Peak Performance

Aging is, at best – if we are lucky and if we work hard at it – a long slow decline, right?

Wrong.

Well, at least partially wrong. Consider this really interesting new study about the age at which the brain reaches peak performance. Researchers at Harvard and Mass General Center for Human Genetic Research looked at evidence from almost 50,000 online participants who had visited the website TestMyBrain.org and then tested close to 22,000 of those people (aged 10 to 71) on vocabulary, the ability to encode strings of numbers into symbols, working memory and something called the “mind in the eyes,” an emotion-recognition test which asks people to identify someone’s feelings using only a picture of that person’s eyes.

They found “considerable heterogeneity” in when cognitive abilities peak: Some abilities peak and begin to decline around the end of high school; some abilities plateau in early adulthood, beginning to decline in our 30s; others do not peak until 40s or later. On at least one important cognitive measure, researchers found almost no decline (in fact, an increase) with age. Their conclusion: “These findings motivate a nuanced theory of maturation and age-related decline.”

Yay for nuanced theory! We need more nuanced theory. We need to understand the many and varied ways in which the mere passage of time (chronological age) does not easily (or sometimes at all)correlate with the aging of the body (biological age). We need to stop thinking that the passage of years spells doom and disaster.

Athletes reach peak performance in their mid- to late 20s. Men’s sexual desire peaks at 30 (poor them). Geniuses often peak in their mid-40s. Our brains have different peaks depending on the tasks we ask of them and, I think it goes without saying, depending on how biologically youthful they are.

So, it turns out that our number-to-symbol coding abilities peak in our late teens. (But who needs that anyway?) Our working memory peaks (much earlier than you thought, I bet) between mid-20s and mid-30s. (So please, let’s 86-it on the “senior moments,” since 35 year olds can have those too.) Our ability to read emotion in faces doesn’t peak until almost 50, and then the decline is very slow, very gradual. In the study, vocabulary climbed with age and showed no signs of decline at all.

It’s time (past time) to stop expecting ourselves to fall apart as we age. We don’t. We don’t have to. This nuanced look at brain function is yet another example.