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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

I’m in my mid 30s. Reading that our brain’s white matter decline accelerates our 50s is both depressing to me and also makes me realize I need to take retirement planning and the FIRE movement much more seriously.

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The article mentions no correlation between shrinking volume and its effects on intelligence or working memory. I wouldn't jump to conclusions quite yet that you are on a doomed path to being useless by 60.

I'm always skeptical of anecdotal evidence, but the chart indicates that between the age of 25 and 41 I have a ~7% decrease in my volume. I've seen absolutely zero change in my mental abilities over that time, and at 41 I am operating at an even higher level than I ever have before in an extremely high pressure environment.

What has changed in that time? I get physically tired more easily and staying up super late can mess with me for days afterwards. I've also noticed a slight decrease in performance when it comes to high speed adrenaline sports (which is demonstrated by some gnarly injuries in the last six years). Mentally though? Nothing.

I'm absolutely certain you're operating at a higher level of competence not despite your age but because of your age. experience makes life significantly easier. Studies have shown that older people excel at ignoring irrelevant information and stressors while young people have more trouble 'paying attention'

Though the human mind/body is excellent at maintaining homeostasis which means you generally don't notice how incapacitated you are despite doing worse on general tests at certain conditions.

> I'm always skeptical of anecdotal evidence, but the chart indicates that between the age of 25 and 41 I have a ~7% decrease in my volume. I've seen absolutely zero change in my mental abilities over that time, and at 41 I am operating at an even higher level than I ever have before in an extremely high pressure environment.

It's because you have accumulated skills (life experience) over time, it's not just a matter of raw intelligence, it's all the additional structure that goes around it as you learn more and more tricks as you age, too. You can actually "increase in level" as you age rather than decline, at least for most of your typical working career.

Personally I've felt the impact of age (mid 40's). Learning new stuff isn't too difficult, but remembering things has become more problematic as I've gotten older. I encounter the "tip of my tongue" problem more frequently than I used to.

With recreation I play video games a lot and I feel a slight reduction in my reaction speed but otherwise I feel no other impact from my age. (Except maybe vision, but luckily that is easily corrected).

Volumetric brain researcher here. Volumetric decreases across development do not represent a singular causal process. Same for volumetric increases. Volumetric changes can reflect a number of developmental processes, often concurrently and in opposite directions. I suspect that the declines in middle adulthood are not caused by the same causes of declines in the elderly, or at different stages, or a by a different mixture of causes.

Here is an example from my own research on amygdala growth, headed by my colleague Derek Andrews, a great scientist and colleague.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35341582/

It's a bit sad to ponder. On the other hand, the volume of white matter is still rather close to it's maximum, even at 60 years. And probably there are also individual variations, both when it comes to the timing of the onset of the decline, and the rapidity of it.

I read about Stradivarius the other day. His "golden years", the years when the quality of his work was considered to be at it's peak, was from he was 50 until he was around 80.

Oh, thanks for the spoiler! (J/K) I wasn't going to click through --I'm 58. :-(

(And, more tangentially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30920287 )

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