Middle-aged brains just as sharp, German university declares

Middle age may burden you with creaky joints, but your brain will remain as limber as it was in youth, a German university has found.

A study has found that middle-aged people retain their mental agility.

The long march through middle age may burden you with creaky joints, but rest assured your brain will remain as limber as it was in your youth.

A study by Germany’s Heidelberg University involving more than a million participants appears to have overturned the widely held idea that mental processing power peaks around the age of 20. Instead, the results suggest mental agility remains stable until people hit their sixties.

The research looked at data from about 1.2 million people aged from 10 to 80 who had taken part in online tests that were originally designed to measure levels of unconscious racial bias.

The assessment called for them to sort words and images as quickly as possible.

Tasks involved being asked to label faces as white or black, or classify words such as “joy” or “agony” as positive or negative, by pressing one of two buttons.

The ability of this kind of test to reveal hidden racism is disputed, but researchers used the vast amount of data they collected to explore an entirely different topic – the participants’ mental processing speed.

Their analysis suggests that as people grow older they tend to become more careful and less impulsive when making decisions.

Information takes just a little longer to make its journey from the eyes to the brain and motor skills become a little blunter, which means it takes longer for a person to hit the button.

Once these “non-decisional processes” are factored in, the study suggests that mental speed increases during one’s early years and then hits a plateau, staying high until the age of about 60.

Overall, the results suggest that people in their twenties were quicker to hit the buttons, not because their mental processing was working more efficiently, but because they were more likely to prioritise speed over accuracy.

“Our results indicate that response-time slowing begins as early as age 20, but this slowing was attributable to increases in decision caution and to slower non-decisional processes, rather than to differences in mental speed,” the authors write in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The Times