Brain doesn't slow down until your 60s – later than we thought

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2308810-your-brain-doesnt-slow-down-until-your-60s-later-than-we-thought/

by kungfudoi • 4 years ago

179 59 4 years ago

Lovely study. The authors are wisely cautious in their interpretation—in fact, three paragraphs in discussion sre devoted to caveats, such as lack of longitudinal data. Are effects due to secular changes or individual changes? Probably the latter, but given possible impact of rampant video gaming on quick decision making abilities, this is not a firm inference. Secular/epoch effects are very real—IQ scores included.

What amazes me is the very wide range of variation in performance. Look at those large error bars throughout figure 2. Age or secular trends do not account for much of the variance in performance. Other variable do!

Paper is open access.

jrmg• 4 years ago

One of the things I find most annoying about modern American political (and popular) discourse is the meme that if you're old, you must be senile. This is regularly assumed about the elder figures in both parties - and both our current and former president.

"They're old, they're probably senile" is not a feeling borne of the actual statistics. By far, most old people are not senile!

tsimionescu3• 4 years ago

The current president is accused of being senile not simply because he is old, but because of several public incidents of suspicious memory issues, like clearly forgetting the name of the Australian prime minister he was holding a (remote) press conference with, or forgetting the name of Barack Obama in a pre-election speech.

Trump was sometimes accused of being senile because of his rambling sentences and bizarre speech pattern involving frequent repetitions.

This is not to say that any of this is introvertible proof that they are in fact senile, but the point is that there is evidence that can be interpreted this way, it's not simply ageism. As a further note of this, Bernie Sanders has not commonly been seen as senile, even though he is of a similar age - since none of his speech patterns suggest these types of memory issues.

kixiQu• 4 years ago

Honestly, more than anyone's particular gaffes or speech patterns -- public figures that have been in the public eye for decades are on tape from when they were younger. With both the current and former president, it's almost shocking to hear how differently they used to speak.

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

Didn't Trump always speak like that? I.e. like cutting sentences to fold out into something else, "speaking in reverse" by backstepping to something prior and dropping negations.

His way of speaking made it really easy to make him look stupid in text quotes. But I didn't reflect on it sounding wierd (I am non native speaker).

markoman• 4 years ago

Any consideration of Biden's mental state should also factor in the fact that he has always been gaffe-prone (speaking without a filter) and has suffered from a stammer/stutter. This is one reason why dementia testing includes a written portion instead of simply relying on speech evidence. These types of speech impediments can often lead to moments of halting speech that unavoidably lead to the impression that the speaker is mentally deficient. There is also the excess and aged skin that he has around his eyes and the squinting appearance this leads to. Added together, it's tempting to form a narrative that he must be senile. However, senility rarely takes a vacation, and I've seen enough press conferences and speeches where Biden is forceful, direct and focused to leave little doubt that he's not senile. He simply looks like a 79 year old man who is accepting and feeling the weight of the office, and during the particularly difficult contemporary conditions of pandemic and national division. The weight of the office has in modern times had a tendency to make ordinarily intelligent people look mentally weak, e.g., G. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, although Obama suffered this to a lesser degree, I'd say.

As an aside on speech impediments, when I was in my late teens I worked retail with another teen who so profoundly stuttered that he could barely get any words out. I knew that he went to my high school but hardly saw him because he was in the special education program. If you took the time to let him get his words out, you could see that he was at least of average intelligence, however, I can imagine the type of education he got from high school was much different than the average student. Had he been properly treated by a speech pathologist in elementary school, perhaps he could have led a different life. He could only work as a trash collector, roving between all the dept store register trash bins. That was 30 years ago and there are times when I wonder what happened to him.

jka6• 4 years ago

When you find time to block out a four-year gap in your calendar, I'd suggest that you try to find a non-stop high-stress job with global implications, and then record yourself continuously on video any time you step outside your house.

I'd wager that when you review the footage, you'll find a few examples of forgetting names in there. Circumstances can change the nature of the thought processes - and good leaders recognize that in each other's actions and don't sweat it.

That doesn't mean it's easy for other people to understand, but I think it's worth being careful about criticizing environments that we don't live in ourselves (and that applies in both directions between global leaders and their populations).

Ataraxiaist2• 4 years ago

Doesn't this article mean the opposite though when you have so many leaders over 60?

