The Smartest Age
The Atlantic:
In their darkest moments, people occasionally say “my best years are behind me.” The problem is, people say this whether they’re 69 or 29. Ezekiel Emanuel, a doctor and bioethicist, believes he only has 18 good years left: By 75, he wrote, “I will have made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make.”
At what age do we really peak? Is there ever a point where, intellectually, we’re as good as we’re going to get?
It depends on what you’re measuring, it turns out. In a study just out in Psychological Science, Joshua Hartshorne of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Laura Germine of Harvard take a look at the ages at which various types of cognitive performance crest. For the study, they gave 2,450 Americans of various ages and geographic provenances a set of 15 tasks, including math tests, picture completion, vocabulary quizzes, and even tapping sets of cubes in a certain order.
Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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