Slashdot Mirror
Brains Work Best At Age of 39
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."
I'm getting old...
Blank until
...that life was over after 30. Yay for the thirty-somethings!
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
...at age 18.
I can't wait for the spam that will advertise me an 18 year old dick, a 39 year old brain, and a 65 year old bank account.
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
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?
.: Max Romantschuk
All those mid 80s Crown Victorias that come out of nowhere, seemingly as if the old fart driving didn't see you coming... maybe he didn't, but maybe he did and it was too late to move his foot 6 inches to the left...
"So, Lone Starr, now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet
This is probably what leads to a midlife crisis. One day you wake up smarter than you've ever been and go "holy shit, I've been a jackass all these years". Then you go and do something about it.
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
...I have to say I expected a little more ;-)
All I have to say is, "Yeah!" quickly followed by, "Oh, crap!"
some people may think "life begins at 40," all it seems to do is slow down
There is no contradiction, IMO. I know people who are so fast they don't have time to live, they are always five minutes late for something. Life begins when you can slow down, relax and think.
Ha ha woo hoo, things are still on the up! Brain that is.......................the rest is sadly flaccid!
Once, over a period of a week when I was in my twenties, I got repeatedly destroyed at chess by a guy in his eighties. Seriously, I have never been so utterly unable to outthink anyone in my life, and I'm a pretty good chess player.
He started playing chess as a boy, and while he did tend to ramble on a bit, if his mind wasn't as sharp as it used to be, it must have once been able to cut diamonds...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Just like the Glucosamine Chondroitin scams. I'm seeing them now for pets.
Being 41, I was rather dismayed to see this article. Even more upsetting was the fact that I then proceeded to left click on it, rather than my ususal middle-click to open it in a tab.
Oh no! It's starting already!
I'll be 39 in 2 months, and I feel like I hit the bottom, not the peak.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Upon contact with an attractive female.
... they base their result on a sample of 72 persons within an age range from 23 to 80.
Science at its best.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
From what I have read, this only appears to apply to the speed of thought, which impacts on our reaction speeds. This would chime with most people's experience of ageing.
What I would be interesting in is whether it actually has a knock-on effect on the quality of cognitive ability. Does thinking faster equal thinking better?
Also, I wonder if the increase in experience is enough to overcome the reduction in reaction speeds. For example a 17 year old may have a great reaction speed, but that doesn't automatically make them a better driver than a 40 year-old with 20+ years of predicting the motion of objects travelling at speed and planning accordingly.
Paul Leader
Speed has little to do with efficiency of the mind believe it or not, otherwise computers would be sapient by now. The proof is in so called "mathematical prodigies" that can solve massive arithmetic problems in astounding time. You may think that their brain operates "fast" but the reality is that there is are an insurmountable quantity of techniques used to achieve this "speed". In the end, there are also subconscious heuristic techniques that the mind develops with practice. Also, "speed" can come from a shortening of distance (similar to the shrinking transistor industry). The mind achieves this by lowering information down the cortical hierarchy. This is the reason that children have to read words letter by letter, and speed reading adults read pages sentence by sentence. So if you keep exercising your mind, there is no peak. Granted this article is about neural circuitry and it will be more difficulty in reaching a higher peak with the biological underpinnings of the mind slowly degrading, but I just wanted to clear up that speedier doesn't always mean faster.
The birth rate among people aged 40 and above drops significantly. Might there be a connection between the brain working better and not having children? (And let's leave Sarah Palin out of this one...)
Why is the myelin deteriorating? Has this deterioration been observed for the last couple centuries, or is it a recent occurrence? Are people known to have had such neural disorders (I'm guessing Alzheimer's is an example) long ago?
So if I want to back to college, I should do it now at age 37, while my brain is near peak capacity, rather than wait until I'm a doddering 40-something. ;-)
- posted with LYNX, a Commodore 64 web browser (using 2 kbit/s modem)
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
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?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Life begins when you can slow down, relax and think.