Why would we not want more people in their 50s making decisions vs 70s if we know the brain is slowing down in 60s?

randcraw• 4 years ago

Maybe the better question was whether people make better decisions after 60. Speed is a poor measure for competence, as the OP stated outright.

avalys• 4 years ago

Just in time for you to be elected President!

taxicabjesus• 4 years ago

The surest way to get your brain to slow down prematurely is to consume alcohol. One of my 'older' passengers (60-70 years old) pointed out to me that a lot of his 'old people' neighbors had drinking problems.

Alcohol is inflammatory. Saw my Canadian friend yesterday - she told me about her former drinking problem, and that she'd been told vodka was the least problematic of all the alcohols. I guess beer/etc have lots of estrogenic properties? Men in Britain have a tendency to gynecomastia?

We wonder how much beer my grandfather drank while he was working on his cabin... My brother and I remember beer cans were all over the place.

My mother's recently basically stopped her wine consumption, because she wonders how much of her health problems are related to the handful of glasses she used to have every week. She doesn't miss it.

Not going to say anything about the drunks I know who are still alive.

Biologist123• 4 years ago

I went to a lecture at university where the lecturer stated that she was researching gynecomastia related to the presence of estrogen in drinking water - that results from wide use of the birth control pill. By the time you drink water in London, it has already been through 12 cycles of use (if memory serves correct).

mianos• 4 years ago

This was found to be fails quite some time ago:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...

rightbyte3• 4 years ago

handful of glasses she used to have every week. She doesn't miss it.

Isn't a few glasses of wine even mildly correlated with better health?

victor106• 4 years ago

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/19/health/alcohol-brain-heal...

timbit42• 4 years ago

I remember that info coming out years ago and then an update saying it wasn't. What was probably correlated to better health is grapes and, to a lesser degree, grape juice.

MrYellowP4• 4 years ago

Hm.

This reads like: "What we thought was a slowing down of mental processes was probably actually just thoughtfulness and the avoidance of jumping to conclusions early."

This reminds me of how people believe (i only have anecdotal evidence, but LOTS of it) that reacting faster in conversations means you're more intelligent, when in fact the opposite must be true.

The brain can super easily pattern match in conversations and will, in absolutely most cases , spit something out that fits to the patterns of the words spoken (as evidenced by speaking with people who react quickly, regardless of how stupid the reaction is), but that doesn't make intelligent.

It makes thoughtless.

Even worse than those are the ones who seem incapable of reflecting on their thoughts, insisting that they are correct, actually refusing to put a second or deeper thought on it.

Those are mindless automatons.

mjburgess2• 4 years ago

Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks a lot in private -- then, in conversation, you can respond quickly and deeply: because your thinking has already been done.

And for answers of the same depth and calibre, producing them faster is also indicative of more intelligence.

MrYellowP4• 4 years ago

No, actually. This is also just automaticity and thoughtlessness.

The brain needs time to process. The faster you react, the less time the brain has to process things. While I agree that someone taking too much time for processing isn't necessarily "smart", believing that a faster response is indicative of higher intelligence is ass backwards.

In the end, even if the response contains deeper thoughts, it's still a thoughtless response when that response has been created long before the conversation happened.

The point is that the brain needs time to gather and process. The less time you give your brain to do so, the more automatic your behaviour will be.

The fact that most people react quickly is absolutely indicative of them not actually using any higher brain functions while conversing with others. And it's observable in the faces of others. You can see if someone is actually thinking, or not. It's not even hard to notice, you can learn it using a mirror.

Furthermore can you never be sure if the "deep thoughts" are actually ones owns and it's important to verify if a person came up with them ones self, or if they're just someone elses thoughts mindlessly parrotted.

It's important to understand that, what I am talking about, is like a difference between doing something actively and passively.

Or, from a different perspective and directly addressing what you wrote:

your thinking has already been done.

You, yourself, have written the reason why "producing them faster is also indicative of more intelligence" is wrong, because "the thinking has already been done." equals "there was no thinking involved in coming up with the response."

... and THAT is not intelligent behaviour, it's automaticity.

rullelito• 4 years ago

when in fact the opposite must be true.

It MUST?

MrYellowP4• 4 years ago

Yes, because the reaction time is indicative of how much time you've spent with the thought.

The worst of the worst are those who react before the other person even ended the sentence. Those people themselves most oftenly consider themselves as intelligent, because - in their minds - they already know "everything".

But, sure ... that's not helpful in regards to your post.

The opposite must be true, because otherwise you give room for the idea that thoughtlessness is intelligence. As the depth of thoughts is a function of time, the longer the brain can "analyse and gather", the better the response will be.

