Brain doesn't slow down until your 60s – later than we thought | Hacker News Reader

Brain doesn't slow down until your 60s – later than we thought

newscientist.com

179 pointskungfudoi59 comments

Hm.

This reads like: "What we thought was a slowing down of mental processes was probably actually just thoughtfulness and the avoidance of jumping to conclusions early."

This reminds me of how people believe (i only have anecdotal evidence, but LOTS of it) that reacting faster in conversations means you're more intelligent, when in fact the opposite must be true.

The brain can super easily pattern match in conversations and will, in absolutely most cases , spit something out that fits to the patterns of the words spoken (as evidenced by speaking with people who react quickly, regardless of how stupid the reaction is), but that doesn't make intelligent.

It makes thoughtless.

Even worse than those are the ones who seem incapable of reflecting on their thoughts, insisting that they are correct, actually refusing to put a second or deeper thought on it.

Those are mindless automatons.

Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks a lot in private -- then, in conversation, you can respond quickly and deeply: because your thinking has already been done.

And for answers of the same depth and calibre, producing them faster is also indicative of more intelligence.

No, actually. This is also just automaticity and thoughtlessness.

The brain needs time to process. The faster you react, the less time the brain has to process things. While I agree that someone taking too much time for processing isn't necessarily "smart", believing that a faster response is indicative of higher intelligence is ass backwards.

In the end, even if the response contains deeper thoughts, it's still a thoughtless response when that response has been created long before the conversation happened.

The point is that the brain needs time to gather and process. The less time you give your brain to do so, the more automatic your behaviour will be.

The fact that most people react quickly is absolutely indicative of them not actually using any higher brain functions while conversing with others. And it's observable in the faces of others. You can see if someone is actually thinking, or not. It's not even hard to notice, you can learn it using a mirror.

Furthermore can you never be sure if the "deep thoughts" are actually ones owns and it's important to verify if a person came up with them ones self, or if they're just someone elses thoughts mindlessly parrotted.

It's important to understand that, what I am talking about, is like a difference between doing something actively and passively.

Or, from a different perspective and directly addressing what you wrote:

> your thinking has already been done.

You, yourself, have written the reason why "producing them faster is also indicative of more intelligence" is wrong, because "the thinking has already been done." equals "there was no thinking involved in coming up with the response."

... and THAT is not intelligent behaviour, it's automaticity.

Automatism of the articulation of things an individual interprets at a much higher level is intelligent behaviour, and a high proportion of synchronous communication is based around establishing/clarifying things the other party is already supposed to have in mind. Someone isn't demonstrating greater intelligence because they can't parse the basic greeting as a single concept so have to retrospectively analyse each individual word of the sentence to infer meaning, because they don't have an existing opinion on an issue (or haven't started thinking about it when it first became the subject of the conversation a minutes earlier) or because they have to iterate through number of possibilities to guess at something somebody else simply recalls or already figured out.

GPT-3 determining the most probable of millions of possible followup word sequences each time the other party emits a new word by comparing it with a vast corpus of mostly irrelevant data isn't reasoning at as high a level as the person who grasps as soon as the other person references $subject that what the other person wants is agreement, and thats as simple as human "automated" responses get (GPT-3 will get there too, via a more circuitous route)

> Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks a lot in private -- then, in conversation, you can respond quickly and deeply: because your thinking has already been done.

I also disagree with this, and I'll provide slightly different reasoning, although I think it does overlap with what you're saying regarding evident utilisation of the mind.

Even if someone has done a lot of thinking about an issue, they may want to take time before responding in a conversation to make sure that they've correctly pattern-matched the circumstances, and to prepare a suitable response for the moment and audience.

At some point I think this is system 1 vs system 2 thinking in that Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast Slow context.

I am really not sure though if any of my thought is something other than lookup tables and types of joins.

Youre ignoring instinctual/creative responses.

Deeply thinking isn't always required to produce high quality ideas (like lightbulb moments)

> when in fact the opposite must be true.

It MUST?

Yes, because the reaction time is indicative of how much time you've spent with the thought.

The worst of the worst are those who react before the other person even ended the sentence. Those people themselves most oftenly consider themselves as intelligent, because - in their minds - they already know "everything".

But, sure ... that's not helpful in regards to your post.

The opposite must be true, because otherwise you give room for the idea that thoughtlessness is intelligence. As the depth of thoughts is a function of time, the longer the brain can "analyse and gather", the better the response will be.

The less time spent, the less time the brain has to "analyse and gather", which means that it will bring up whatever matches the patterns first.

It's quite amazing. We're capable of conversing without needing to actually think about what's being said and people aren't even noticing the fact that they're not actually thinking about what's being said.

