Evolution of me

Link: http://evolutionofme.net/evolution/

For years it's been assumed that the brain, much like the body, declines with age. A new studies have found that rather than losing many brain cells as we age, we retain them, and even generate new ones well into middle age and our brain hits its peak between 40 and 60.

The research has followed 6,000 people since 1956, testing them every seven years and found that:

-older people did better on tests of vocabulary, imagining what an object would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees, how many words you can remember, more complex tasks such as problem-solving and language;

-amount of myelin increases well into middle age, boosting our brainpower;

Myelin is the fatty substance which insulates the brain’s cells (the neurons) and makes the signals between them move faster.

American scientists scanned the brains of 70 men aged 19 to 76, and found that in two crucial areas, the amount of myelin peaked at the age of 50, and in some cases in people’s 60s.

The neuroscientist who led the trial said this increase in myelin can boost our brain’s ability by up to 3,000 per cent, and is ‘the brain biology behind becoming a wise middle-aged adult’.

In short, researchers are now coming up with scientific proof of what we've all known for years - we do get wiser with age.

Meanwhile, job-related studies have found that middle-aged people out-perform younger ones.

Other good news is that we keep our long-term memory with age.