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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
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)
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
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.
As a wise man once said to me: "A new broom sweeps like hell, but the old broom knows where the dirt is..."
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
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
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.