If you wish to believe that (consciously or not) reducing ones self to pattern matching in conversations equals (any level of higher) intelligence, then I'm not convinced you have any practical experience on the matter.

Right now, you are just some dude on the internet with a strong opinion, can you back up your assertions with citations?

Anecdotally, I am one of those people who interject when people are talking to me. I know it's a bad habit, but in most cases I DO think faster than almost everyone I meet, and from my perception people take forever to explain their point. Most of the time I know exactly where they are going on the topic, and I bore easily, so find myself interrupting. It is one of my worst traits, but I challenge that it's because I don't think. I think deeply about everything and anything as I have a constant desire to learn regardless of topic. The down side of this is that most people talk absolute rubbish about topics they know nothing about, yet seem to enjoy doing it, and resent being corrected or educated. I had to learn this the hard way. These days I just don't engage in any general conversations with colleagues or acquaintances for this very reason.

Pretty much all know-it-alls think they are smarter that anyone else.

There might be two opposite forces going on here: one delta t is the time required for some deeper thought, the other - negative - delta t is the time saved by predicting what your interlocutor is trying to say.

There's an (unusual, I admit) energy expenditure counter-argument here.

If someone is able to respond near-automatically and produces an accurate, relevant response that progresses a conversation or situation positively (for whatever that means), then the fact that they haven't spent time and mental energy (and in turn, genuine calorific energy) could be seen as a success.

Now I'm not necessarily arguing that it's good or healthy to have less-thoughtful conversations like that; just that there are other perspectives possible here.

(I think that what really matters is the overall level of progress that humanity can make in terms of achievement - and I think that rapid-response conversations are likely to keep us stuck with existing models of insecure, attention-sapping, user-harmful technology)

This also provides some arguments against synchronous (video, audio) meetings.

Although it's possible for a group to have a sensible, thoughtful conversation within a synchronous environment, a lot of that requires a calm and slow temperament on the part of (all of!) the participants.

That isn't, in my experience, the reality in most software companies -- people talk quickly and interject. That has the effect of pushing out more thoughtful responses.

> people talk quickly and interject.

Yes. Mindless automatons.

Not really what I'm suggesting; many of the responses (even rapid ones) could be valuable and accurate.

But regardless, it can make it difficult for all opinions to feel heard (and that can lead to other problems).

Depends who this happens with and the context.

I cherish those incredible conversations with some where there was lots of constructive interjection… essentially jamming with ideas.

This hasn’t been the case with those who have a point to prove or are just argumentative.

For exactly that reason I’ve never understood the focus on the in-person hearing in law. Thought I think the preference is the result of preferring speed over quality. As a judge, reading and comprehending twenty pages of well researched legal briefs takes much more time than scheduling a 15 minute hearing (which is also mich less mentally taxing on you, because it’s going to be the parties of the case who are doing most of the talking).

I would think/hope/expect the judge has spent time reading and comprehending the case before that 15 minute meeting. At least in my very limited experience, they manage to pose fairly astute questions in such meetings.

This makes me wonder if ideologues may have certain faster brain patterns or areas with faster activity, compared to those who are say more thoughtful, have further developed critical thinking, are open minded/more open minded?

To be fair that is 99% of the population.

Our entire working lives are conditioned to jump to conclusions - they want things fast and they want it to agree with the opinion/vision of the boss.

Lovely study. The authors are wisely cautious in their interpretation—in fact, three paragraphs in discussion sre devoted to caveats, such as lack of longitudinal data. Are effects due to secular changes or individual changes? Probably the latter, but given possible impact of rampant video gaming on quick decision making abilities, this is not a firm inference. Secular/epoch effects are very real—IQ scores included.

What amazes me is the very wide range of variation in performance. Look at those large error bars throughout figure 2. Age or secular trends do not account for much of the variance in performance. Other variable do!

Paper is open access.

The surest way to get your brain to slow down prematurely is to consume alcohol. One of my 'older' passengers (60-70 years old) pointed out to me that a lot of his 'old people' neighbors had drinking problems.

Alcohol is inflammatory. Saw my Canadian friend yesterday - she told me about her former drinking problem, and that she'd been told vodka was the least problematic of all the alcohols. I guess beer/etc have lots of estrogenic properties? Men in Britain have a tendency to gynecomastia?

We wonder how much beer my grandfather drank while he was working on his cabin... My brother and I remember beer cans were all over the place.

My mother's recently basically stopped her wine consumption, because she wonders how much of her health problems are related to the handful of glasses she used to have every week. She doesn't miss it.

Not going to say anything about the drunks I know who are still alive.

