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

This continuing research has followed 6,000 people since 1956, testing them every seven years. It has found that, on average, participants performed better on cognitive tests in their late 40s and 50s than they had in their 20s.

Specifically, older people did better on tests of vocabulary, spatial orientation skills (imagining what an object would look like if it were rotated 180 degrees), verbal memory (how many words you can remember), problem solving, more complex tasks such as problem-solving and language.

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.

Furthermore, researchers have found that the 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. It used to be thought that all our myelin was laid down in our childhood and adolescence, but now we know it goes on much longer.

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’.

Other good news is that we keep our long-term memory with age. True, as we get older our short-term memory deteriorates. The problem is not that the information
has vanished, but that you have trouble retrieving it because we have so much other information stored in our brains — it’s like trying to finding the right book in a huge library.

Read Full Article at Daily Mail, UK