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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."
I'm getting old...
Blank until
...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
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 ;-)
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.
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!
... 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
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
More than likely you are now wise enough to know that you don't know everything.
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.
Loss of fatty skin? When I hit middle age, that's when I started getting fatty skin.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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!
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?
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
- reaction time peaks at 30
That's cool to know. In online FPS games, people always whine about the reflexes of the 12-17 year olds and so on, but I've always felt like it was because older gamers just didn't devote the time into games to get as good. Now that the crowd of mid-20 gamers has had years of experience in these games, they are still the majority at the top level of competition. (There are exceptions, but I'm just pointing out that once you are past 17, that doesn't mean you won't be able to compete with younger gamers anymore on the grounds of reflexes.)
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.
Not necessarily. It is more reason to NOT vote for McCain (as if there aren't enough already). Obama is also older than 39. We need to have a candidate who is exactly the minimum age of 35, that way we can vote him out his second term before his brain slows down!
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
- flexibility (ala gymanasts and skaters) peaks at 15 and ends around 25
Flexiblity ENDS at 25? Is that some sort of pun? I never was very limber, but I'm over 40 and it's not like rigor mortis has set in yet.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Historically, their most significant work is done before age 30.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
There is No "one" point where the body stops working.
Actually, I believe its called death.
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.
And for those that would not ask:
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.