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New Research Shows Cognitive Decline Begins At 45
An anonymous reader writes "New research shows people might start to suffer from cognitive decline as early as age 45. The research, which looked at over 7000 people between the ages of 45 and 70 when the study started, watched participants over a 10 year period. Disturbingly enough, even the youngest participants started declining immediately."
Cognitive function is not all that counts in being successful in life. Emotional intelligence ('maturity'), judgement and experience ('wisdom') might increase with age and might be fair trade for a slight decline in raw processing power. Life can get easier post-50 with these skills.
Surely that means that cognitive decline begins earlier than 45 and the age range they studied was inadequate for measuring the onset of cognitive decline?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Once again, Slashdot is the epitome of bad science reporting :)
The study shows that in a group of people ranging from 45 - 70, they found that cognitive decline was present in all of them. That means that cognitive decline begins AT LEAST at 45. TFA says "As early as 45", which is technically true but sort of dishonest IMHO, and the original paper doesn't make any such explicit conclusions.
Sigh.
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace." -Robert H. Goddard
The normal curve I've seen, in multiple places, is that cognitive function takes a sudden nosedive at about age 13, and typically recovers in the mid 20s. I wouldn't call that "cognitive decline" however, perhaps "puberty-induced temporary brain damage" would be more to the point.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Oh, my, how did that get rated +5 insightful? With all due respect, even if your anecdote was not about one vaguely described example, it is still completely pointless and irrelevant
Since that was someone you knew in high school, you probably weren't born when he was under 45. Sadly, there is an excellent chance that he was even more brilliant when he was 30 or 40. The decline is, after all, a relative thing.
No, because giving them an education makes them better workers. An army of people that can do nothing more than sweep floors, and can't even manage their own finances because they don't know basic math, is not useful for an advanced society. So we give them a basic education first, before sending them out into the world, and the smarter ones or more motivated ones we give an even better education, job training, etc. so they can do higher-level jobs. This wouldn't change if the brain had no age-related limitations. The only thing that'd change is perhaps we'd lose some of our age discrimination.
I just turned 46, and this is definitely true. I remember that we invaded Iraq, and I'm sure there must have been valid reasons for that, but I can't remember them. I clearly remember voting for Obama because he was a constitutional law professor who promised to restore civil liberties and the rule of law, but I can't remember anything he did to follow up on that. I seem to remember intentionally flying from SF to NY in 1986 without any form of ID, but obviously that can't be right, because if people had been able to do that for all those years, our country would have been immediately destroyed by terrorists.
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And various sorts of mental crutches. I've lost the reference, but the study suggested that people with higher cognitive skills were more likely to recognize that their skills were declining, and figure out substitutes to make up for the difference, like a greater dependency on "to do" lists. The concluding hypothesis was that this explained some of the observations that people with higher IQs who succumbed to various dementias appeared to decline more rapidly after onset; that the actual onset was missed due to the use of crutches, and the decline appeared more rapid once the dementia had reached a stage where the crutches were no longer sufficient.
Speaking anecdotally, I can still retrieve and explain the real analysis I learned when I was 22. What I can't do, now that I'm approaching 60, is soak up and retain new math at the same pace I could then.