Slashdot Mirror
Brain Decline Begins At Age 27
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.'"
Get off my... uh green thing, with the, um little plants? What's it called?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
but I'm 31, not 22.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
But then I'm way past 27...
"Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help."
What a coincidence! That's when most people graduate from college!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
[sarcasm]
Yeah, like I'm going to pay any attention to a study by a guy who got his Ph.D. in 1974 whose brain has therefore been declining for at least 35 years...
[/sarcasm]
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...)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
According to his own findings, these results can't be trusted as they come from a person who's mind is already decaying. I would've believed it if the prof was about 22 years old.
As a 26-year-old, let me be the first to say:
"Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"
caritj.org
Bit of a flamebait headline, eh? I know I'm not mentally as fast as my 3-year old (watching his little brain hum is a bit awe-inspiring...hard to believe I ever learned at that pace), but at the same time my actual skills are vastly more advanced.
Likewise, I'm sure I was more mentally agile at 18 than I am now at 30, but I know for a fact at 18 I wasn't even a tenth the coder I am now: some of the things I remember struggling with are trivial now, and my productivity is dramatically higher.
So yea, youth and energy are nice, but they fade as experience comes to the fore, and experience carries you until the real mental infirmities kick in.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
They told us never trust anyone over 30
What?
When does age-related cognitive decline begin?
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...
Seastead this.
I expect stem cell technology will allow us to replenish the abilities of our brains some time before most of us are too much older and dumber. Fear not, fellow 28-year-olds.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
... or perhaps the reason they saw declining figures starting at the age of 27, is that older people who are more intelligent, tend to not have the time, choose not to waste the effort, and do not need the $100, to participate in these kinds of studies.
That's the problem with doing these kinds of studies as a point-measurement across an age-range. The test groups cannot possibly be equivalent, unless a VERY large sample is taken at random from the population. Frankly, I'll have trouble believing such a study unless it's a prospective study that tests the same volunteers across a span of their lifetime.
That might be funnier if your username were RemoWilliams82.
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.
No sig for you!!
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
For men that is.
Now, where did I put my ED pills?
What?
I always thought that the brain works best at 39 ;)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/27/1630225
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.
Deleted
For President I'll take age and experience over fast firing neurons any day. Up to a point...
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
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
He may of course also be a girl...
Wouldn't that make the comment, and all of his/her children, cease to exist? This is /., girls don't exist here ; ;
But then, of course, the fact that this post, my parent post, and all of the (uncle/aunt?^H^H^HOther Child-) posts exist, proves that he is not a girl.
There's no reason, however, that your pigtail comment need not apply, it could very well still be valid
I'm 40. Excuse me while I nip outside and shoot myself.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
we stop giving a fuck.
Its like sex.
In my teens I couldn't wait, It was all a mystery.
In my twenties, I was into "The Selfish Gene" and "Spreading my Seed" far and wide.
In my thirties and forties, I wanted a friend more than a fuck.
In the middle fifties, I am coming to the conclusion that I was a hormonal idiot.
It's taken years, decades, to come to the conclusion that I'd have been a more productive human being, though a worse coder/project lead/manager.
In the end, hopefully years from now, its as a human being that I'd really want to be remembered.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If this is valid, I'd like to know what is the cause. Is it a physiological degradation or an psychological one?
This is wild speculation, but people seem to remain fairly active before their 30s but there seems to be this crossover point where people tend to fall into a rut and tend to be resigned to their lives at that current state. From observing family, friends and myself this seems to be the case. Could that variety help provide inspiration and the sort of motivation that help people continue to grow?
That said, I think that experience far outweighs anything else. I find myself solving problems and handling issues with far more easy and speed than at any time in the past. Work that I labored over in college for hours, if not days, I could now be done with within 30 minutes.
This sort of thing certainly doesn't make it easier for job security. The last thing companies need is yet another excuse to dump older, more expensive employees.
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!
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
...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.
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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.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Sure, why not? If you worked as an auto mechanic for twenty years and decide that you want to switch to engineering or law, graduating from college would be a useful and necessary thing.
My mother graduated from medical school when I, her fourth child, was an infant. She was 35 years old. Going a step or two higher in education can be a smart move when your family is growing and your spouse is underemployed.
Also, college is not trade school. I gained many things from my education that don't show up on my resume but make me a more fulfilled human being.
Interesting post - relating it to databases. From what I have read, IQ has two main components, gC and gF, standing for Crystallized and Fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is raw problem solving ability, crystallized intelligence is the database aspect you are referring to (tables, the data in the tables and the queries you have built up over the years). I guess fluid intelligence is more the ability to create the right tables, fill them up with good data, and creating meaningful queries.
Fluid intelligence is known to peak in young adulthood and then steadily decline. Crystallized intelligence gradually rises and then stays stable through most of adulthood, declining after 65 on average. I think practically for many things, the increase or maintenance in gC offsets the decrease in gF.
I notice the drop in gF type things in myself - I certainly don't have the superior reaction times I did in my late teens. If I play an FPS, I have learned to make up for that by playing in a more patient manner and playing the percentages - picking my battles. It's harder to say about the reasoning, I haven't noticed much decline yet. But I certainly notice having the larger database of information and more queries, and more refined queries of gC, which enables me to solve some problems much quicker than previously.
Eventually though, it's downhill and I hope to anticipate that and lower my expectations accordingly.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.