How do our cognitive abilities change with age, what tasks are we better at in our 20s, 30s, 40s, or 60s, and why is it never too late to become a writer? Psychologists are sure that the best years of our brains are still ahead for many of us.
Admit it, faced with some difficult task, you must have thought at least once in your life: “Oh, in the best years I would not have had problems with this!” So from time to time everyone thinks starting from about 25 years old. And completely in vain, unless we are talking about lifting exorbitant weights or marathon races. Yes, our physical abilities gradually decrease over the years, but is this the case with intellectual ones? And does the brain even have “better years”?
No – it all depends on the specific tasks, psychologists Joshua Hartshorne from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laura Germine from Harvard University (USA) are sure. They asked 2450 volunteers of various ages and educational backgrounds to take a series of 15 tests. And they found that almost a third of the tasks were more successfully performed by people over 45 and even 55 years old. (one)
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Memory versus experience
Young participants in the experiments excelled in tests that required memory and attention. For example, in one of the tests, it was necessary to look at several family photographs, and then remember who, in what poses, and in what sequence was captured on them. The best results here were in people aged 18 and up to about 35 years.
But math problems and tests for general knowledge were much easier given to participants over 40 years old. And that’s not all. The tests included the so-called mind-in-eyes: after looking at a photograph of a person, the subjects had to determine what emotions he was experiencing. The task is not as easy as it might seem: for example, extreme degrees of joy, surprise or fear are often expressed by very similar facial expressions. Volunteers aged 43–58 were best able to read the “written on the face”.
And finally, a test for the richness of the vocabulary did show that this stock reaches a maximum after 55, and often after 65 years – and only declines closer to 80. “The age of the prime of our brain simply does not exist,” the researchers conclude. “Moreover, it is impossible to even determine the age at which a person performs best on most cognitive tasks, since almost every one of them is most effectively solved at different periods of life.”
The results of the study can hardly be considered sensational. Rather, they experimentally confirm what is already easy to guess: in some situations, the speed and mobility of the young mind are good, and in others, the accumulated experience and knowledge of the mature mind. But still, you see, it’s nice to know from the respected scientific source Psychological Science that the best years of your brain are ahead one way or another – no matter how old you are.
1. J. Hartshorne, L. Germine «When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak? The Asynchronous Rise and Fall of Different Cognitive Abilities Across the Life Span» Psychological Science, онлайн-публикация от 13 марта 2015 года.