Is there a scientific basis for retiring at 60? The brains of 60-year-olds and 20-year-olds are both in "optimal" condition

Audit expert: Yin Tielun

Deputy Chief Physician, Department of Neurology, Airport Branch, Peking University Third Hospital

"I'm old, old, and my brain is not working anymore."

"I'm old now, not as good as you young people."

…

Source: The Paper

I have always heard these arguments before. In general, most people believe that young people's brains work much faster than old people. In addition, in previous scientific studies, researchers have also concluded through data analysis that there is a negative correlation between the speed of brain thinking and age, that is, when it comes to cognition and decision-making, the thinking speed of the elderly is slower.

Relationship between average reaction time and age

Source: Paper "Mental speed is high until age 60 as revealed by analysis of over a million participants"

But are you sure this is true?

Recently, Mischa von Krause and his psychological research team from Heidelberg University in Germany discovered loopholes in previous studies, which directly affected the final conclusions.

Source: Nature Human Behavior

The research team found that the conclusions we expressed in the past, about brain activity, were actually inferred indirectly through the speed of reaction time. That is, after the age of 20, the human body's reaction time will begin to slow down, so brain power begins to decline.

However, experience cannot be ignored!

The research team finally expressed the view that the slower reaction time is actually a change with age and psychological development, leading to increases in decision caution and slower non-decisional processes. In simple terms, people think more but their fingers are slower.

The real difference in thinking speed will only be reflected when you are 60 years old. (Is this the real reason why people retire at 60?)

The study directly challenges the common view on the relationship between age and thinking. So, what other details should we pay attention to in this experiment?

Is there a scientific explanation for young people's impulsiveness? In this study, Mischa von Krause recruited 1.2 million volunteers aged between 10 and 80 and asked them to complete a simple online experiment. For example, when a face suddenly appeared on the screen, the participants needed to judge the expression of the face and press the correct button in the corresponding "happy" and "angry" buttons.

The research team used the Bayesian diffusion model (DM) to analyze the data and obtained several amazing results.

The relationship between mental speed and age

Source: Paper "Mental speed is high until age 60 as revealed by analysis of over a million participants"

The first is the speed of thinking, which is what we usually call the speed of the brain.

As mentioned above, people's thinking speed can remain relatively stable before the age of 60. From the age of 60, the activity of the brain will decline rapidly and continue until the age of 80. Of course, 80 is the upper age limit of the research sample, and in fact it is highly likely to continue.

So stop making excuses - at 60, your brain is just as capable of making decisions as it was at 20!

Then there is the issue of decision-making prudence, or as the Chinese saying goes, “think twice before acting”, whether one considers the final consequences before taking action.

The relationship between decision-making accuracy and age

Source: Paper "Mental speed is high until age 60 as revealed by analysis of over a million participants"

Research shows that people become less cautious in their decision making between the ages of 10 and 20, and then increase quasi-linearly until age 65 (just before retirement).

In layman's terms, college-age people react imprudently, often "act on impulse," pursue speed rather than correctness, and are willing to vacillate between accuracy and speed.

But after this period, people became more cautious about their decisions, most likely because they wanted more accuracy before making a final decision. When mental speed (the speed at which our brains understand the information we receive and respond to it) remained unchanged, people took longer to press the button.

Source: See watermark

As we age, we become more cautious and less likely to act rashly, but it also makes us more easily distracted by other information.

At the same time, because the amount of data is very large, the research team also found that even taking into account factors such as gender, nationality and education level, people's decision-making ability remains at a stable high level after the age of 20.

However, the team also stated, "We must note some limitations of this study."

What other questions are there? From the experimental description just now, we can also see that although the amount of data in this experiment is astonishing and high-precision comparative operations are used, the task of the experiment itself is relatively simple, just a specific vote. People are constantly changing, and it is not certain whether the age differences and trends shown in the data can represent the development process of human beings.

In addition, some commentators believe that this study does not fundamentally solve a question about the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD, senile dementia): After the age of 60, is the reason for people's slower thinking speed due to a decline in psychological cognition or a neurodegenerative disease?

But in any case, this research is a good start, and there will definitely be more surprising connections waiting for us to discover regarding the connection between the brain and aging.

In short, this study proves that during our working age, our brains remain in the “optimal” state and can “work” well.

So, how many more years do you think you can fight?