It always start that way for me, then I end up either on Slashdot, or masturbating. :-(
Anyone who has touched an uninsulated wire can attest that it still conducts electricity just as well as with insulation.
Fastest != best. With no software to run, a processor's clock speed is mostly useless.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
not only that, but also um, Im kinda pretty sure there not really like um don't know what they talk about. It's all downhill once you turn 30 and, um, you know, stuff. um. anyways, what was I saying? ah bummer.
...But I'm 45.
Loss of fatty skin? When I hit middle age, that's when I started getting fatty skin.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I can add an anecdotal confirmation of this study. 39 does seem to be the peak age for motor response.
... well ... be fair, most anything else.
I can move my fingers/hand much much faster while looking at a picture of Cheryl Ladd when she was 39 than I can for
but I think my brain worked best 10-15 years ago
If I could walk that way I wouldnt need cologne.
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".
Free Martian Whores!
So the most pivotal moment of human thought is 10:04pm at age 39? I need to start planning and make sure I have a notebook or something... cite: http://idle.slashdot.org/idle/08/10/20/1652246.shtml
indicating the average age of the slashdotter reading this story is over 39
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Fraud Alert: The results are wildly over-interpreted. The conclusions are guessing, not science.
..."
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.
The fuck it is. It's bad reporting. The actual research is all about how motor response speed correlates extremely well with myelin degradation, and discusses how this backs up the idea that myelin degradation is important in the aging of the brain and the resulting reduced physical ability. Even the press release, entitled "Physical decline caused by slow decay of brain's myelin" only mentions the 39-year figure once, and only in the context of this particular sample group, two-thirds of the way down the web page. 39 is the age at which finger tapping speed and myelin integrity both peak and begin to decline. At no point do the researchers claim that this has anything to do with cognative performance, let alone extrapolate it to say that there's some magic age at which mental function begins to decline.
That story is a creation of the media which have decided to run with "brains work best at age of 39" for no readily appreciable fucking reason. Next time, hacks, save some effort and just put a bunch of words in a hat and make up the story based on those.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Think about all the middle aged crisis fools who shed fat without considering the ramifications. They are melting their brains!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
But that might also be because by age 40 you'd probably have diverted into management if you were no good at coding.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Just because older brains don't necessarily work as fast as younger ones doesn't mean they don't work better. Plenty of better thinking is slower than the fastest stuff, like jumping to conclusions. And the older brains have lots more information and habits that can be more powerful than the newer ones. This is known to humans as "wisdom".
Besides, just getting to the wrong answer faster is not "better".
Just some more reasons people say "age and guile will beat youth and talent any day". Even if younger people just zip around without realizing it.
--
make install -not war
Thank you, Sockatume. MOD PARENT UP!!! "That story is a creation of the media..."
Anyone interested in studying brain function should study why the other people who responded to this article couldn't see that.
If the article is about the loss of the fatty sheath, why mention what nerve cells are called?
The base UCLA article explains that the fatty sheath (myelin) is around nerve fibers (axons) not nerve cells (neurons). The bad quote was copied from telegraph.co.uk, and I found it ironic in an article about loss of mental acuity.
My wild guess is that the British writer saw that the lead paragraph in the UCLA article was focused on baseball and it threw him a googly (howzat!) and he was overcome by the urge to rewrite.
Since I am turning 39 today, this is seriously awesome news.
Stupid!
So, go ahead and eat a nice prime rib medium well.
Man you can't win, what's good for the heart isn't good for the brain? I think the lesson here is keep everything in balance. Don't eat ultra a low fat diet.
So Jack was on to something then...
I knew it! I knew it!
What were we talking about, again?
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
LOL. Yes, I'm saying that.
Read what Sockatume had to say below: Bad reporting, more like.
Anyone who practices finger-tapping will become a faster finger-tapper. Probably the results of the study only show that younger people are more likely to have played computer games. Practicing motor coordination improves response times.