I went to a lecture at university where the lecturer stated that she was researching gynecomastia related to the presence of estrogen in drinking water - that results from wide use of the birth control pill. By the time you drink water in London, it has already been through 12 cycles of use (if memory serves correct).

This was found to be fails quite some time ago:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...

> handful of glasses she used to have every week. She doesn't miss it.

Isn't a few glasses of wine even mildly correlated with better health?

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/05/19/health/alcohol-brain-heal...

Meh, ye was too good to be true. Probably ill people cut back on alcohol skewing the stats or something.

I remember that info coming out years ago and then an update saying it wasn't. What was probably correlated to better health is grapes and, to a lesser degree, grape juice.

One of the things I find most annoying about modern American political (and popular) discourse is the meme that if you're old, you must be senile. This is regularly assumed about the elder figures in both parties - and both our current and former president.

"They're old, they're probably senile" is not a feeling borne of the actual statistics. By far, most old people are not senile!

The current president is accused of being senile not simply because he is old, but because of several public incidents of suspicious memory issues, like clearly forgetting the name of the Australian prime minister he was holding a (remote) press conference with, or forgetting the name of Barack Obama in a pre-election speech.

Trump was sometimes accused of being senile because of his rambling sentences and bizarre speech pattern involving frequent repetitions.

This is not to say that any of this is introvertible proof that they are in fact senile, but the point is that there is evidence that can be interpreted this way, it's not simply ageism. As a further note of this, Bernie Sanders has not commonly been seen as senile, even though he is of a similar age - since none of his speech patterns suggest these types of memory issues.

Honestly, more than anyone's particular gaffes or speech patterns -- public figures that have been in the public eye for decades are on tape from when they were younger. With both the current and former president, it's almost shocking to hear how differently they used to speak.

Didn't Trump always speak like that? I.e. like cutting sentences to fold out into something else, "speaking in reverse" by backstepping to something prior and dropping negations.

His way of speaking made it really easy to make him look stupid in text quotes. But I didn't reflect on it sounding wierd (I am non native speaker).

Not so much, consider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgJAxkALyc .

His first sentence there is "modern trump", but listen to every other. He's more-or-less speaking like a person.

Any consideration of Biden's mental state should also factor in the fact that he has always been gaffe-prone (speaking without a filter) and has suffered from a stammer/stutter. This is one reason why dementia testing includes a written portion instead of simply relying on speech evidence. These types of speech impediments can often lead to moments of halting speech that unavoidably lead to the impression that the speaker is mentally deficient. There is also the excess and aged skin that he has around his eyes and the squinting appearance this leads to. Added together, it's tempting to form a narrative that he must be senile. However, senility rarely takes a vacation, and I've seen enough press conferences and speeches where Biden is forceful, direct and focused to leave little doubt that he's not senile. He simply looks like a 79 year old man who is accepting and feeling the weight of the office, and during the particularly difficult contemporary conditions of pandemic and national division. The weight of the office has in modern times had a tendency to make ordinarily intelligent people look mentally weak, e.g., G. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, although Obama suffered this to a lesser degree, I'd say.

As an aside on speech impediments, when I was in my late teens I worked retail with another teen who so profoundly stuttered that he could barely get any words out. I knew that he went to my high school but hardly saw him because he was in the special education program. If you took the time to let him get his words out, you could see that he was at least of average intelligence, however, I can imagine the type of education he got from high school was much different than the average student. Had he been properly treated by a speech pathologist in elementary school, perhaps he could have led a different life. He could only work as a trash collector, roving between all the dept store register trash bins. That was 30 years ago and there are times when I wonder what happened to him.

Yes, my point was only that there are more reasons than their age that some have started claiming Biden or Trump are senile. These people are probably wrong, but they are not simply equating old with senile.

When you find time to block out a four-year gap in your calendar, I'd suggest that you try to find a non-stop high-stress job with global implications, and then record yourself continuously on video any time you step outside your house.

I'd wager that when you review the footage, you'll find a few examples of forgetting names in there. Circumstances can change the nature of the thought processes - and good leaders recognize that in each other's actions and don't sweat it.

That doesn't mean it's easy for other people to understand, but I think it's worth being careful about criticizing environments that we don't live in ourselves (and that applies in both directions between global leaders and their populations).

Again, I wasn't trying to claim that Biden or Trump are senile. I was just claiming that the common argument is not only based on their age, it is based on their age + particular speech patterns/events.

This is not to say that those facts prove anything, as you rightly say they can be cherry picked or signs of many other things than senility.

Thank you, that makes sense. And my mistake, my post was a bit overly provocative (although in a sense it wasn't entirely directed at you; it's a broader frustration at criticism of small details while ignoring larger patterns).

