Mental skills peak at different ages
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At what age is your brain the sharpest?
It can be helpful to learn more about when your brain might be at its best.
Certain mental abilities do seem to reach their fullest point in certain periods of life.
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Information processing and short-term memory, for example, tend to be at their highest in early adulthood.
Emotional understanding, on the other hand, becomes highest during middle age.
When Do Mental Powers Peak?
Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, is often suggested to peak during late adulthood.
According to some experts, this long-held dichotomy might be far too simplistic.
What they found instead was that there was a surprising consistency to when particular abilities typically peak.
According to Hartshorne, that’s becausethe brain is always changing.
Digging deeper, the two began looking at archival data from older intelligence tests.
What they discovered was that there appeared to be no single mental peak.
Instead, different abilities seemed to peak at wildly different and sometimes surprising ages.
These results helped inspire their further investigation into how mental abilities change with age.
How Researchers Looked at Mental Sharpness
How did researchers look at how mental abilities change with age?
They drew a large online sample of participants who utilizedbrain trainingwebsites.
Using the approach, the researchers gathered data from nearly 50,000 people across a wide range of ages.
Hartshorne and Germine’s earlier research had shown that these tasks measured mental abilities that change as people age.
The results revealed what the researchers called “considerable heterogeneity in when cognitive abilities peak.”
What could explain this late peak in mental abilities?
They also agree that further investigations are needed to determine exactly why mental powers peak at different ages.
What Does This Mean For You
Your brain does not have a single “peak” age.
Hartshorne JK, Germine LT.When does cognitive functioning peak?
The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the life span.Psychol Sci.
