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.'"

Comments

You kids!

[spun]

Get off my... uh green thing, with the, um little plants? What's it called?

Re:You kids!

[internerdj]

Who are you? What are you talking about? And have you seen my glasses?

Re:You kids!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Get off my... uh green thing, with the, um little plants? What's it called?

I'm guessing pot garden? :-)

Re:You kids!

[Ethanol-fueled]

And so we come full-circle with the root-cause of the memory loss.

Re:You kids!

[isaac338]

The man you trusted isn't Wavy Gravy at all! And all this time I've been smoking harmless tobacco.

This would have been first post

[MadMidnightBomber]

but I'm 31, not 22.

Peaking at 22

[Thelasko]

What a coincidence! That's when most people graduate from college!

Re:Peaking at 22

[bretticus]

Well I feel like an idiot everyday of med school, so I am inclined to disagree.

Re:Peaking at 22

[buswolley]

I hear you.

Hey folks guess what. We are discovering brain exercise procedures that will improve a lot of these mental functions and slow their decline. No I'm not selling anything, but I am a research that is conducting this kind of work.

For retaining and improving working memory, try a regimen of the n-back test. BTW, working memory is a large component of IQ.

says the 60-something year old...

[ecklesweb]

[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 people get tired of stupid tests

[Mr. Slippery]

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...)

Noooooo!

[pdabbadabba]

As a 26-year-old, let me be the first to say:

"Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"

Re:Noooooo!

[interkin3tic]

You think you have it bad, I'm 27. I was going to say something like "wooo! That means I'm at my peak." Then I realized that it said, right there, that 22 was the peak. Also I'm wearing my Mr Rogers cardigan, I told myself I was wearing it ironically, but now I see that for the lie it is. So enjoy these last few months when you can finish the summary before jumping to conclusions and can actually wear old person clothes ironically.

Re:Noooooo!

[Sponge Bath]

The time is gone, the song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say.

Re:Noooooo!

[reverseengineer]

As a 27-year old, I realize that I have completely spent the peak years of my intellectual capacity having made no greater contribution to the advancement of the human race than a few hundred Slashdot posts....




Yeah, I can live with that.

Re:Noooooo!

[meringuoid]

As a 27-year old, I realize that I have completely spent the peak years of my intellectual capacity having made no greater contribution to the advancement of the human race than a few hundred Slashdot posts....

Ever paged through an archived /. article on some topic of interest you're looking up - maybe you're in a discussion elsewhere and you think 'hang on, wasn't there that thing I read about a few years back where...' and you Google it and it turns up the /. page - and while reading through the comments for that article you come upon one that perfectly sums up exactly what you had in mind, exactly what you wanted to say, and does so concisely and clearly, far better than you ever could have put it?

And then you look at who wrote that comment...

... and it's you?

Because if as we're told it's all downhill from 27, then I suppose I'll have to expect a lot more experiences like that.

Uh-huh

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Uh-huh

[krou]

That's why the summary says, "abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60" (emphasis mine).

It's not your accumulated knowledge that declines initially, it's "brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability". When you consider that things such as dementia and alzheimer's are believed to begin several years before they noticeably affect you, your "decline" is going to be very subtle, and over a long period of time.

Oh, and the headline was the BBC's.

Re:Uh-huh

[SatanicPuppy]

So the BBC can't do flamebait? Come on.

And problem solving ability is more useful when you're young anyway, because there are so many problems that you don't know the solution to. Your brain is working overtime, all the time, trying to process crazy new information.

My first mainframe admin job, I lived in a heightened state of awareness, like a 20 point buck during deer season. Every time the system hiccuped or some COBOL job crapped itself I had this adrenaline response...It was off the charts in my previous experience. That weight of hundreds of people and millions of dollars was terrifying.

Now? It's old hat. Where I would have been running around and wracking my brain, I go get a cup of coffee, check the logs, and fix the problem. There's no panic, there's no high-end problem solving even, because I've already solved those problems in the past, I just need to apply that experience to the current problem.

The thing is, that's life. As you move through life, the ability to react immediately to never-before-experienced situations should decline in favor of the ability to apply experience to a familiar problem.

You see what I'm saying? The sort of problem solving that's declining isn't as useful to an adult as the ability to constructively apply experience. It is pejorative to refer to it as an overall decline in problem solving abilities; it's a decline in a type of problem solving ability.

stem cells

[Lord Ender]

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.

Confounding Variable

[TheMeuge]

... 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.

Re:Confounding Variable

[vasp]

Another question one should ask is 'do new generations get smarter?' What if the kids of these 60 year olds will be smarter on average than their parents generation? I will certainly read up on this in 40 or so years..

Re:Confounding Variable

[da cog]

...except that the study didn't just show that people over 27 did less well on the score, but also that their scores on certain tests *declined over time*.

So assuming your theory, which basically boils down to supposing that the older people who are taking this test are stupider then those who chose not to take the test and thus bias the outcome, you would also have to explain why this group also just happens to get less good at the test over time than the younger people.

Of course, I suppose it would be too much to assume that the people doing a study such as this probably know what they are doing and probably accounted for such an effect, since they are merely professional scientists and all. :-)

Re:Confounding Variable

[bitt3n]

intelligence is like pornography:

• it's hard to define what it is
• it's easy to identify when you see it
• it perpetually frustrates organized religion

Re:Confounding Variable

[Anarchitektur]

To quote my dad's favorite proverb...

Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.

Re:Confounding Variable

[yali]

Googling the name of the journal, Neurobiology of Aging, leads to the abstract for this study:

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.

In other words, the researchers were wayyyy ahead of slashdot. They analyzed both cross-sectional and prospective longitudinal designs. They modeled and controlled for potential confounds due to (a) sampling bias in cross-sectional comparisons (point raised by grandparent) and (b) practice-effect biases in longitudinal comparisons (because if you take any test twice, you'll probably do better the second time). They also validated their results with other methods (like neurobiological assessments). What they got was a convergence of results from multiple methods, which is exactly what good science is supposed to be.

Re:No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

That might be funnier if your username were RemoWilliams82.

YMMV

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:YMMV

[maxume]

X is the mark of someone who doesn't read.

It's happened to me and it sucks

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Mental Agility Not The Only Thing That Peaks At 22

[aquatone282]

For men that is.

Now, where did I put my ED pills?

39?

[chromis]

I always thought that the brain works best at 39 ;) http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/27/1630225

Re:Abstract

[girlintraining]

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...

Sure, until someone spots a trend that Christians show a greater tendancy towards dementia than Atheists. Then it's a throw-down. Nevermind that it might be an exploratory study, or not be statistically significant (3%?), etc., the problem is as soon as we start doing these kinds of analysis people will take it out of proportion to either support or refute their own niche. The end result is social chaos. No, profiling is not okay. Gathering data is all fine and good, but there's serious ethical questions about how that data is packaged and released.

I mean, look at how many people think evolution is "just a theory", and you might start to realize just how dangerous a little knowledge is in the hands of morons.

The peak is probably around 24

[Colin Smith]

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.

 

Nah. Its just that after a while,

[crovira]

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.

I'd like to know why.

[MaWeiTao]

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.

What a coincidence that the 'peak' is right around

[Assmasher]

...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.

Similar car-crash experience

[smellsofbikes]

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.