I am curious as to how a graph would look if you gave a man an I.O. test every decade until he was say 90 years old. A typical healthy person with above average but not genius at his peak.
At 65 I find myself struggling with a lot of things I used to whiz right through. I often have to draw things out or write out a series of events where I would normaly just do it in my head. The only advantage I seem to have now is an improved attention spanIf whizzing is now a problem you may want to have your prostate checked.
No, my aging brain is fine. Why do you ask?
What?
Oh, you mean “age associated cognitive decline”. Very real, very variable between individuals, not well understood. The burning question is always whether or not the changes are part of normal aging or an early sign of dementia.
My cursory googling hasn’t yet turned up IQ change data, sorry.
If online IQ tests count, mine hasn’t (yet) changed, between ages 33 and 67. That’s not to say I don’t walk into a room and have to walk out again to remember why I was there in the first place.
I stuttered as a child, and I’ve found it returning when I’m especially tired or stressed. I lose words, but that was part of the original stutter.
I’ve found the opposite to be the case but having had to deal with certain neurological damage since childhood, perhaps that’s not unusual. Things I used to have great difficulty with now barely require any effort at all while others still remain difficult if not virtually impossible.
The fact of the matter is that neurogenesis is possible in the adult brain and seems to be the basis for many depression treatments as it now seems as if these involve the release of BDNF (brain derived neurotropic factor) in the hippocampus.
From what I’ve read, the most important factor in cognitive decline seems to be the level of intellectual and mental stimulation. The more you have, the lower and slower the amount of the decline.
Hope it doesn’t drop too much. I have returned to college at 61 to study digital forensics and cyber security, the classes are not push overs.
This would make sense, durring my working and raising family years I really didn’t do anything challenging on a regular basis. I do find my ability to grasp mathamatical concepts seems as good as ever yet I no longer have the ability to store numbers I need to comeback to and compare while I am working out an answer. I also have a hard time remembering mathamatical rules but have no problem working out the answers once I look the rules back up.
I certainly lose words and names all the time. Math is considerably harder to do and what I do do is clearly not at the same level as when I was in my 30s. There is definitely cognitive decline as I age. Heading to 0.
Interesting that you chose your 30s as the comparison - do you think that’s when you peaked? I ask, of course, because the cliche answer for mathematicians is that it’s all downhill after age 25 (or even earlier!).
Raw score performance on IQ tests does decline with age somewhere after the late teens or early twenties, if I recall.
But norms are derived from age groups, which do expand at the older ages, so it’s relative. Your performance is compared to other people your age cohort, so your IQ score remains pretty stable.
Younger people are better at the timed hands-on tasks and memory tests that are included on most of the tests. Performance on measures of “crystallized” intelligence, such as verbal reasoning and vocabulary, is more enduring.
I am 65, and i definitely feel that my brain isn’t what it used to be. But in my case I suspect that alcohol usage is involved in the equation.