Doesn't this article mean the opposite though when you have so many leaders over 60?

Why would we not want more people in their 50s making decisions vs 70s if we know the brain is slowing down in 60s?

Maybe the better question was whether people make better decisions after 60. Speed is a poor measure for competence, as the OP stated outright.

In many mathematical circles, and certainly in a lot of popular books about mathematicians, there's this persistent idea that you are at your mathematical peak in your 20's (or earlier) because that's the peak of your brain power, and that once you hit 30 it's all cognitive downhill. I've always been suspicious of this (as a mathematician nearing 40, for personal reason) -- and reading this makes me wonder if the decline in productivity (if it even exists) is because of other factors entirely, such as people start families and now have other responsibilities, maturity dictates spending your time and resources elsewhere, etc...

There was a graph passed around when I was doing undergrad physics showing a weighted average of age at most impactful publication by field, with the results as I recall them now roughly in line with what one might expect: physicists peaked in their mid-ish 20's, mathematicians in their mid-late 20's / early 30's, and the for the other listed fields age steadily increases in proportion with the value of synthesis and experience versus a huge working memory and a razor sharp mind.

I was unable to find that graph looking now, if anyone recalls it with more detail I'd love to see it again.

Mark Zuckerberg: Young people are just smarter.

He should find a younger person to run Meta as he is clearly aging out.

So we know that brains do slow down for people aged 60+. How many of our judges, politicians, etc are 60+? Could this be considered a problem?

I wondered the same, since the ruling class seems to be predominantly geriatric. This is definitely a problem.

Also it's not wise to entrust your future in the hands of someone who's not going to live the consequences of their decisions.

> Also it's not wise to entrust your future in the hands of someone who's not going to live the consequences of their decisions.

I agree to an extent but I also feel this is exaggerated sometimes. Sure, they won't live to see the actions of their consequences but that doesn't mean they don't care about them. Many politicians have family, kids, grandkids who they care about and have an interest in giving a better life. I'd also say that many younger people also unfortunately don't care any more about the future either (nihilistic).

Well, they might not care, but for a different reason. They have money and connections. They and their progeny are set. So I think that's a bigger thing than age.

The age part might just make them out of touch with what's going on in the world. In the case of judges, this and decline in mental acuity could be a serious issue (there's nobody to offload to).

I agree. The class divide is certainly more concerning than the age divide.

> Well, they might not care, but for a different reason. They have money and connections. They and their progeny are set. So I think that's a bigger thing than age.

I agree that this would be the bigger issue than age. A young(er) politician can also be just as corrupt. See how many politicians get jobs in private sector areas they "helped" during their political career.

For example, if memory serves me, Nimrata "Nikki" Haley got a spot on the Boeing board after supporting them as governor in the past. She's only 50.

> In the case of judges, this and decline in mental acuity could be a serious issue

I completely forgot about judges, this is a great point. Judges hold a large sway from civil court all the way to supreme.

"A young(er) politician can also be just as corrupt."

I agree they can be. I think it's more common or to a greater degree with older ones, simply because they've built up more connections and "favors" over the years. But yeah, the whole private sector job after being a regulator/politician is huge, especially with the FDA.

My state had an age limit set for judges to retire at 70. It required a referendum to change. They wanted to change the age to 75. At first they wrote the referendum to inform the voters of the fact that current forced retirement age is 70 and the measure would raise it to 75. The court determined that disclosing the existing limit was biased. They had to rewrite it to basically ask "should judges retire at 75" with no mention of the current limit.

It passed overwhelming because people didn't know the existing limit was 70. Many said they never would have voted to raise the age and would prefer it stay at 70. So the courts were biased to extend their own ruling time, and knowingly duped the public into raising the limit by keeping them uninformed.

As a side note, once a judge is forced to retire, they can still be a judge. They just can't be elected/retained. They basically work on a contract basis. They do this because they say there are a lack of judges.

However we do, as we see in the number of childless leaders in Europe for instance.

I understand your concern but based on my understanding of the political system (United States) it wouldn't be a huge issue in at least most of the cases. I believe that much of the work a politician does ends up getting divided between employees/interns/etc, an older politician may just have to offload more of their workload on unimportant matters and focus on important ones (which I suspect they already all do). What do you think?

They're generally the ones setting policy positions for those workers and interns to follow. So it could still affect their, or coming up to speed on the new issue.

The US is a gerontocracy, and the results of this are outwardly visible.

Aside from my own family study (Aerospace Dad in 90s had me late in life), I read a study published last quarter called AAPL which is run by execs who are qualified for AARP membership.

Just in time for you to be elected President!

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