular basis well into old age. I can do more and solve problems far better than I could ten years ago. I suspect many other programmers who are always learning new languages find the same. Your brain doesn't have to get old, just use it!
No! Wrong wrong wrong!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not even going to dignify this the time it takes to read the article, it is patently wrong.
I am 34, and I have never felt more quick, creative, and industrious as I am today. (And I can still whoop ass against guys half my age in on-line shooters.)
The reason older people appear to take longer to make decisions and learn and create and recall memory is simply because our database is far more full and complex than the youngster's.
When a youngster is taught to cross a one-way street, they look only the way traffic will be coming from.
But an old-folk goes, "Ah, a one-way sign. Hmm, I've seen people run the wrong way before..." so they look both ways.
When someone asks a youngster a question, they quickly run through their database in their mind and pick the answer (probably their only answer).
But an old-person may have seen the question more than once in their lifetime, and has to pick through a larger network of data, and decide through possible multiple instances of the same data, and compound those memories into an answer.
For example, ask a young person if eggs are good or bad for you. They'll think of the first aspect of eggs that they've heard, and tell you whether they're good or bad for you.
But an old person has to think, "Hmmm... back in the 70's, doctors said they were good for you. Then they said they were bad. Then certain kinds. Oh, and they may be good for certain parts of the body, but maybe elevate cholesterol and high blood pressure. Does it interact with any medications?..."
You get my point. It's an apples and oranges comparison he's trying to do.
And what about filters? Young people have fewer filters on their brains than older people. When I was younger, I could bounce down a stairway and have no problems. Now I have this filter on my brain that says, "before you move any part of your body, look ahead to see if it will cause pain."
Another filter is, when the wife says something that just sets herself up for a punchline, about 3 or 4 things drop down in my head that I *could* say. But which ones will get you in trouble? So I take longer to respond... and look slow.
Here's another example of a filter you can even test: Play CS or any other on-line shooter game where you have two teams. Play once where team-killing is disabled (can't kill your own guys). Then, play one where you can accidently shoot your own team. Takes longer to decide to shoot, doesn't it!
Re:Noooooo! (Score:5, Interesting)
As a 27-year old, I realize that I have completely spent the peak years of my intellectual capacity having made no greater contribution to the advancement of the human race than a few hundred Slashdot posts....
Ever paged through an archived /. article on some topic of interest you're looking up - maybe you're in a discussion elsewhere and you think 'hang on, wasn't there that thing I read about a few years back where...' and you Google it and it turns up the /. page - and while reading through the comments for that article you come upon one that perfectly sums up exactly what you had in mind, exactly what you wanted to say, and does so concisely and clearly, far better than you ever could have put it?
And then you look at who wrote that comment...
... and it's you?
Because if as we're told it's all downhill from 27, then I suppose I'll have to expect a lot more experiences like that.
What a coincidence that the 'peak' is right around (Score:4, Interesting)
...when many people are finishing University and the decline seems to start just when you'd probably finish grad school. ;)
Now, if everyone tested had NOT attended a University in any fashion, it would be interesting to see the results.
Re:Confounding Variable (Score:3, Interesting)
Similar car-crash experience (Score:5, Interesting)
In my case it was in 2000, and I spent a year having a lot of trouble reading sentences and managing to follow the meaning. I could handle Dr. Seuss. It's gotten consistently better since then, although I'm still nowhere near as conventionally smart as I was.
What I find interesting is that although I feel like I'm the same person, my friends say I'm a much nicer, more considerate person now, and that I accomplish a lot more because I'm more persistent and organized -- because I have to be, since I have a lot of issues with short-term memory.
When I was going to a cognitive therapist, one of the things she mentioned was that in some ways they were going to treat me for aging, as much as the accident. She said, four years ago, that she felt like people peaked mentally at about 30, and she wanted to see if she could do stuff to just ward off age-related decline so I'd be about as smart as I would have been anyway. I was prescribed two different types of anti-Alzheimer's medication and wowie, were they amazing in terms of focus and memory. I wish I could afford to keep taking them. Breathtakingly expensive but seriously amazing effects.
Re:Noooooo! (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the point of going to college at 40? Does it actually increase your employability?