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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."
I just turned 45 and don't feel any decline in my... wait, what were we talking about?
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Did they properly consult the AD&D chart for character age? I show INT and especially WIS increasing over time.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
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
This is why we should move the Social Security retirement age down to 55. It would free up jobs for the young, and let us old folks relax with our monthly check and medicare.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
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
Ah but teaching, even teaching a cognition heavy top, does not necessarily require much cognition. The noncognition memory way to teach is "why I remember back in '63 another young man just like you making the same mistake with integration by parts and what I told him back in '63 was..." Then there is the non-cognition cheerleader way to teach which just amounts to telling you that you can do it. And the non-cognition drill sgt way to teach is just telling you that you will do it.
Calc hasn't changed much in a couple hundred years, at least at the undergrad level. Now a math teaching job that would require some cognition would be designing a "how to prove Fermats last theorem" class. So do you start with the full modularity theorem even though only the semistable elliptic curves are necessary for FLT and the full modularity theorem was proven after FLT, but maybe you should introduce the full theory as a concept and then go in depth into just semi-stable elliptic curves, or ... Now experience does enter into this so you need to correct for that to test pure cognition.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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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I had a calculus tutor in high school, he was retired and had to have been at least 70, but he was brilliant and his analytical skills don't seem to have declined at all.
I would expect that the amount you exercise your brain, and how healthy you eat/exercise, plays a big role.
I'm pushing 60 and have noticed that my cognitive abilities have declined. I'm still just as good with stuff I have learned as I used to be, I haven't forgot much. What is declining is the speed that I can learn new stuff. It's takes me more work and time now to pick up on new concepts than it used to.
So I'm not surprised that your calculus tutor is brilliant in a field he's been working in all of his life and perhaps he is one of those exceptional people who don't decline like most but sometimes it's the exception that proves the rule.
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.