In my grandparent post I meant to say that "should" indicates a theory, not that nothing is known with more sureness than theory.
This somewhat contradicts the observation that most Nobel prize winners do so for research they did in their early thirties. Of course having new ideas isn't exactly the same as thinking fast. But maybe we'd get better scientists when we don't expose them to science until a later date, so that this maximum speed, some theoretical background and fresh ideas all intersect?
Fleur de Sel
Stupid thing keeps telling me that 20 is the ideal age.
Also, this is just one more reason to vote Obama!
Life begins when you can slow down, relax and think.
Unfortunately, for many of us, by the time we can slow down and relax, our thinking capability is already sliding. I think that's the paradox they're trying to refer to.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I hear there's a great new clothing store for people our age. It's called Forever 41.
Sure, not even 4 weeks after I turn 39 they come out with this.
Now I have scientific proof that it's all down-hill from here. :-P
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A younger person with faster thinking capabilities can realize that they are committing a fallacy or "jumping to conclusions" and correct the problem sooner.
Your right in the speed of the brain does not determine the quality of thought. By that logic you can deduct that a person well exercised in critical thinking can get the solution to a problem no matter what the speed of there brain.
So take two people with the similar analytical talent, the younger one will get the answer faster.
It is my observation that older people who are smarter then young people where always smart. They did not suddenly get the ability to think, drive or solve problems better after the age of 41.
Don't use it you loose it. So do as much as you can before you get old so you can keep it. Hopefully they find a way to delay this effect.
This is why he always said he was 39.
5 minutes late? I'm always at least 20 minutes late. I must be REALLY living my life.
rj
The story is about the brain. So what's with the "heart" graphic?
So does this mean calling someone a fathead is a compliment now?
Bill Gates turned 40 in 1995. Guess what came out of Microsoft in '95.
My sig has been answered.
Historically, their most significant work is done before age 30.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I figure that the human brain is geared to lose flexibility over time but gain efficiency. In other words, the old man ain't fast but he's wise. Eighty years of playing chess has made him a powerful opponent -- whatever clever plays you tried he had seen before. But deal him a hand of bridge and if he's never played he'll have a harder time learning it than a twenty year old.
What surprises me is that this article suggests that the peak of speed is 39, not something younger.
It looks like it's all down hill for now on....
Good thing it doesn't take much intelligence to say "Get of my lawn!"
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
Rejoice!
I, OTOH, have only four weeks to go to my 40th birthday...
Stachel
It certainly means that Palin has a better brain than McCain. Given how frightening a thought THAT is, Obama is the only choice.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Tell this to Chris Chelios.
You said, "I'm sure the average research neurobiologist would be far more proficient at eliminating confounding factors, since it is a critical part of the job..."
Actually, I haven't found that to be the case. Only a few of the people doing "science" actually have a careful scientific orientation.
Vioxx is an example. Read Dangerous Deception - Hiding the Evidence of Adverse Drug Effects in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It is my observation that fraud and incompetence is widespread in what is called "science".
"Only a few..." should have been "Only a small percentage..."
I'm very busy today, and not spending enough time reading what I typed.
A younger person with faster thinking capabilities can realize that they are committing a fallacy or "jumping to conclusions" and correct the problem sooner.
I agree that the speed of the brain does not determine the quality of thought. By that logic you can deduct that a person well exercised in critical thinking can get the solution to a problem no matter what the speed of there brain.
So take two people with the similar analytical talent, the younger one will get the answer faster.
It is my observation that older people who are smarter then young people where always smart. They did not suddenly get the ability to think, drive or solve problems better after the age of 41.
I don't even think a scientific study is needed to observe the clear empirical evidence that older people think slower. Hopefully they find a way to delay this effect.
They say if you don't use it you loose it. I wonder if any research has been done to determine if the decay effect sets in faster with less mental activity. Like loosing strength after not exercising.
So what the article suggests is that up to age 39 our brain is racing like a hare, but after that it's turtles all the way down?
