I have to laugh at some of the research done these days. This recent study on mental alacrity seems to indicate that the ability to reason and visualize to solve problems and respond quickly starts to decline by the age of 27, and that at age 22, one’s brain is at that peak, at least in this area. There was some good news that “Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.”
So they look at the physiology of the brain which is a damn good place to start. But will they take into consideration that particularly when it comes to speed in the thought process, that there’s a whole lot more empty space to readily spot connections in the brain of a 22 year-old than to immediately find what you’re seeking from the stacked and cluttered shelves of the accumulation of experience in the mind of everyone as they get older. Imagine using a program such as Eastgate’s Tinderbox to organize the knowledge of an individual as it is gained. Imagine the tangle of threads as new boxes–the alphabet, a nursery rhyme, names and faces, phone numbers, history, spelling, reading, etc.–are created and looped back to their base of prior experience and knowledge. Then the ease of selecting a single fact simply by clicking a button?
I think the reason–aside from some definite physiological changes caused by aging–that some older people are better than others at mind games, recall, and catching on to new things also is based on how well an individual has learned to either organize a lifetime’s worth of data and images or how well they’ve kept up on cleaning out and dumping the unnecessary.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology