The peak of the brain is at 22 years of age

Mar 20, 2009 15:13 GMT  ·  By
The human brain reaches its cognitive peak at the age of 22, but general knowledge is accumulated until about the time one turns 60
   The human brain reaches its cognitive peak at the age of 22, but general knowledge is accumulated until about the time one turns 60

The human brain constantly evolves throughout people's lives, but some of its abilities, a new study shows, seem to peak at the age of 22, and then to slowly decline at around 27. Among the skills that are affected after that age are the capabilities to detect relationships between seemingly-unrelated things, to remember data that are unrelated to a specific topic, as well as the ability to make rapid comparisons between two or more items, people, or situations.

“This research suggests that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s,” the lead investigator of the new study, University of Virgina professor of psychology Timothy Salthouse, shares. The main conclusions of the research can be found in the latest issue of the scientific journal Neurobiology of Aging.

Over 2,000 healthy individuals were studied for this investigation and they covered all the age ranges from 18 to 60 years old. The participants were followed for a period of seven years, and during all this time, they were asked at constant intervals to take part in small “games,” designed to test their cognitive abilities. They had to solve various types of puzzles, or even remember certain details that they saw or heard in childhood stories.

In other tests, they were also required to find hidden patterns and symbols in a seemingly unrelated assortment of numbers or letters. The investigations within the study were not carried out on an yearly basis, but rather several times per year, so that the experts analyzing the results could detect even the slightest decline in test subjects' brain functions as soon as they occurred.

“These patterns suggest that some types of mental flexibility decrease relatively early in adulthood, but that how much knowledge one has, and the effectiveness of integrating it with one's abilities, may increase throughout all of adulthood if there are no pathological diseases,” Salthouse adds. At the average age of 22, the participants showed that they were at the peak of their cognitive abilities, while a serious gap in some functions was statistically detected around the age of 27.

Still, vocabulary and general knowledge levels seemed to be on the rise regardless of age, until the critical stage of 60, when certain types of medical conditions, including senility and dementia, as well as other brain diseases, started tainting the results of the investigation.