At What Age Is Your Brain the Sharpest?

At what age is your brain the sharpest? Researchers have found that while some mental abilities tend to peak earlier in life, many don't reach their highest point until around age 40 or later.

It can be helpful to learn more about when your brain might be at its best. While you might feel that you're already past your prime, evidence suggests that there are actually many different pinnacles when it comes to your mental powers.

When Do Mental Powers Peak?

Research suggests that certain mental abilities reach their highest points at the following ages:

• 18-19: Information-processing speed peaks early, then immediately begins to decline.
• 25: Short-term memory gets better until around age 25. It remains fairly steady until it begins to decline around age 35.
• 30: Memory for faces peaks and then starts to gradually decline.
• 35: Your short-term memory begins to weaken and decline.
• 40s-50s: Emotional understanding peaks in middle to later adulthood.
• 60s: Vocabulary abilities continue to increase.
• 60s and 70s: Crystallized intelligence, or accumulated knowledge and facts about the world, peaks late in life.
  

Changes in the Adult Brain

Some of the earliest intelligence tests simply categorized all people over 16 as "adults." Today, researchers recognize that the brain continues to develop and change throughout early adulthood and that there are significant changes in how the brain functions as people age.

Still, we often tend to think of the adult brain as a relatively stable and unchanging thing, suggesting that various mental abilities are simply static, or even on the decline, throughout most of adulthood.

There is also a tendency to believe that certain mental abilities, such as fluid intelligence, typically peak relatively early in adulthood. Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, is often suggested to peak during late adulthood.

According to some experts, this long-held dichotomy might be far too simplistic. Researchers Joshua Hartshorne, PhD, and Laura Germine, PhD, utilized a large pool of online participants to gather information about which ages that specific mental abilities are the strongest.

What they found instead was that there was a surprising consistency to when particular abilities typically peak. Not only that, but many abilities don't actually peak until later in adulthood, upending previous help views suggesting that brains peak early in life and decline with age.

Some Mental Abilities Peak Much Later in Life

According to the study published in the journal Psychological Science, different aspects of fluid intelligence peak at different ages, with some abilities hitting their apex as late as age 40.

According to Hartshorne, that's because the brain is always changing. No matter what your age, you're going to be getting stronger in some areas and worse in others.

Hartshorne had previously found that visual short-term memory peaks in the mid-30s before beginning to go down. In another study, Germine found that the ability to recognize faces also improves until people are in their early 30s and then begins to gradually decline.

Instead, different abilities seemed to peak at wildly different and sometimes surprising ages. These results helped inspire their further investigation into how mental abilities change with age.

How Researchers Looked at Mental Sharpness

How did researchers look at how mental abilities change with age? They drew a large online sample of participants who utilized brain training websites. Using the approach, the researchers gathered data from nearly 50,000 people across a wide range of ages.

Four different types of cognitive tasks were used, as well as one task that looked at the ability to detect the emotional states of other people. Hartshorne and Germine's earlier research had shown that these tasks measured mental abilities that change as people age.

The results revealed what the researchers called "considerable heterogeneity in when cognitive abilities peak."

Crystallized Intelligence and Other Abilities

While the results that crystallized intelligence peaks later in life are consistent with earlier findings, this study implies that this peak occurs much later in life than previously believed. What could explain this late peak in mental abilities?

The researchers suggest that their results might be due to the fact that people today have more education, greater access to information, and more mentally demanding jobs than did previous generations of adults.

The researchers are continuing their online research by introducing more cognitive tasks as well as tests designed to measure language abilities, executive function, and social and emotional intelligence. They also agree that further investigations are needed to determine exactly why mental powers peak at different ages.

The researchers note that while their study demonstrates that mental abilities peak at different ages in life, more research is needed to understand better how mental abilities change through life.