Charting Declining Brain Performance

The good news for people 35 - 55 is that your brain performance is holding steady. The bad news is what happens after your mid-50's.

The Salthouse Cognitive Aging Lab at the University of Virginia studies the effects of aging on brain functions such as memory and processing speed. Their studies show a striking pattern: a decline from twenty to the mid-thirties, a period of relative stability to the mid-fifties, and decline thereafter.

Subjects were tested with questions like these:

These tests apparently include a broad sample of people. That's as it should be, but the aggregation may mask an important differentiation in aging brains: between those that have problems, including dementias such as Alzheimer's, and those that are healthy. Separating these two could show that for healthier brains, the post-fifties decline is less dramatic.

The chart appears in another recent paper, "The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions Over The Lifecycle" and are excerpted from a forthcoming revision to "Cognitive Aging: A Primer," which Salthouse co-authored with D. C. Park and N. Schwarz. "The Age of Reason" posits that people make their best personal finance decisions in middle age, when their growing experience base is not yet overwhelmed by poorer cognitive performance.