Worried that you can't remember where you filed that email? Finding it hard to match names to faces at conferences, and lost without name badges?This week's New Scientist has a comfortingly upbeat article on "The five ages of the brain:" gestation, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age.
Skipping straight to adulthood, we find that ...
"This long, slow decline begins at about 27 and runs throughout adulthood, although different abilities decline at different rates. Curiously, the ones that start to go first - those involved with executive control, such as planning and task coordination - are the ones that took the longest to appear during your teens.
Episodic memory, which is involved in recalling events, also declines rapidly, while the brain's processing speed slows down and working memory is able to store less information.
That all sounds rather depressing, but there is an upside. The abilities that decline in adulthood rely on "fluid intelligence" - the underlying processing speed of your brain. But so-called "crystallised intelligence", which is roughly equivalent to wisdom, heads in the other direction. So even as your fluid intelligence sags, along with your face and your bottom, your crystallised intelligence keeps growing along with your waistline. The two appear to cancel each other out, at least until we reach our 60s and 70s."
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