15 ms·

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

179 points by kungfudoi 5y ago

robwwilliams 5y 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 5y 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!
- tsimionescu 5y 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 5y 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.
  - rightbyte 5y 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).
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      Not so much, consider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgJAxkALyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgJAxkALyc . His first sentence there is "modern trump", but listen to every other. He's more-or-less speaking like a person.
  - markoman 5y 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.
- Ataraxiaist 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
Just in time for you to be elected President!
taxicabjesus 5y 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.
- rightbyte 5y 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 5y ago
    https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/19/health/alcohol-brain-health-intl-scli-wellness/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/19/health/alcohol-brain-heal...
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      Meh, ye was too good to be true. Probably ill people cut back on alcohol skewing the stats or something.
  - timbit42 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
MrYellowP 5y 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.
- mjburgess 5y 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.
  - MrYellowP 5y 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.
nnoitra 5y ago
Mark Zuckerberg: Young people are just smarter.
- dade_ 5y ago
  He should find a younger person to run Meta as he is clearly aging out.
giantg2 5y 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?
- dodgerdan 5y ago
  The US is a gerontocracy, and the results of this are outwardly visible.
- pastacacioepepe 5y 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.
  - TheFreim 5y 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).
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Well, they might not care, but for a different reason. They have money and connections. They and their progeny are set. So I think that's a bigger thing than age. The age part might just make them out of touch with what's going on in the world. In the case of judges, this and decline in mental acuity could be a serious issue (there's nobody to offload to).
      - pastacacioepepe 5y ago
        I agree. The class divide is certainly more concerning than the age divide.
rindalir 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

179 points by kungfudoi 5y 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 5y 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!

tsimionescu 5y 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 5y 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.
- rightbyte 5y 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).
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Not so much, consider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgJAxkALyc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgJAxkALyc . His first sentence there is "modern trump", but listen to every other. He's more-or-less speaking like a person.
- markoman 5y 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.
Ataraxiaist 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

Just in time for you to be elected President!

taxicabjesus 5y 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.

rightbyte 5y 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 5y ago
  https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/19/health/alcohol-brain-health-intl-scli-wellness/index.html https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/19/health/alcohol-brain-heal...
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Meh, ye was too good to be true. Probably ill people cut back on alcohol skewing the stats or something.
- timbit42 5y 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

MrYellowP 5y 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.

mjburgess 5y 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.
- MrYellowP 5y 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.

nnoitra 5y ago

Mark Zuckerberg: Young people are just smarter.

dade_ 5y ago
He should find a younger person to run Meta as he is clearly aging out.

giantg2 5y 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?

dodgerdan 5y ago
The US is a gerontocracy, and the results of this are outwardly visible.
pastacacioepepe 5y 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.
- TheFreim 5y 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).
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Well, they might not care, but for a different reason. They have money and connections. They and their progeny are set. So I think that's a bigger thing than age. The age part might just make them out of touch with what's going on in the world. In the case of judges, this and decline in mental acuity could be a serious issue (there's nobody to offload to).
    - pastacacioepepe 5y ago
      I agree. The class divide is certainly more concerning than the age divide.

rindalir 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.