Brainpower Starts to Decline at Age 27
Human Brain Peaks at 22, then Experience Compensates
Mar 17, 2009
Professor Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia studied 2,000 healthy people aged 18 to 60 for a seven-year period. He published the results of his work in the April 2009 issue of the scientific journal Neurobiology of Aging.
Testing for Signs of Dementia
Reporting on the study on March 16, 2009 the BBC wrote, “To test mental agility, the study participants had to solve puzzles, recall words and story details, and spot patterns in letters and symbols.
“The same tests are already used by doctors to spot signs of dementia.
“In nine out of 12 tests the average age at which the top performance was achieved was 22.”
The first signs of decline began to show up at age 27. However, memory hung in undiminished for another decade, starting to drop off at the age of 37, on average.
Rebecca Wood is Chief Executive of the Alzheimer’s Research Trust in the U.K. She told the BBC, “This research suggests that the natural decline of some of our mental abilities as we age starts much earlier than some of us might expect - in our 20s and 30s. Understanding more about how healthy brains decline could help us understand what goes wrong in serious diseases like Alzheimer’s."
As Ms. Wood points out, Alzheimer's is not a natural part of getting old. It is a disease that strikes tens of thousands of people below the age of 65. By studying the effects of mental decline in young people, something may be learned about the cause of this mysterious illness.
But, here’s the good news for those of middle age from Prof. Salthouse’s study: “Abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.” This is confirmed in another study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied in March 2009.
Older and Smarter
Doctors Ashley Nunes and Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that the experience of older air-traffic controllers compensates for any age-related decline in mental acuity.
As the scienceblog.com reported, “The evidence that experience triumphs over the normal changes of aging could help overturn myths about older workers...”
The authors of the study said that many years of experience conferred the greatest benefit in solving the most complex air-traffic control simulations. Older controllers got their tasks completed with fewer instructions than younger ones; an important consideration because the greater the number of instructions given to pilots the greater the possibility of misinterpretation.
Drs. Nunes and Kramer wrote that the older controllers acted “in a more measured fashion to achieve performance that rivals that of their younger counterparts, who exhibited better cognitive ability.”
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