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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."
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
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?
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It's still science. Weak or strong statistacally, science is body of work based on "Cool! Hey everybody, check this out!" followed either by "Hey, that is cool!" or "Dork, you forgot to carry the one!" Sometimes both.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
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).
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
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".
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Fraud Alert: The results are wildly over-interpreted. The conclusions are guessing, not science.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.