Very clever, young man.
Nerve conduction can change in speed, or in voltage, or both. What it affects is a different matter.
It's well known that aging causes perceptual slowing. Old people drive slow because things are coming at them faster than they did at the same speed when they were younger. However, cognitive skills such as problem solving do not change speed with aging.
Pulling them apart is particularly difficult because people try to test things with reaction time equipment. What's perceptual, what's cognitive and what's motor speed?
If you want to rip an enormous hole in the assumption TFA is based on, point at someone with very little myelination anywhere, like say, http://www.itbhu.org/chronicle/images/jun.07/stephenhawking.JPG
Then get the aging people at UCLA to try to think faster than him.
BTW, there are far more differences in amount of myelination between groups of people tested according to things like reaction to pain, hypnotizability, attentional abilities/deficits and such, than any differences that occur due to aging in any given normal brain (ie. not undergoing some clinically relevant change such as in the example above).
If you started from a different set of assumptions, you'd conclude that as people get older, they become less conscious. After all, anesthesia produces changes in neurons by changing the reactivity of myelin, and nerve conduction slows with increased anesthesia.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Awesome. One down, two to go...
I finally have a reason to fire all my employees over 39 years old, ha, ha, ha!!
... that other interesting parts peak much earlier than 39.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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.
and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Anyone secret military base thought of that?
"Best may not be the right word. "Fastest" might be better. While there are some skills that require a fast twitch, most of us are not in that situation. In some cases, one may achieve a better result with a slow but accurate response verses several fast twitches. It's just as likely (and equally unproven) that as the fast twitch strategy starts failing, it forces the development of a better slow but accurate strategy.
Of course, if the myelenation curve is a symmetrical U, that would imply that the condition of myelin in the brain would slow a 20 something about as much as a 50 something. At 49, you should be no worse off than at 29.
If this research is replicated and is true this is actually a HUGE finding. Previous research showed that our brains started slowing down after age 25 or so. 39 is a big difference. They also said that myelination increases until age 39. That's the really important finding (before we said that we were done at age 25 at the latest). Trust me, this sort of research is very similar to what I do (white matter and brain volumetrics in aging populations). This, if true, is a very important finding.
Sorry, for me the article suggests,that degradation starts at AROUND that age. Let's suppose that you keep learning and learning (which I try to do and some here probably too), but most of the population has a steady succesful or sucky job at the age and is already degrading with alcohol or drugs.
OK, I had a really bad day, and I am kinda grumpy, still however I read the article I just cannot feel that "peek is there, X more years and I am on the top" ....
cheers ...
And for those that would not ask:
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Your Will and Wisdom is at peak at 39.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Pseudo Science "proofs" of what we already knew, old people suck. We need to lay those stupid old people off because they took those raises we gave them so they could buy a couple kids to make their lives miserable. Then we can hire 1.3 kids out of college and just have the old guy consult part time to train them up for a year while they smug behind his back.
Hey, but I'm not bitter...
Sincerely,
Curmudgeony Grudgin, Old Guy Extraordinaire.
P.S. you can have those ingrate kids of mine! You could even hire them for 2/3 the price of a smug college grad!
Sadly, I know at least two people who diverted into management, and two more who branched into being a lower paid admin, in spite of being damn good at coding. Just because they got convinced that if they don't give up coding before the 40's they're gonna become teh stupid. The rampant ageism is sad as it is, but seeing it cause self-destructive behaviour like that is just depressing.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Your nervous system NEEDS cholesterol.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I have been a good athlete all my life, as well as an applied mathematician. I am "smarter" now then ever based on the sophistication of both mathematics I can understand and deploy. My reflexes are vastly better at age 55 than age 30. I am large 6'4" 250# and I attribute better reflexes to effective cross linking of neurons that occurs only at an advanced age. This allows effective paths to be more shorter than direct paths that would be the result of the "sheath" effect which I think is bullshit anyway.
