If the peak is at 22, we are really short changing our children by setting the age of majority at 18.
No frickin' kidding.
Study: Old Age Begins at 27
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#52Maybe... Let me share my personal experience: when I was 18-21 I struggled with advanced math in college. Now, at 30, when I re-open those books just for fun, everything makes so much sense and some aspects of it are even enjoyable. I've failed to find a plausible explanation for myself. I haven't done much math (calculus, probability, statistics) since graduation, yet the exact same books are so much easier to read…
Also anecdotal, but...
As I started getting into heavy research on recommender systems for our startup after being somewhat lax in my research reading for a few years I stumbled into some papers that were really hard for me to push through. I kept thinking, "I must be slipping, I know this stuff wasn't as hard for me in college."
Then at some point I needed to look up a couple things in some of my textbooks (I saved them all) and as soon as I picked them up I thought ... wait? That was the hard stuff? This is all so ... trivial. Since the progression from textbooks to academic papers had mostly come at some remove, I'd not noticed that I was gradually reading much harder material, to the point that the stuff that I found hard in computer science in college now seems all rather easy.
Now, I'm 28 at this point, but already I've noticed that I'm not as fast as I once was, but I've got more momentum. When I throw myself at a problem it's with the goal of crushing it rather than dancing around it. This seems to be what's awesome about smart folks that are in middle to older ages. There's like this blunt force of knowledge that can be thrown at hard problems. Great systems programmers in their 50s are awesome to work with.
Note, also, that the article also mentions that knowledge based abilities increase up until you're 60.
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#53Maybe... Let me share my personal experience: when I was 18-21 I struggled with advanced math in college. Now, at 30, when I re-open those books just for fun, everything makes so much sense and some aspects of it are even enjoyable. I've failed to find a plausible explanation for myself. I haven't done much math (calculus, probability, statistics) since graduation, yet the exact same books are so much easier to read…
Once you've got an intuitive picture of how something works, you will find that the details just fall into place. But often that intuitive picture can't just be gifted to you, despite the best efforts of our best teachers to concoct the perfect metaphors. It takes time. You have to fiddle around with the concepts in your head, sometimes for years, before they really sink in. You might have to repeat them several times, or approach them from several angles, or encounter them in unusual surroundings, or find the one book that finally explains the subject in a way that clicks.
Once you really understand something, trying to remember what it was like before you understood it is like trying to forget how to read.
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#54May be Its fault of education systems and corporate jobs..I don't buy it for sure
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#55I don't buy it. I suspect that it is more related to dull/stressful work environments than age (at 22 you're either still in college or fresh out from it).
Also, mental dexterity and knowledge are probably inversely proportional to each other because once you learn more you draw on more to make decisions. So, if we could rid our minds of our knowledge we might improve our thinking speed.
Anyways, for people who feel down about their age, remember that nothing anybody does will last forever. Our judgment of significance is significantly colored by our finite sense of time. Just think of what seemed like a long time to you at 3 vs at 30. Thus, it is ok to primarily aim at happiness in this life instead of achievement, though aiming at achievement is also good if it makes you happy.
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#56Who cares if your clock slows down say 20% by 50? Think how easy it is to optimize any program by 20%. It's irrelevant. Much more important is what software you're running. Like other posters here, I struggled with things in my 'prime' that I now find much easier. That phenomenon doesn't seem to get talked about much. There seems to be this truism that intellectually challenging work peaks before 30. How many great novels or plays were written by anyone in their 20's? Yet important math and music is often done young. Go figure.
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#57I'm 23. I'm going to reference this research when we pitch our company to raise money. Fund the young guys.
That's a good idea. And if you're still pitching when you get older, you can reference this other study about the brain peaking at 39: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345785
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#58I'm 23. I'm going to reference this research when we pitch our company to raise money. Fund the young guys.
