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Comment by nox101 | Hacker News Reader

> With old age, we all lose our mental faculties.

Citation needed

AFAIK it's not remotely true that "we all lose our mental faculties". Plenty of people do not

I thought it was well understood that your mental/physical potential peak when you are young and degrade thereafter? E.G. comparing 26 year old self to 86 year old self.

But a saving grace is the degradation can be combated with exercise both mental/physical.

I am not sure how much of aging is understood, so I hesitate to mention stuff like DNA damage.

I think that's a total misconception. I think the myth that "the brain stops developing at 25" was an apocryphal conclusion from a study where they simply stopped measuring past 25 and that either the same study or other studies found many brain faculties don't plateau, ever, even in advanced age. I also heard that it's highly variable from person to person how the brain develops, like some 8-year-olds had faster development in some regions than some 30-year-olds.

One thing's for sure though: we're still in the stone age of neurology.

so primitive. but we're finding things out, from ultrasound surgery to cut out the addiction center of the brain, to influencing motivation/treating depression with magnetic/electrical fields with TMS and tdcs, we're ever so slightly making sharpened stones and crude axes of the stone age we're in

Years ago we were taught that the brain could not grow. You had what you were born with and after your twenties it degraded.

Now of course we are aware that the brain has plasticity. It can rewire itself, grow, learn.

There's a difference between slowing down and losing cognitive abilities. It's one thing to not be able to solve very complex problems anymore and another to not remember how to use a toothbrush. I don't think anyone's really disputing that we're on average more capable in 20s-40s.

In medical school we were taught that basically everyone gets alzheimers, or would get it if aged up to a certain age (200, 300, etc). You could make the same argument for cancer - actually in that vein prostate cancer is a big one people die with but not of. When you study the body enough you realize that every system at every micro/macro level is failing slowly with age, but we can only pick on one of them as the cause of death.

Re: citation needed : failed literature search link needed as pre-requisite

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