Some years ago, in the small university town of Tübingen, Germany, a linguistics researcher named Michael Ramscar happened upon a paper concerning cognitive decline. It asserted that from age forty-five onwards one’s brain begins losing its capacity to function as well or as quickly and ended by stating that this was inclusive of one’s vocabulary. Ramscar was perplexed and recalls thinking "That doesn't make sense to me; 99 percent of the people I look up to intellectually, who keep me on my mettle, are older than I am.”.
The notions that the research paper spoke of didn’t sit well with Ramscar. The researchers had tested individuals on how fast they could remember words, without thinking twice about the amount of words already committed to memory. And so Ramscar began his own research, and, in January 2014, published an article debunking previous findings in cognitive decline. He proposed that researchers were asking the wrong questions and carrying out the wrong tests. A common test might consist of a twenty-year-old and a seventy-year-old being asked to commit to memory a list of words and then remember them later on. The younger test subjects would mostly come out on top of the older. He argued that, much like the speed of a brand new computer compared to that of a computer with a maxed out hard drive, older brains take longer to bring up memories simply because of the amount they already have stored, not because of a decrease in their capability to function.
Ultimately Ramscar hopes that his research will be able to redefine what aging means and to seriously question the idea that our brains merely move into decline at a certain point. This is undeniably a more positive and even advantageous way to think of spending our time on Earth: that our brains do not become more faulty, but rather require a bit more time to sift through the troves of information they have picked up along the way. The pursuit of knowledge seems that much more rewarding.
He conducted his actual investigation using self-made computer models to simulate people’s brains, both young and old. He inserted information into all of his computer ‘brains’, but far more into some, identifying them as the older ones. "I could see precious little evidence of decline in [the models of] healthy, older people," he says. "Their slowness and slight forgetfulness were exactly what I'd expect, because with more to draw on, there are more places to search, and there's more information to search through to find an answer.”
By Malcolm Cameron
Do Our Brains Truly Peak at Age Forty-Five?