Study: At what age does our thinking really slow down?
The older we get, the slower everything becomes… including our thinking. But is that really true? And if so, when does our brain start to slow down? A study has some answers – and some of them are surprising.
When older people take a little longer at the supermarket checkout, we tend to blame it on their years. After all, our brains work significantly slower as we get older – right? It's not quite that simple, as a study by the Psychological Institute at Heidelberg University has discovered. According to their study , there's another reason why older people sometimes take more time.
Intelligence + cognitive abilities: Study on mental speed in old ageFor the study, Mischa von Krause's research team analyzed approximately 1.2 million data sets from people between the ages of 10 and 80. Participants were asked to assign images and words on a screen to specific categories.
In fact, older people took longer to make decisions than younger people. But according to the scientists' analysis, this isn't necessarily due to declining cognitive abilities, but rather to the fact that older people simply take more time to make decisions. They apparently weigh things up more carefully than younger people.
Thinking slows down with age – but later than previously thoughtAccording to the research team, this hesitancy begins to increase as early as age 20. And—contrary to previous beliefs—mental abilities and intelligence actually increase continuously until age 30. They then remain roughly the same throughout most of our adult lives and only begin to decline from around age 60.
The experts explain: "For large portions of the human lifespan and typical professional careers, our results challenge the widely held notion of an age-related slowing of mental speed." Their analysis suggests that the decline begins much later in life than previously thought.
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However, these research results should be treated with caution, as the team did not examine the brain itself, but based their conclusions on a mathematical model and the participants' data sets. There were no neurological studies that could have supported this hypothesis.
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