Never trust anybody over 30, man
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
After 40 your reflexes are slower and you are less likely to have your world shattering idea. For some people, creativity increases with age. But still, quick thinking and high energy levels are useful. I think it's crucial that we compress schooling as much as possible so people can do something important while they still can.
i think creativity increases as you have more experiences (plural) to draw inspiration from.
As a writer I'd agree with your statement. I've also read a lot about young writers and there are very few specifically for this reason, not necessarily for a lack of creativity but for the inability to produce something believable.
How can a 15 year old write believably about relationships, or going to a bar or club, or any of these things. Experience can easily be transposed from one place to another; aka, you don't have to get kicked in the gut to know it's going to hurt a lot, just like you don't need to win the PGA tour to write how great it would feel to win it. However, if you've never won anything or felt any sense of achievement, it has to be exceptionally hard to write convincingly about someone winning.
I think this is why most writers begin appearing in their 20's (I believe it depends on region, I've seen more early-20's writers from the UK, where you graduate high-school at 16, than from the US, where you graduate high-school at 18) when they've had many formative experiences and they start experiencing the real world. When they start to see hardship and all the rest that comes with adulthood.
Re: Study: Old Age Begins at 27
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
What happens if we extend life to, say, 150 and what we get is this long, 100-year decline into complete cognitive paralysis? We go "That's interesting, I wonder which processes are involved and how we can keep their desirable effects while removing or reversing the decline?" I'm late 20s and I do feel like I'm losing it. I feel overloaded by the infohose of 'news' I skim read every day yet mostly forget completely v…
I'm 18, and occasionally I feel like I've lost something I had before. But that's a common feeling, I'm sure: I'll always want to be wiser and simultaneously younger. I doubt that has anything at all to do with my actual age or level of knowledge. The feeling of losing things may very well stem from the inertia that builds up in life, along with your own growing awareness of your abilities. When I was 5 I thought I w…
Speaking from 3 years ahead of you, you're going to begin feeling like you've lost things a lot more.
I swear old age starts at 5 years old, because I can forget the most simple things, but last night my wife was asking me the demographics of Canada and I nailed like 7 out of the top 10 in the right order through guessing alone, just because I have a lot of knowledge to base my guesses off of.
I had a clarifying moment when I was 15, which I believe is the point at which I reached maturity and quite honestly I feel very little difference at 21 than I did at 15 except for experience. I simply realised that the one thing I wanted to do in life was write, and that all the BS of school was transitory. That summer, at 16 I started working as a reviewer and was the first person at the company to get an excerpt on a product, however I left when the politics started interfering with the job. It was like, depending on who the product came from you had to add points to the review. It wasn't so much with movies, but with video games if one was coming from EA it was virtually impossible to badmouth. The final straw came with Oblivion, the preview material was so flawed the game was inherently unplayable without cheats (the whole, a rat can kill a lvl 30 thief because they stupidly made all the creatures level too).
After I left I switched from writing short stories to actually going for the goal posts with a novel. I've ditched a lot of projects, simply because I outgrew them in the process of writing them. I threw out an entire months work because it wasn't original enough for me, and from my experience humans have a very limited ability to see outside of the box when they're focusing on something so if I released it wasn't original then so would everyone else.
My honest advice to you is find someone with a valid opinion on writing (in my case it was my editor, who I became quick friends with) and get them to be brutally honest. Take every single word they say to heart and then feel free to ignore every fucking word if it doesn't help you. Do this with as many people you can trust and get them to be honest and if they don't provide criticism they're not helping.
People often avoid hearing the bad things about their work and people often avoid saying bad things about it, but you need to hear every single criticism no matter how irrelevant it actually ends up being. If it doesn't help you immediately, it will eventually because once you're published your work is open to the judgment of millions of people. It also helps with denials, lots of agents/editors can be helpful, but don't be surprised if you get a standard denial letter... I once got one when I emailed an agent asking what genres he was currently accepting submissions for, which was exceptionally funny.