But, hey that's just me.
"I'm keeping my mind limber on a steady diet of booze and drugs."
~Jeffrey "Big" Lebowski
Two more years of being a dumb fucker.
"That isn't incompetence or fraud on the part of the researchers..."
Are you saying that the researchers knowingly participated in management problems, but they should not be held responsible?
"Obviously old people can learn things but in most instances their brains aren't as good just like the rest of their bodies."
It isn't obvious, and it doesn't always happen. Some people's lives degrade far, far more than others. The theories MUST take the recognized facts into account.
Middle management everywhere will be so relieved.
42 is the perfect age. Hold onto your towel tightly until then.
...and I'm spending all of my brain power trying to keep up with my 11-month-old son, instead of saving the universe!
Actually, maybe that's OK after all. Screw the universe. I'll hang out with the kid and find out all the places that Cheerios are supposed to go.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
You are just guessing, I think. You didn't read any of the scientific papers. It is far, far worse than you seem to think.
You said, "I don't think researchers should be held responsible for decisions they can't control that they're effectively being blackmailed to hush-up..."
If there is a conspiracy to defraud customers, that is understandable and acceptable for some of the conspirators?
You said, "... you have no way to verify that his claims are valid."
Both before and after, I watched him play the game. I was staying at his house in Turin, Italy. I watched everything he did, and his score tripled in two weeks, after he hassled himself because I got a higher score than he did. He said he was old. I just had more practice. After two weeks, his score was higher than mine.
You said, "... you're a drooling ideologue..."
Someone disagrees with you, and you engage in a personal attack? It's a fact, you are justifying a system in which a manufacturer can keep fraud secret.
You said "... hundreds of drugs are approved every year and only a handful turn out to have unknown risks..." [my emphasis]
The February 2008 article in the highly respected journal Nature, 2007 FDA drug approvals: a year of flux says, "The US FDA approved 17 new molecular entities (NMEs) and 2 biologic license applications (BLAs) in 2007, the lowest number recorded since 1983." That article includes a chart showing drug approvals for every year since 1996.
An August 23, 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal, Sick Patients Need Cutting-Edge Drugs says "The FDA approved just 16 new drugs last year, and is on pace to approve only 18 this year. That's down from a high of 53 in 1996 and 39 in 1997." That article says more drugs should be approved. But that is the position of a very ignorant person, who doesn't understand the widespread sloppiness of drug development.
Read the November 23, 2006 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, to which I linked above, Dangerous Deception - Hiding the Evidence of Adverse Drug Effects. That and many, many other articles show that drug fraud is common.
The November 23, 2006 NEJM article, Observational Studies of Drug Safety - Aprotinin and the Absence of Transparency says, "The full safety profile of a new drug is rarely known at the time of approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Most drug-development programs designed for treatments of symptomatic indications are underpowered to detect any increased risk of rare drug reactions or change in background event rates attributable to the drug. Large, post-marketing, randomized, controlled trials provide robust data on drug safety but may be subject to multiple sources of bias."
Again, "The full safety profile of a new drug is rarely known at the time of approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)", and only 16 drugs were approved in 2007. [my emphasis]
The evidence shows that the FDA is correct when it doesn't approve many drugs. The vast majority of clinical trials, experiments on people, show no benefit whatsoever. That's because new drugs are usually proposed based on wild guessing, not because of truly scientific investigation.
A large percentage of people in the U.S. are drug enthusiasts. They shouldn't be. Drugs, even ones that are considered beneficial by everyone, usually have negative side-effects.
Why it is exactly 39?!
Why most (if not all) politicians are older than 39?
I think this must be positive because you got the peak , reached your best and got the sufficient experience.
Let tell you something about Islam's prophet Mohammed (pbuh) , he received the message from god for the first time when he was 40.
Notice that for every 33 years there're 34 years in Hijri (Islamic) calendar : which means that he was at age of 39, the age of ultimate maturity.