The less time spent, the less time the brain has to "analyse and gather", which means that it will bring up whatever matches the patterns first.

It's quite amazing. We're capable of conversing without needing to actually think about what's being said and people aren't even noticing the fact that they're not actually thinking about what's being said.

If you wish to believe that (consciously or not) reducing ones self to pattern matching in conversations equals (any level of higher) intelligence, then I'm not convinced you have any practical experience on the matter.

jka6• 4 years ago

This also provides some arguments against synchronous (video, audio) meetings.

Although it's possible for a group to have a sensible, thoughtful conversation within a synchronous environment, a lot of that requires a calm and slow temperament on the part of (all of!) the participants.

That isn't, in my experience, the reality in most software companies -- people talk quickly and interject. That has the effect of pushing out more thoughtful responses.

MrYellowP4• 4 years ago

people talk quickly and interject.

Yes. Mindless automatons.

leobg• 4 years ago

For exactly that reason I’ve never understood the focus on the in-person hearing in law. Thought I think the preference is the result of preferring speed over quality. As a judge, reading and comprehending twenty pages of well researched legal briefs takes much more time than scheduling a 15 minute hearing (which is also mich less mentally taxing on you, because it’s going to be the parties of the case who are doing most of the talking).

loceng• 4 years ago

This makes me wonder if ideologues may have certain faster brain patterns or areas with faster activity, compared to those who are say more thoughtful, have further developed critical thinking, are open minded/more open minded?

lvl100• 4 years ago

To be fair that is 99% of the population.

giantg25• 4 years ago

Our entire working lives are conditioned to jump to conclusions - they want things fast and they want it to agree with the opinion/vision of the boss.

nnoitra• 4 years ago

Mark Zuckerberg: Young people are just smarter.

dade_• 4 years ago

He should find a younger person to run Meta as he is clearly aging out.

giantg25• 4 years ago

So we know that brains do slow down for people aged 60+. How many of our judges, politicians, etc are 60+? Could this be considered a problem?

pastacacioepepe2• 4 years ago

I wondered the same, since the ruling class seems to be predominantly geriatric. This is definitely a problem.

Also it's not wise to entrust your future in the hands of someone who's not going to live the consequences of their decisions.

TheFreim3• 4 years ago

Also it's not wise to entrust your future in the hands of someone who's not going to live the consequences of their decisions.

I agree to an extent but I also feel this is exaggerated sometimes. Sure, they won't live to see the actions of their consequences but that doesn't mean they don't care about them. Many politicians have family, kids, grandkids who they care about and have an interest in giving a better life. I'd also say that many younger people also unfortunately don't care any more about the future either (nihilistic).

vixen99• 4 years ago

However we do, as we see in the number of childless leaders in Europe for instance.

TheFreim3• 4 years ago

I understand your concern but based on my understanding of the political system (United States) it wouldn't be a huge issue in at least most of the cases. I believe that much of the work a politician does ends up getting divided between employees/interns/etc, an older politician may just have to offload more of their workload on unimportant matters and focus on important ones (which I suspect they already all do). What do you think?

giantg25• 4 years ago

They're generally the ones setting policy positions for those workers and interns to follow. So it could still affect their, or coming up to speed on the new issue.

dodgerdan• 4 years ago

The US is a gerontocracy, and the results of this are outwardly visible.

rindalir• 4 years ago

In many mathematical circles, and certainly in a lot of popular books about mathematicians, there's this persistent idea that you are at your mathematical peak in your 20's (or earlier) because that's the peak of your brain power, and that once you hit 30 it's all cognitive downhill. I've always been suspicious of this (as a mathematician nearing 40, for personal reason) -- and reading this makes me wonder if the decline in productivity (if it even exists) is because of other factors entirely, such as people start families and now have other responsibilities, maturity dictates spending your time and resources elsewhere, etc...

katmannthree• 4 years ago

There was a graph passed around when I was doing undergrad physics showing a weighted average of age at most impactful publication by field, with the results as I recall them now roughly in line with what one might expect: physicists peaked in their mid-ish 20's, mathematicians in their mid-late 20's / early 30's, and the for the other listed fields age steadily increases in proportion with the value of synthesis and experience versus a huge working memory and a razor sharp mind.

I was unable to find that graph looking now, if anyone recalls it with more detail I'd love to see it again.

vaxman• 4 years ago

Aside from my own family study (Aerospace Dad in 90s had me late in life), I read a study published last quarter called AAPL which is run by execs who are qualified for AARP membership.

Brain doesn't slow down until your 60s – later than we thought

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