As they say getting old is no fun. It’s age that makes us forget things we wanted to say, makes us lose keys, and spend hours trying to remember the password to the e-mail account. Yet, we believed the old age to hit us sometime beyond the “forty benchmark”. However, the scientists do not get payed for nothing: a recent study confirmed that we start aging around 10 years earlier than that.
According to the Daily Mail, the data from the research showed that our mental abilities begin to deteriorate roughly after we turn 27.
The study was conducted by the initiative of the University of Virginia. Two thousand participants (men and women ages between 18 and 60) in good mental state and with good health and education background were asked to solve some puzzles, recall some words, details from texts, and fill in blanks in words and symbols. It should be noted that similar tests are used for diagnosis of mental disability and dementia.
75% of the best results came from the participants who were on average 22 years old. 27 appeared to be the benchmark when the results started to decline. Participants at this age had lower logic, speed of thought, and spatial imagination than the 22-year-old participants. Memory starts to decline roughly around the age of 37, and the rest of figures from 42.
The scientists believe that the results from the study will affect the approaches to therapeutic techniques designed to slow the action of time on human intelligence. In particular, it appears that those techniques should be practiced much earlier than the retirement age, since the results of the study clearly showed that healthy and well-educated young people (ages 20-30) go through the earliest stages of age-related deterioration of cognitive abilities.
Source of the image: flickr.com/photos/margolove.
